No, that isn’t what my comment suggests at all, on any level.

I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

I think there are definitely many positions with which I disagree, but are nonetheless well-thought through and coherent.

But it seems pretty clear that the people making these decisions haven’t done the work of thinking it through, and are instead just trying to maximize money. That’s my claim, at least.

Would you consider being a contract killer (i.e. a hitman) ethical? What about being a creator of CSAM? Because those are both examples making money by providing others with what they want. And if we followed free market principles to their logical extreme then both of those would be allowed.

I think most people would agree that this would not be even remotely ethical. Nor would it lead to higher living standards than a more restricted market economy.

Sometimes I really don’t know how to reply to comments like these. Because they either seem to completely misunderstand the basic premise of my comment, or they deliberately focus on some tangential thing in order to make some trollish point. But I’ll reply here, and just assume my comment was somehow unclear.

Do you genuinely think that putting money above any other value is an ethical way to operate in the world? I certainly don’t, virtually no ethical theory does, and the vast majority of people don’t either.

This is not saying that making money is inherently a bad thing, but that placing it above every other value without question is definitely a bad thing, or at least a careless and thoughtless one.

To use your example: all sorts of things are in demand but unquestionably make the world worse. Does the fact that people are willing to pay for propaganda or chemical weapons or X other negative thing somehow mean that facilitating their sale is ethical? I really don’t understand the position.

I suppose there are some people out there who seriously have studied ethics and think making money is the ultimate good. It doesn’t seem like a serious position to me.

But I don’t think that’s become the default position because of serious analysis, but rather the total lack of it. Which is what my comment was about: when you refuse to engage in serious philosophical thought about something, you’re just going to revert to base values like the acquisition of money and power, or some variant of that which your local system is optimizing for.