6 ms·

This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so basica

• sitepodmatt 8y ago
  You make a reasonable point, health and safety bullshit can go too far at times, but equally exploitation often goes further - in that the effort to save/pockets costs shadows the good will. Very difficult to quantify
• JauntTrooper 8y ago
  Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none? This is solved at least somewhat by using 'rule utilitarianism' instead of 'act utilitarianism'. Society is better off as a whole if we adhere to rules such as protection of the human body or safety regulations when constructing buildings.
  • lobotryas 8y ago
    Yes, but only up to a point. If all the rules and safety checks inflate the cost and timeline of projects exponentially then barely anything would get built. The question, as always, is: "Where do we draw the line?".
    • beaner 8y ago
      This doesn't seem to be true because things do get built with high safety today.
  • raldi 8y ago
    Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.
    • XorNot 8y ago
      Is this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"
      • raldi 8y ago
        Even autonomous vehicles will always have nonzero fatality rates. Letting them go 50mph will lead to more human deaths than capping them at 25.
      • jsight 8y ago
        lol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal. They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.
        • allannienhuis 8y ago
          I wouldn't be surprised to see an increasing number of (express-type) roads or perhaps dedicated lanes where human drivers were not allowed on though, after self-driving capabilities become the norm. (yes I realise that's an assumption). I think people underestimate the cultural impact that self-driving vehicles will have - imagine a whole generation or two after self-driving vehicles are generally available - how many people will bother learning to drive? I think it might become more of a job-specific skill than a general 'adult life' skill as it is now in most places.
          • raldi 8y ago
            First it will be like knowing how to drive a stick-shift. Then it'll be like owning a sports car. Then it'll be like owning a horse or a boat.
  • gameswithgo 8y ago
    > We should live in a society where the expected human sacrifice of a construction project should be 0. No, but that should be the ideal which you should strive to move towards, when practicable. But you can't ever actually get there, and shouldn't try infinitely hard either.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • sooheon 8y ago
    Your "pure utilitarianism" is a complete straw man. Killing someone to take their organs to save 5 lives is utilitarianism to only first order effects. We live in a world that does not terminate after one time step, so we have to consider Nth order effects to calculate utility. For example, the second order effect is other humans' moral judgements. "How horrible, he murdered that man" is a valid moral reaction to have, and this is disutility that must be accounted for in a "pure utilitarian" world view. Third order effects may be the social disorder that results from allowing such ad hoc killings as means to an end, and so on. The only thing preventing pure utilitarianism from being viable is a lack of compute power, and "rule utilitarianism" is a poor heuristic based approach for philosophers without patience ;)
    • ericd 8y ago
      Great comment, I've never had a good way of putting that same thought.
  • tzs 8y ago
    > For example you could kill someone and take their organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others with none? There was a pretty good short story, "Dibs" by Brian Plante, about that published in the April 2004 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Everyone was required to be registered in the transplant matching system. Occasionally you'd receive a letter telling you that someone was going to die soon unless they got one of your organs. That person now had dibs on that organ, and if anything happened to you before they died they got it. Usually you would get another letter a couple weeks or so later telling you that the person no longer had dibs, which generally meant that they had died. Sometimes, though, you'd get a second dibs letter while you already had one organ under dibs. And sometimes you'd get a dibs letter when you already had two organs under dibs...meaning if you died now it would save three lives. At that point you were required to report in and your organs were taken to save those three other lives. The story concerned someone who worked for the transplant matching agency who got a second dibs letter and was quite worried. He illegally used his insider access to find out who the people were who had dibs on him, and started digging around to try to convince himself they were terrible people who didn't deserve to survive to justify illegally interfering, if I recall correctly (I only read the story once, when it was in the current issue). I don't remember what happened after that. I just remember thinking that it was an interesting story and explored some interesting issues.
• johngalt 8y ago
  It might be more palatable if the benefits accrued to the people assuming the risks. Reliably the people absorbing the risks capture almost none of the added value.
• posterboy 8y ago
  Yes, it does sound horrible. Not because of the objective, but it is so uninformed and low effort that it is really pain full. Yes, it's a great idea. Killing one person will allow us to double speed. How exactly I wonder, but this seems like the kind of project where asking questions is strictly forbidden.
  • qaq 8y ago
    This has nothing to do with specifically killing people but has to do with creating regulatory environment were very few entities can complete and comply with regulation. I am not sure anyone can contribute the improved stats to that burdensome regulation easily as it can be just general tech and process improvements.
• imbur 8y ago
  The premise that people will die if the hospital takes longer to build is false. The same work can be done in another building