While I don’t often say this, that question doesn’t strike me as an ethical question. It seems to turn entirely on questions of what steps would be most effective to producing the desired effect.
Entirely? It depends on things like how we should weigh the present vs future generations, how we should weigh rich vs poor, whether we’re working under ethical constraints other than pure utility maximization. All those are ethical questions.
When primitives performed human sacrifice to ensure the sun will rise tomorrow, they were not mistaken about ethics—they were mistaken about astronomy.
If the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is something else than a unit step function of the number of humans sacrificed, ethics comes in again. Do you sacrifice victim number 386,264 for an added 0.0001% chance of sunrise? Ethical question.
Entirely? It depends on things like how we should weigh the present vs future generations, how we should weigh rich vs poor, whether we’re working under ethical constraints other than pure utility maximization. All those are ethical questions.
I’m not sure who the ‘we’ here are. Ethical questions are questions about what I should do. I see no reason to ‘weigh’ rich or poor people, or different generations.
There are political questions about what sorts of institutions should be set up, and those things might address collectives of people or whether the poor get to count for more than the rich. But while in some sense ‘what political system should I prefer’ is an ethical question, the relevant questions to analyze the problem of what institutions to set up are political.
Entirely? It depends on things like how we should weigh the present vs future generations, how we should weigh rich vs poor, whether we’re working under ethical constraints other than pure utility maximization. All those are ethical questions.
If the probability of the sun rising tomorrow is something else than a unit step function of the number of humans sacrificed, ethics comes in again. Do you sacrifice victim number 386,264 for an added 0.0001% chance of sunrise? Ethical question.
I’m not sure who the ‘we’ here are. Ethical questions are questions about what I should do. I see no reason to ‘weigh’ rich or poor people, or different generations.
There are political questions about what sorts of institutions should be set up, and those things might address collectives of people or whether the poor get to count for more than the rich. But while in some sense ‘what political system should I prefer’ is an ethical question, the relevant questions to analyze the problem of what institutions to set up are political.