Product structure
A market for two main varieties of moral trade
The paper highlights recurring personal arrangements and matched cancellation of opposed donations. This site supports both, then layers on trust, counterfactual honesty, and simple matching rules.
Personal pledge swaps
Use when each side is willing to take on a new habit, donation, or recurring act only if the other side does something they deeply value.
- Vegetarian or low-meat commitments
- Recurring donations or volunteer hours
- Climate, poverty, public health, and local community actions
Donation offsets
Use when two sides would otherwise fund opposed advocacy. The site helps them cancel out those transfers and redirect the matched portion to a compromise cause.
- One-to-one or ratio-based matching
- Shared compromise destination
- Unmatched surplus stays visible instead of hidden
Trust-first design
Ord identifies factual trust and counterfactual trust as the main practical obstacles. Every offer therefore exposes how it will be checked and what the user claims they would do absent a trade.
- Verification preference
- Duration and review cadence
- Counterfactual honesty and policy pledge
Interactive market
Publish an offer and see who can match it
Offers are stored in your browser only. Seeded examples mirror the paper's main use cases so the market has enough structure to explore immediately.
Live board
Offer book
Loading offers...
Matching and frontier view
Selected offers generate reciprocal matches and a simple Pareto map
The chart approximates the paper's idea of moving from a status quo point toward outcomes that are better for both parties. It is illustrative, not a moral calculus.
Selected offer
Offer details
Reciprocal matches
Compatibility queue
Choiceworthiness view
Pareto-style trade map
Status quo is fixed in the lower-left. Better matches move up and right when both sides clear each other's minimum impact threshold and align on trust.
Trust rails
Built around the two trust problems Ord identifies
Factual trust asks whether the other side is actually complying. Counterfactual trust asks whether they would have done it anyway. The UI makes both visible.
Factual trust
Verification labels surface how the trade is checked: receipts, witnesses, public pledges, or escrow.
Counterfactual trust
Every user must attest that their offer depends on a trade, preventing empty signaling.
Review cadence
Shorter review periods make it easier to re-evaluate, which the paper suggests helps manage uncertainty.
Compromise destinations
Offset trades redirect moral conflict into shared good rather than mere cancellation.
Safeguards
This prototype narrows the market to reduce obvious failure modes
The paper discusses negative externalities and perverse incentives. A real deployment would need identity, moderation, legal review, and abuse handling. This prototype visibly constrains the domain.
What is allowed
- Habits, donations, volunteer time, and lifestyle commitments
- Offsetting opposed donations into a compromise destination
- Locally negotiated trust and review periods
What is excluded
- No election or ballot-vote swapping
- No illegal, deceptive, or coercive trades
- No harmful behaviors performed just to extract side payments
What a production version needs
- Authentication and audit trails
- Escrow or bonded verification for larger trades
- Moderation, legal review, and jurisdiction-aware rules