The day to day life bit is irrelevant. The volitional aspect is not at all. Take the exact sacrifice you described but make it non-volitional. “torturing yourself working at a startup” becomes slavery when non-volitional. Presumably you find that trade-off less acceptable.
The volitional aspect is the key difference. The fact that your life is rich with examples of volitional sacrifice and poor in examples of forced sacrifice of this type is not some magic result that has something to do with how we treat “real” examples in day to day life. It is entirely because “we” (humans) have tried to minimize the non-volitional sacrifices because they are what we find immoral!
Point number one is: I don’t understand how you can say, when I am making an argument explicitly restricted to instrumental decision theory, how day to day life is irrelevant. Instrumentalism should ONLY care about day to day life.
With respect to forced sacrifice, my intuitions say I should just do the math, and that the reason volition is so important is that the reasonable expectation that one won’t be forced to make sacrifices is a big-ticket public good, meaning the math almost always comes out on its side. I think that you’re saying these choices have been screened off, but I think non-volitional choices have been screened off because they are in general bad trades rather than because “volition” is a magic word that lets you get whatever you want.
Point three, let’s turn this around… say someone is about to spend their entire life being tortured. Would you rescue them, if you knew it meant throwing a harmless dust speck into the eye of everyone ever to exist or be emulated? This should be equivalent, but both of the sacrifices here are forced since, at a minimum, some human beings are sociopaths and wouldn’t agree to take the dust speck.
If you want me to consider volition more closely, can you come up with some forced sacrifice choices that are reasonable exchanges that I might come across if I lived in a different world?
One possible idea: if I was the son of an African warlord, and I had the ability to make my parents’ political decrees more compassionate if I talked to them after they blew off steam torturing people, but I could instead make them torture fewer people by talking to them beforehand.
Here my intuitions say I should let the individuals be tortured in exchange for effecting large scale policy decisions.
The day to day life bit is irrelevant. The volitional aspect is not at all. Take the exact sacrifice you described but make it non-volitional. “torturing yourself working at a startup” becomes slavery when non-volitional. Presumably you find that trade-off less acceptable.
The volitional aspect is the key difference. The fact that your life is rich with examples of volitional sacrifice and poor in examples of forced sacrifice of this type is not some magic result that has something to do with how we treat “real” examples in day to day life. It is entirely because “we” (humans) have tried to minimize the non-volitional sacrifices because they are what we find immoral!
Point number one is: I don’t understand how you can say, when I am making an argument explicitly restricted to instrumental decision theory, how day to day life is irrelevant. Instrumentalism should ONLY care about day to day life.
With respect to forced sacrifice, my intuitions say I should just do the math, and that the reason volition is so important is that the reasonable expectation that one won’t be forced to make sacrifices is a big-ticket public good, meaning the math almost always comes out on its side. I think that you’re saying these choices have been screened off, but I think non-volitional choices have been screened off because they are in general bad trades rather than because “volition” is a magic word that lets you get whatever you want.
Point three, let’s turn this around… say someone is about to spend their entire life being tortured. Would you rescue them, if you knew it meant throwing a harmless dust speck into the eye of everyone ever to exist or be emulated? This should be equivalent, but both of the sacrifices here are forced since, at a minimum, some human beings are sociopaths and wouldn’t agree to take the dust speck.
If you want me to consider volition more closely, can you come up with some forced sacrifice choices that are reasonable exchanges that I might come across if I lived in a different world?
One possible idea: if I was the son of an African warlord, and I had the ability to make my parents’ political decrees more compassionate if I talked to them after they blew off steam torturing people, but I could instead make them torture fewer people by talking to them beforehand.
Here my intuitions say I should let the individuals be tortured in exchange for effecting large scale policy decisions.