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.
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.