A young girl is going to grow up and have an amazingly sublime life. You have the opportunity to cause her to instead lead a mediocre life, which will include a moment when she records her cat doing something similar, uploads it to youtube, and provides a bajillion people who would otherwise be having a boring afternoon with a few seconds of mildly funny youtube content.
And, yes, if I phrase the question in such a way that emphasizes my ability to remove sublimity rather than my ability to grant it, then my intuitions shift around (among the reasons I don’t trust my intuitions here, since I see no reason to endorse giving different answers depending on how I phrase the question).
The additional causal link between her mediocre life and the youtube content doesn’t seem to affect my intuitions at all, though.
The causal link wasn’t really meant to change anything, it just made the question more sensical. Why would affecting one person’s sublimity create a brief youtube moment? Because she didn’t have many friends so she bought a cat!
Perhaps the question could be worded as:
A young girl is going to grow up and have an amazingly sublime life. You have the opportunity to cause her to instead lead a mediocre life, which will include a moment when she records her cat doing something similar, uploads it to youtube, and provides a bajillion people who would otherwise be having a boring afternoon with a few seconds of mildly funny youtube content.
Perhaps.
And, yes, if I phrase the question in such a way that emphasizes my ability to remove sublimity rather than my ability to grant it, then my intuitions shift around (among the reasons I don’t trust my intuitions here, since I see no reason to endorse giving different answers depending on how I phrase the question).
The additional causal link between her mediocre life and the youtube content doesn’t seem to affect my intuitions at all, though.
The causal link wasn’t really meant to change anything, it just made the question more sensical. Why would affecting one person’s sublimity create a brief youtube moment? Because she didn’t have many friends so she bought a cat!