Mandatory? It’s not mandatory. But if you don’t specify then you’re making an argument with vital bits missing.
I agree that utilitarian decision making (or indeed any decision making) is harder when you don’t have all the information about e.g. how much effort something takes.
I also agree that in practice we likely get more efficiency if people care more about themselves and others near to them than about random people further away.
Welll the specification would be “jobs of roughly equal effort” which I guess I left implicit in a bad way.
I think you are arguing that the essence will depend on the efficiency ratios but I think the shared vs not-shared property will overwhelm efficiency considerations. That is if job efficiency varies between 0.1 and 10 and the populations are around 10000 and 100000 then 1000 public effort lives at typical bad efficiency will seem comparable to 1 private life at good efficiency while at population level doing the private option at bad efficiency would be comparable to getting the public option done. Thus any issue affecting the “whole” community will overwhelm any private option.
It is crucial that the public task is finite and shared. If you could start up independent “benefit all” extra projects (and get them done alone) the calculus would be right. One could try point ot the error also via “marginal result” in that yes it is an issue of 1000 lives but if your participation doesn’t make or break the project then it is of zero impact. So one should be indifferent rather than thinking it is the utmost importance. If it can partially succeed then the impact is the increase in success not the total success. Yet when you think stuff like “hungry people in africa” your mind probably refers to the total issue/success.
If I am asking what is the circumference of a circle at lot of people would accept pi as the answer. Somebody could insist that I tell the radius as essential information to determine how long the circumference would be. Efficiency is not essential to the phenomenon that I try to point out.
Mandatory? It’s not mandatory. But if you don’t specify then you’re making an argument with vital bits missing.
I agree that utilitarian decision making (or indeed any decision making) is harder when you don’t have all the information about e.g. how much effort something takes.
I also agree that in practice we likely get more efficiency if people care more about themselves and others near to them than about random people further away.
Welll the specification would be “jobs of roughly equal effort” which I guess I left implicit in a bad way.
I think you are arguing that the essence will depend on the efficiency ratios but I think the shared vs not-shared property will overwhelm efficiency considerations. That is if job efficiency varies between 0.1 and 10 and the populations are around 10000 and 100000 then 1000 public effort lives at typical bad efficiency will seem comparable to 1 private life at good efficiency while at population level doing the private option at bad efficiency would be comparable to getting the public option done. Thus any issue affecting the “whole” community will overwhelm any private option.
It is crucial that the public task is finite and shared. If you could start up independent “benefit all” extra projects (and get them done alone) the calculus would be right. One could try point ot the error also via “marginal result” in that yes it is an issue of 1000 lives but if your participation doesn’t make or break the project then it is of zero impact. So one should be indifferent rather than thinking it is the utmost importance. If it can partially succeed then the impact is the increase in success not the total success. Yet when you think stuff like “hungry people in africa” your mind probably refers to the total issue/success.
If I am asking what is the circumference of a circle at lot of people would accept pi as the answer. Somebody could insist that I tell the radius as essential information to determine how long the circumference would be. Efficiency is not essential to the phenomenon that I try to point out.