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Perhaps, but is Anubis' scales, the good is weighed against the evil that a man has done. Cannot the engineer be culpable for facilitating a crime, and yet be a

Perhaps, but is Anubis' scales, the good is weighed against the evil that a man has done. Cannot the engineer be culpable for facilitating a crime, and yet be also culpable for improving the lives of many thousands of others, and in balance the good outweighs the bad? Culpability is not an absolute. The engineer may be culpable, but how culpable? Relative to the culpability of the one who held the knife? Relative to the man's parents who suspected his intent but failed to stop him? Relative to a society which has decided that it needn't guarantee access to mental health care that the man required? Culpability is distributed, and it isn't all or nothing.

Kalium 8y ago
You stated that we have moral culpability for second-order effects, whatever those are. If a person engineers a bridge that works as designed, what would the second-order effects be?
- jonnycomputer 8y ago
  "whatever those are" was a poor attempt to indicate that I wasn't sure what people mean by second order effect. was it that something that was not intended, or is it that it happens further in the causal chain, or is it something about particular affordances and general ones (a bridge affords crossing. a bridge that affords crossing both affords crossing a bridge to buy your groceries and crossing a birdge to commit a crime.) Or is it just things that are hard to predict might occur? Or things that have an intervening autonomous moral agent between the engineer and the victim? its not clear to me. A man-made dam might increase a city's availabe water supply and allow power generation, but it also can increase CO2 emissions and do harm to salmon reproduction. Increased CO2 emissions and detriments to salmon reproductions might contribute to global warming in the first case and an increased price on fresh fish and a declining seal population in the second. Increased price of fresh fish mean less availability to poor consumers and the loss of what might be an otherwise valuable part of diet. Global warming means climage change, sea level rise, an expected increase in unrest, and large scale ecological instability. All those things mean that my daughters may not enjoy the relatively secure life that my generation has led...

Kalium 8y ago

You stated that we have moral culpability for second-order effects, whatever those are. If a person engineers a bridge that works as designed, what would the second-order effects be?

jonnycomputer 8y ago
"whatever those are" was a poor attempt to indicate that I wasn't sure what people mean by second order effect. was it that something that was not intended, or is it that it happens further in the causal chain, or is it something about particular affordances and general ones (a bridge affords crossing. a bridge that affords crossing both affords crossing a bridge to buy your groceries and crossing a birdge to commit a crime.) Or is it just things that are hard to predict might occur? Or things that have an intervening autonomous moral agent between the engineer and the victim? its not clear to me. A man-made dam might increase a city's availabe water supply and allow power generation, but it also can increase CO2 emissions and do harm to salmon reproduction. Increased CO2 emissions and detriments to salmon reproductions might contribute to global warming in the first case and an increased price on fresh fish and a declining seal population in the second. Increased price of fresh fish mean less availability to poor consumers and the loss of what might be an otherwise valuable part of diet. Global warming means climage change, sea level rise, an expected increase in unrest, and large scale ecological instability. All those things mean that my daughters may not enjoy the relatively secure life that my generation has led...