Elizer: “It’s wrong when repeated because it’s also wrong in the individual case. You just have to come to terms with scope sensitivity.”
But determining whether or not a decision is right or wrong in the individual case requires that you be able to place a value on each outcome. We determine this value in part by using our knowledge of how frequently the outcomes occur and how much time/effort/money it takes to prevent or assuage them. Thus knowing the frequency that we can expect an event to occur is integral to assigning it a value in the first place. The reason it would be wrong in the individual case to tax everyone in the first world the penny to save one African child is that there are so many starving children that doing the same for each one would become very expensive. It would not be obvious, however, if there was only one child in the world that needed rescuing. The value of life would increase because we could afford it to if people didn’t die so frequently.
People in a village might be willing to help pay the costs when someone’s house burns down. If 20 houses in the village burned down, the people might still contribute, but it is unlikely they will contribute 20 times as much. If house-burning became a rampant problem, people might stop contributing entirely, because it would seem futile for them to do so. Is this necessarily scope insensitivity? Or is it reasonable to determine values based on frequencies we can realistically expect?
Elizer: “It’s wrong when repeated because it’s also wrong in the individual case. You just have to come to terms with scope sensitivity.”
But determining whether or not a decision is right or wrong in the individual case requires that you be able to place a value on each outcome. We determine this value in part by using our knowledge of how frequently the outcomes occur and how much time/effort/money it takes to prevent or assuage them. Thus knowing the frequency that we can expect an event to occur is integral to assigning it a value in the first place. The reason it would be wrong in the individual case to tax everyone in the first world the penny to save one African child is that there are so many starving children that doing the same for each one would become very expensive. It would not be obvious, however, if there was only one child in the world that needed rescuing. The value of life would increase because we could afford it to if people didn’t die so frequently.
People in a village might be willing to help pay the costs when someone’s house burns down. If 20 houses in the village burned down, the people might still contribute, but it is unlikely they will contribute 20 times as much. If house-burning became a rampant problem, people might stop contributing entirely, because it would seem futile for them to do so. Is this necessarily scope insensitivity? Or is it reasonable to determine values based on frequencies we can realistically expect?