I think you have one extra assumption. I do not assume that said superhero wants to sacrifice his life to the greater good, but I do assume he is willing to chip in in a more reasonable way. To be as vague as possible, saving zero people and saving the maximum possible without a spare hour to eat cake on his birthday are both unacceptable, and I suspect the answer to how much he would want to work is closer to the middle than either extreme.
My question is how blameworthy it is to not be at the extreme of self-sacrifice.
Someone like you or me in every other way but who happens to save the life of one or two other people upon whom he happens to stumble per week seems almost certainly ethically superior to us. Assuming he wants to take advantage of his gift to a degree he would consider reasonable upon rational reflection and still have a life, how could he decide with more precision how much to work?
I suspect we can do better than just assuming 40h/wk.
My question is how blameworthy it is to not be at the extreme of self-sacrifice.
The underlying point is that, from a consequentialist point of view, you shouldn’t care how self-sacrificing a superhero is but rather how effective they are in fighting crime and saving people—which is to say how good they are at their job. Reality doesn’t grade for effort. If Batman decides to work twenty-hour days because he feels guilty about anything less, and a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and the Batmobile drifts into the path of an oncoming cement truck, he may have been very praiseworthy by some deontological standard but in practical terms he didn’t do much for Gotham.
It’s still a little more complicated than “how many hours should they work?”, though. Superheroing’s an inherently reactive sort of enterprise—traditionally a superhero doesn’t just go out whenever they want to rough up gang members, but rather shows up when e.g. a guy in a koala mask with a ray gun is robbing a bank—so I expect skilled on-call professionals like trauma surgeons or datacenter admins might be a better model than, say, factory workers.
That seems like a false extreme to me, but I might have misspoken. Lets say he decides okay, I could work 85 hours a week and suffer no loss in productivity, but I am unwilling to work more than 40h. He still benefits the world more than any but 0-100 (I bet someone curing something might win, but still, few...) people. Is he ethically blameworthy or praiseworthy?
I think you have one extra assumption. I do not assume that said superhero wants to sacrifice his life to the greater good, but I do assume he is willing to chip in in a more reasonable way. To be as vague as possible, saving zero people and saving the maximum possible without a spare hour to eat cake on his birthday are both unacceptable, and I suspect the answer to how much he would want to work is closer to the middle than either extreme.
My question is how blameworthy it is to not be at the extreme of self-sacrifice.
Someone like you or me in every other way but who happens to save the life of one or two other people upon whom he happens to stumble per week seems almost certainly ethically superior to us. Assuming he wants to take advantage of his gift to a degree he would consider reasonable upon rational reflection and still have a life, how could he decide with more precision how much to work?
I suspect we can do better than just assuming 40h/wk.
The underlying point is that, from a consequentialist point of view, you shouldn’t care how self-sacrificing a superhero is but rather how effective they are in fighting crime and saving people—which is to say how good they are at their job. Reality doesn’t grade for effort. If Batman decides to work twenty-hour days because he feels guilty about anything less, and a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and the Batmobile drifts into the path of an oncoming cement truck, he may have been very praiseworthy by some deontological standard but in practical terms he didn’t do much for Gotham.
It’s still a little more complicated than “how many hours should they work?”, though. Superheroing’s an inherently reactive sort of enterprise—traditionally a superhero doesn’t just go out whenever they want to rough up gang members, but rather shows up when e.g. a guy in a koala mask with a ray gun is robbing a bank—so I expect skilled on-call professionals like trauma surgeons or datacenter admins might be a better model than, say, factory workers.
That seems like a false extreme to me, but I might have misspoken. Lets say he decides okay, I could work 85 hours a week and suffer no loss in productivity, but I am unwilling to work more than 40h. He still benefits the world more than any but 0-100 (I bet someone curing something might win, but still, few...) people. Is he ethically blameworthy or praiseworthy?