Eisegates, is there no limit to the number of people you would subject to a punch in the face (very painful but temporary with no risk of death) in order to avoid the torture of one person? What if you personally had to do (at least some of) the punching? I agree that I might not be willing to personally commit the torture despite the terrible (aggregate) harm my refusal would bring, but I’m not proud of that fact—it seems selfish to me. And extrapolating your position seems to justify pretty terrible acts. It seems to me that the punch is equivalent to some very small amount of torture.
1. My intuition on this point is very insensitve to scale. You could put a googol of persons in the galaxy, and faced with a choice between torturing one of them and causing them all to take one shot, I’d probably choose the punches.
2. Depends how much punching I had to do. I’d happily punch a hundred people, and let others do the rest of the work, to keep one stranger from getting tortured for the rest of his life. Make it one of my loved ones at risk of torture, and I would punch people until the day I die (presumably, I would be given icepacks from time to time for my hand).
3. Extrapolating is risky business with ethical intuitions. Change the facts and my intuition might change, too. I think that, in general, ethical intuitions are highly complex products of social forces that do not reduce well to abstract moral theories—either of the deontological or utilitarian variety. And to the extent that moral statements are cognitive, I think they are referring to these sort of sociological facts—meaning that any abstract theory will end up incorporating a lot of error along the way.
Would you really feel selfish in the dust speck scenario? I think, at the end of the day, I’d feel pretty good about the whole thing.
Eisegates, is there no limit to the number of people you would subject to a punch in the face (very painful but temporary with no risk of death) in order to avoid the torture of one person? What if you personally had to do (at least some of) the punching? I agree that I might not be willing to personally commit the torture despite the terrible (aggregate) harm my refusal would bring, but I’m not proud of that fact—it seems selfish to me. And extrapolating your position seems to justify pretty terrible acts. It seems to me that the punch is equivalent to some very small amount of torture.
1. My intuition on this point is very insensitve to scale. You could put a googol of persons in the galaxy, and faced with a choice between torturing one of them and causing them all to take one shot, I’d probably choose the punches.
2. Depends how much punching I had to do. I’d happily punch a hundred people, and let others do the rest of the work, to keep one stranger from getting tortured for the rest of his life. Make it one of my loved ones at risk of torture, and I would punch people until the day I die (presumably, I would be given icepacks from time to time for my hand).
3. Extrapolating is risky business with ethical intuitions. Change the facts and my intuition might change, too. I think that, in general, ethical intuitions are highly complex products of social forces that do not reduce well to abstract moral theories—either of the deontological or utilitarian variety. And to the extent that moral statements are cognitive, I think they are referring to these sort of sociological facts—meaning that any abstract theory will end up incorporating a lot of error along the way.
Would you really feel selfish in the dust speck scenario? I think, at the end of the day, I’d feel pretty good about the whole thing.