This is starting to feel like Motte and Bailey fallacy to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bail

This is starting to feel like Motte and Bailey fallacy to me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy Either that or just confusion about what and/or who we are talking about. EA is not a well defined set of concepts or ideas. I do know a lot of people who identify as EA and have argued for "earn-to-give" where the giving part is deferred far into the future. I won't spur the confusion further but my own personal experience is that there are several people I have personally met who more closely match the parents description than the description you give. I'm all for earn-to-give if you are doing the giving soon and to causes where the outcomes are easier to measure, like what you mentioned. This is very commendable. Where EA-style thinking runs into trouble is where it places excess confidence in future predictions either A) I will eventually donate this money B) This cause I'm donating to has no obvious impact now, but it will have immense impact in the future or C) Even though I can't see all the negative impacts my work is having, my prediction/inference is that the negative impacts will be smaller than the positive impacts of my altruism. So I have nothing against the idea of trying to maximize good, I just think that I frequently see it used in conjunction with excessively high-confidence predictions or inferences. In your case, I think it's important that the banker do some sort of accounting of whether he is having a negative impact on their current project/firm etc. There are bankers who have had a huge negative impact in the past and so this does need to be part of the accounting.