Garage-band ethicists

About Taboo Trades

Taboo Trades was founded to confront our era’s largest hypocracy:
As work becomes specialized, it becomes harder to be moral.

If you bake cakes, you can donate your day-old bread to the poor. But what are you supposed to do if you maintain the burr mills which make flour? Donate your used grinding stones?

We believe the solution to this problem of specialtion is more specilization: namely, to create a market which explicitly sells moral goods. This will allow the specialists in our society to use their increased production to be more moral.

Unlike past efforts at charity, Taboo Trades will never ask you to for your general funds. We offer commodity outcomes, delivered at scale. If you want those outcomes and find the price fair, then buy them. If you don’t, then don’t.

It’s the libertarian way.

Our Policies

3rd Party Auditing

Every purchase though Taboo Trades is subject to bi-annual review by an independent group of statisticians, ethicists, and economists.

We perform this audit both to increase the confidence of our customers and to help our analysis: an outside audit is tremendously helpful at locating hidden assumptions, and increasing the rigour of a pricing model.

Transparent Pricing

Our pricing policy is simple: we seek to find the absolute lowest scalable price for a moral good, then charge you our costs in buying it plus a 20% markup to fund our operation and research.

What justifies our fee? The lowest price for a moral good is often 100 times lower than the average price. Without our 20% markup, we would be unable profitably help you get this increase in effectiveness.

Stochastic Outcomes

Often the most cost effective interventions are not deterministic. They posess a random nature. For these situations, our prices reflect “risk neutral” results – the price at which we expect, on average, we expect one unit of the moral good can be created.

For example, imagine that there is a large population of people with a disease that can be cured 50% of the time by paying for a $200 medical treatment. In this case our list price would be $480. (2x treaments + our 20% margin).

Although this means any single purchaser has a 25% chance of saving zero lives, a 50% chance of saving one life, and a 25% chance of saving two lives, the average across all our customers will be very close to the expected (average) value.

Purified Actions

To the extent that the negative effects of an action can be known, the moral goods we offer are “purified” to be free of them.

For example, it might be that the lowest price we are aware of for saving a human life requires disel trucks to transport the medicine. This naturally will contribute to greenhouse gas production, so the price for that intervention will also include carbon credits to offset this cost.

Please note that this purification is only offered with respect to moral goods we currently list for sale.

Special note on how this will interact with any religious moral goods:

• Relgious outcomes will be purified with respect to all non-religious outcomes, as well as any moral goods within that denomination.

• Non-religious actions will not purified with respect to religious outcomes.

Requesting a moral good

If there is a moral good you’d like to buy, please let us know!