I know I’m way behind for this comment, but still: this point of view makes sense on a level, that saving additional people is always(?) virtuous and you don’t hit a ceiling of utility. But, and this is a big one, this is mostly a very simplistic model of virtue calculous, and the things it neglected turn out to have a huge and dangerous impact.
Whoever knowingly chooses to save one life, when they could have saved two—to say nothing of a thousand lives, or a world—they have damned themselves as thoroughly as any murderer.
First case in point: can a surgeon harvest organs from a healthy innocent bystander to save the lives of five people in dire need of those organs? Assuming they match and there is no there donor, an unfortunately likely incident. According to this, we must say that they not only can, but should, since the surgeon is damned as a murderer either way, so at least stack the lower number of bodies. I hope I don’t need to explain that this goes south. This teaches us that there must be some distinction between taking negative action and avoiding a (net) positive one.
Another case: suppose I’m in a position to save lives on a daily basis, e.g. an ER doctor. Then if a life not saved is a life lost, then every hour that I rest, or you know, have fun, is another dead body on my scoreboard. Same goes for anyone doing their best to save lives, but in any way other than the single optimal one with the maximal expected number of lives. This one optimal route, if we’re not allowed to rest, leads to burnout very quickly and loses lives on the long run. So we must find (immediately!) the One Best Way, or be doomed to be perpetual mass murderers.
As Zach Weinersmith (and probably others) once said, “the deep lesson to learn from opportunity cost is that we’re all living every second of our lives suboptimally”. We’re not very efficient accuracy engines, and most likely not physically able to carry out any particular plan to perfection (or even close), so almost all of the time we’ll get things at least somewhat wrong. So we’ll definitely be mass murderers by way of failing to save lives, but… Then… Aren’t we better off dead? And then are lives lost really that bad...?
And you can’t really patch this neatly. You can’t say that it’s only murder if you know how to save them, because then the ethical thing would be to be very stupid and unable to determine how to save anyone.
This is also related to a problem I have with the Rationalist Scoreboard of log(p) that Laplace runs at the Great Spreadsheet Above.
And even if you try to fix this by allowing that we maintain ourselves to save more lives in the long run, we 1) don’t know exactly how much this should be, and 2) doing our best attempt at this is going to end up with everyone being miserable, just trying to maximize lives but not actually living them, since pain/harm is typically much easier to produce and more intense than pleasure.
And, of course, all of this is before we consider human biases and social dynamics. If we condemn the millionaire who saves lives inefficiently, we’re probably drawing attention from the many others who don’t even do that. Since it’s much easier to be exposed to criticism than earn praise in this avenue (and this in the broad sense is a strong motivation for people to try and be virtuous), many people would see this and give up altogether.
The list goes on, but my rant can only go so long, and I hope that some of the holes in this approach are now more transparent.
I know I’m way behind for this comment, but still: this point of view makes sense on a level, that saving additional people is always(?) virtuous and you don’t hit a ceiling of utility. But, and this is a big one, this is mostly a very simplistic model of virtue calculous, and the things it neglected turn out to have a huge and dangerous impact.
First case in point: can a surgeon harvest organs from a healthy innocent bystander to save the lives of five people in dire need of those organs? Assuming they match and there is no there donor, an unfortunately likely incident. According to this, we must say that they not only can, but should, since the surgeon is damned as a murderer either way, so at least stack the lower number of bodies. I hope I don’t need to explain that this goes south. This teaches us that there must be some distinction between taking negative action and avoiding a (net) positive one.
Another case: suppose I’m in a position to save lives on a daily basis, e.g. an ER doctor. Then if a life not saved is a life lost, then every hour that I rest, or you know, have fun, is another dead body on my scoreboard. Same goes for anyone doing their best to save lives, but in any way other than the single optimal one with the maximal expected number of lives. This one optimal route, if we’re not allowed to rest, leads to burnout very quickly and loses lives on the long run. So we must find (immediately!) the One Best Way, or be doomed to be perpetual mass murderers.
As Zach Weinersmith (and probably others) once said, “the deep lesson to learn from opportunity cost is that we’re all living every second of our lives suboptimally”. We’re not very efficient accuracy engines, and most likely not physically able to carry out any particular plan to perfection (or even close), so almost all of the time we’ll get things at least somewhat wrong. So we’ll definitely be mass murderers by way of failing to save lives, but… Then… Aren’t we better off dead? And then are lives lost really that bad...?
And you can’t really patch this neatly. You can’t say that it’s only murder if you know how to save them, because then the ethical thing would be to be very stupid and unable to determine how to save anyone. This is also related to a problem I have with the Rationalist Scoreboard of log(p) that Laplace runs at the Great Spreadsheet Above.
And even if you try to fix this by allowing that we maintain ourselves to save more lives in the long run, we 1) don’t know exactly how much this should be, and 2) doing our best attempt at this is going to end up with everyone being miserable, just trying to maximize lives but not actually living them, since pain/harm is typically much easier to produce and more intense than pleasure.
And, of course, all of this is before we consider human biases and social dynamics. If we condemn the millionaire who saves lives inefficiently, we’re probably drawing attention from the many others who don’t even do that. Since it’s much easier to be exposed to criticism than earn praise in this avenue (and this in the broad sense is a strong motivation for people to try and be virtuous), many people would see this and give up altogether.
The list goes on, but my rant can only go so long, and I hope that some of the holes in this approach are now more transparent.