Hey folks! Thought experiment for you economic philosophers/theorists 
You know how publicly-owned businesses produce detailed quarterly reports on the state of their finances? OK, crazy idea, but bear with me… I’m wondering about how feasible it would be to do the same, but with a business’ wellbeing/ethical impact on the world. And I’m not talking about those yearly impact reports large business produce with (admittedly beautiful) graphic design, showcasing the X amount they donated to charity that year, etc. I’m talking a quanitative calculation to decisively measure the positive (or negative) impact of a business’ day-to-day operations (as well as their charitable outreach).
We could even imagine a unit of measurement - let’s call it a Smiley - with, say, 1 Smiley being equivalent to… I dunno, the amount of satisfaction the average person gets from eating a chocolate bar. Then we could suppose that oil companies, for instance, would ‘earn’ lots of Smileys in terms of the economic development their products unlock in underdeveloped countries, jobs created, and so on, but would ‘lose’ an ever-increasing number of Smileys for ever-more-severe environmental impacts, the effect of their denial/delay tactics on public perception of the importance of such impacts, etc.
As a thought experiment, I tried imagining what it would be like to run a small independant business measuring ethical impact as opposed to (or alongside) profit. Let’s say you run a video rental shop (read: YouTube channel, you youngsters unable to imagine that). How can you measure the impact you have on the world?
You only receive certain information from your customers(/viewers), such as what videos they’ve chosen and how often they come by - but that doesn’t tell you how your service impacts their wellbeing: are they chronically binge-watching to avoid dealing with their problems, or simply having a good time with friends? I imagine asking them which they are probably wouldn’t be taken very well.
My suggestion for solving this would be statistical analysis. Start by doing research to find out how watching a video affects a group of at least 100 people’s happiness. Convert this into nice, quantifiable Smilies and average this out to find the average amount of positive change induced by 1 video. Then, day-to-day as you’re running your business, you simply multiply your number of rentals/views by the number of Smileys per video to find your daily wellbeing impact. The idea is that, while this could never put an exact figure to your positive impact, it would give a good-enough approximation; while some people’s wellbeing may unfortunately suffer as a result of your service, this should be made up for, on average, by the number of people who do benefit.
Now. I will be the first to acknowledge that there are some gaping issues with this idea. Some of which are:
- I’ve used happiness/wellbeing/ethical impact interchangeably, but there are important distinctions between the three
- It’s difficult to measure happiness, let alone convert it into a Smiley
- Does the good done by 1 Smiley really cancel out the harm of -1 Smiley? Is it really OK to do bad things if you do an ‘equivalent’ number of good things?
- If a video advocates for violence, are you responsible for any harm that causes? To what extent are you responsible for downsteam effects of your service?
That’s enough from me. I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this idea, any improvements/methods you would suggest, or whether you’ve seen it done before. Is it realistic? Is it even possible? Would it have the intended effect?
Looking forward to discussing this with you all!
-Zoo