2 ms·
Only in the same sense that if you dodge a bullet, you're responsible for whatever person got killed instead of you.
by tpoacher 5y ago
Only in the same sense that if you dodge a bullet, you're responsible for whatever person got killed instead of you.
- saurik 5y agoNot that I think your analogy is a reasonable one anyway--as, if nothing else, you took the action here, picking up the gun and being told to fire it--but it doesn't work even if you pretend it makes sense: if no one ever tried to doge bullets then someone always gets shot... but if everyone tries (as they should) then maybe no one gets shot; it is simply incorrect to assume that someone else is going to get shot and so it may as well be you (god this analogy is weird ;P).
- tpoacher 5y agoIf you bypass the whole "attack only the points of the analogy which do not relate to the argument" and focus on the points of the "analogy" that make it a suitably demonstrative specialization of the more general argument (and thus a formally valid argument, which in general an analogy is not, and thus a neither is a strawman counterargument), then: General Premises: 1. Agent A enforces Action X onto Agent B 2. Action X hurts C with some probability. Not Action X hurts B with high probability. 3. For all persons D under A, the probability of Not Action X is vanishingly small. Reasonable Argument: 1. If B performs Action X bad things happen to C. This makes them partly responsible. However, under premise 3, B's counterfactual contribution is vanishingly small, whereas A's contribution is close to 100%. Unreasonable argument: 1. As the final link in this particular chain of events, B is wholly responsible for the harm done to C, because had they suffered harm with high probability, they would have ensured the reduction of the probability of non-harm to C by a vanishingly small amount.