I suspect we already indirectly, incrementally cause the death of unknown persons in order to accumulate personal wealth and pleasure. Consider goods produced in factories causing air and water contamination affecting incumbent farmers. While I’d like to punish those goods’ producers by buying alternatives, it’s apparently not worth my time*.
Probably, faced with the requirement to directly and completely cause a death, we would feel wrong enough about this (even with a promise of memory-wipe) to desist. But I find it difficult to consider such a situation honestly when I’m so strongly driven to signal pervasively (even to myself) that I am not an evil person. Perhaps a sufficiently anonymous poll could give us a better indication of what people would actually do.
There are certainly scenarios where under average utility maximization, you’d want to kill innocent people—draw lots if you like, but there’s only enough air for 3 of us to survive the return trip from Mars.
* And maybe the economic benefit to the producing region is greater than the harm to the backyarders, and they just need to spend more in compensating or protecting them. But I believe there are some unambiguous cases where I ought to avoid consuming said product at the very least.
In general industrialized economies have better health, lifespan, standard of living and etc. You seem to be paying attention only to the negative side effects of your manufactured goods.
(That graph is not proof. Correlation is not causation. This is a short comment that makes a small point. Go easy on me.)
I suspect we already indirectly, incrementally cause the death of unknown persons in order to accumulate personal wealth and pleasure. Consider goods produced in factories causing air and water contamination affecting incumbent farmers. While I’d like to punish those goods’ producers by buying alternatives, it’s apparently not worth my time*.
Probably, faced with the requirement to directly and completely cause a death, we would feel wrong enough about this (even with a promise of memory-wipe) to desist. But I find it difficult to consider such a situation honestly when I’m so strongly driven to signal pervasively (even to myself) that I am not an evil person. Perhaps a sufficiently anonymous poll could give us a better indication of what people would actually do.
There are certainly scenarios where under average utility maximization, you’d want to kill innocent people—draw lots if you like, but there’s only enough air for 3 of us to survive the return trip from Mars.
* And maybe the economic benefit to the producing region is greater than the harm to the backyarders, and they just need to spend more in compensating or protecting them. But I believe there are some unambiguous cases where I ought to avoid consuming said product at the very least.
In general industrialized economies have better health, lifespan, standard of living and etc. You seem to be paying attention only to the negative side effects of your manufactured goods.
(That graph is not proof. Correlation is not causation. This is a short comment that makes a small point. Go easy on me.)
Yes, but I acknowledged that possibility in my asterisk turned bullet point (thanks, markup).
To get the asterisk back, use ” \ ” instead of ” ”.