Why should the moral weight of applying a specified harm to someone be independent of who it is?
When making moral decisions, I tend to weight effects on my friends and family most heavily, then acquaintences, then fellow Americans, and so on. I value random strangers to some extent, but this is based more on arguments about the small size of the planet than true concern for their welfare.
I claim that moral obligations must be reciprocal in order to exist. Altruism is never mandatory.
None of Eliezer’s 3^^^3 people will
(with the given hypotheses) ever interact with anyone on Earth or any of their descendents.
I think the sum of moral weights I would assign to these 3^^^3 people would be less than
the sum of weights for (e.g.) all inhabitants of Earth from 2000BC to the present. I would happily
subject all of them to dust motes to prevent one American from being tortured for 50 years, and would think less of any fellow citizen who would not do the same.
There seems to be an unexamined assumption here.
Why should the moral weight of applying a specified harm to someone be independent of who it is?
When making moral decisions, I tend to weight effects on my friends and family most heavily, then acquaintences, then fellow Americans, and so on. I value random strangers to some extent, but this is based more on arguments about the small size of the planet than true concern for their welfare.
I claim that moral obligations must be reciprocal in order to exist. Altruism is never mandatory.
None of Eliezer’s 3^^^3 people will
(with the given hypotheses) ever interact with anyone on Earth or any of their descendents.
I think the sum of moral weights I would assign to these 3^^^3 people would be less than
the sum of weights for (e.g.) all inhabitants of Earth from 2000BC to the present. I would happily
subject all of them to dust motes to prevent one American from being tortured for 50 years, and would think less of any fellow citizen who would not do the same.