No problem. You clearly communicated what you intended to, which is never a problem.
From the link, though:
3.3: What do you mean by a desire to avoid guilt?
Suppose an evil king decides to do a twisted moral experiment on you. He tells you to kick a small child really hard, right in the face. If you do, he will end the experiment with no further damage. If you refuse, he will kick the child himself, and then execute that child plus a hundred innocent people.
The best solution is to somehow overthrow the king or escape the experiment. Assuming you can’t, what do you do?
‘Die trying’, is one moral answer. ‘Gain permission from the child’ is another. ‘Perform an immoral act for the greater good’ is a third answer. I choose not to make the claim “In some cases you should non-consensually kick a small child in the face because hurting people is bad.”
‘Die trying’ doesn’t save the 101 people. If anything, I’d think about the TDT-related benefits of having precommitted to not giving in to blackmail, but in this particular example it’s far from clear that the king wouldn’t have offered you the deal in the first place had he been sure you were going to refuse it—though it is in most similar situations I’m actually likely to face in real life.
Two of the three actions I suggested saved 102 people (assuming that you aren’t one of the 100 innocent people). Two of them are possible in the least convenient universe. Two of them are moral. Those three tradeoffs are the only ones I considered- or do you consider kicking a child in the face to be a moral act?
There is no benefit to committing to not give into blackmail in this case, except that it might reduce the chances of the scenario happening. One of the advantages to noncompliance is that it reduces the chance of the scenario recurring- can you be blackmailed into kicking any number of children with the same 100 hostages?
No problem. You clearly communicated what you intended to, which is never a problem.
From the link, though:
‘Die trying’, is one moral answer. ‘Gain permission from the child’ is another. ‘Perform an immoral act for the greater good’ is a third answer. I choose not to make the claim “In some cases you should non-consensually kick a small child in the face because hurting people is bad.”
‘Die trying’ doesn’t save the 101 people. If anything, I’d think about the TDT-related benefits of having precommitted to not giving in to blackmail, but in this particular example it’s far from clear that the king wouldn’t have offered you the deal in the first place had he been sure you were going to refuse it—though it is in most similar situations I’m actually likely to face in real life.
Two of the three actions I suggested saved 102 people (assuming that you aren’t one of the 100 innocent people). Two of them are possible in the least convenient universe. Two of them are moral. Those three tradeoffs are the only ones I considered- or do you consider kicking a child in the face to be a moral act?
There is no benefit to committing to not give into blackmail in this case, except that it might reduce the chances of the scenario happening. One of the advantages to noncompliance is that it reduces the chance of the scenario recurring- can you be blackmailed into kicking any number of children with the same 100 hostages?