I’m pretty sure that it’s a hell of a lot easier to avoid shooting at people in a cinema than to earn enough money for the AMF to save a dozen lives. I do the former all the time—in fact, I’m doing that right now as I’m typing.
It’s much easier to directly save one person from malaria, than to save one person from a mad gunman. Not just on the societal level, as RobertLumley stated, but as simple individual actions.
I guess I misunderstood his point, then. I took “ethically, what matters” to mean ‘what matters to the question how bad a guy the gunman was, compared to how bad a guy or gal the typical person is’. There was an action X the gunman could have done such that, if counterfactually that day the gunman had done X instead of what he actually did, at the end of the day there would have been 12 fewer dead people—namely, staying out of the cinema. There was no such obvious action in my case—at least, none which wouldn’t have left me in several thousand dollars of debt.
I’m pretty sure that it’s a hell of a lot easier to avoid shooting at people in a cinema than to earn enough money for the AMF to save a dozen lives. I do the former all the time—in fact, I’m doing that right now as I’m typing.
Yes, but it’s a lot harder for us as a society to prevent people from doing all random acts of violence like that.
It’s much easier to directly save one person from malaria, than to save one person from a mad gunman. Not just on the societal level, as RobertLumley stated, but as simple individual actions.
I guess I misunderstood his point, then. I took “ethically, what matters” to mean ‘what matters to the question how bad a guy the gunman was, compared to how bad a guy or gal the typical person is’. There was an action X the gunman could have done such that, if counterfactually that day the gunman had done X instead of what he actually did, at the end of the day there would have been 12 fewer dead people—namely, staying out of the cinema. There was no such obvious action in my case—at least, none which wouldn’t have left me in several thousand dollars of debt.