4 ms·
Because a kid will recover more easily from feeling responsible for their parent's death than they will from extended but finite lockdown?
by CodeMage 6y ago
Because a kid will recover more easily from feeling responsible for their parent's death than they will from extended but finite lockdown?
- Wolfenstein98k 6y agoI keep saying "do the cost-benefit" because you should do the cost-benefit. One option harms every child and potentially saves some parents' lives. The other harms practically no children and will likely lead to some more parents dying, although the data is unclear (as death rates in states with much more open schools is not consistently higher). Harm all kids to save a few parents on the margin...potentially? Do the cost-benefit.
- schrodinger 6y ago> The other harms practically no children and will likely lead to some more parents dying Really? You think that a parent dying harms "practically no children"? For christ's sake, I lost my father at 25 years old (10 years ago) and it still hurts me daily (at 35 now). Your calculus is just plain fucking cold.
- umanwizard 6y agoOf course not, but that assumes the first outcome is as likely a result of no-lockdown as the second is of lockdown. In reality you need to consider probabilities. What if there are thousands of times more kids in the second category than the first? This is a pattern of thinking that I’ve seen a lot on the pro-lockdown side: reasoning from the axiom that a human being dying has infinite negative utility. While normally a good policy heuristic in practice when all else is equal, it of course can’t be strictly true. If it were, then it would be worth it for everyone in the world to experience unbounded misery if that extended the life of one person by one day. Clearly that is absurd. So the moral calculus must be more nuanced than “if it saves lives, it must be worth it”.