In Against Money Maximalism, I argued against money-maximization as a normative stance. Profit is a coherent thing you can try to maximize, but there are also other sorts of value. Profit-maximization isn't the unique rational way to engage with money.
One way you could respond to this is economic Darwinism: "Sure, you can optimize other things than money, but over time, the market will come to be dominated by money-maximizing agents."
I think this is misguided in several respects.
First, obviously, the values of probable future societies aren't necessarily your values. Even the values of the dominant order in current society aren't necessarily your values. Even if your cause is hopeless, that doesn't automatically mean that you should flip values.
Second, I don't really think markets evolve money-maximizers, in the same sense that evolution doesn't really evolve fitness-maximizers. I see at least three senses in which this is true.
Building fitness-maximizers is hard.
Evolution will aggressively prune behaviors which harm fitness (relative to readily accessible mutations), but this doesn't exactly add up to fitness-maximizing organisms. Similarly, common practices in business aren't exactly as economists would suggest. Economists say that profit-maximizers should set prices by finding the point where marginal [...]
---
First published:
November 26th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KG7n79wLZihZNEHEo/evolution-and-freedom
---
Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
