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It's nice to hear of a few other philosophers in this area aside from Peter Singer, the Effective Altruism community and trolley car problems. These moral scal
by anselm 4y ago
It's nice to hear of a few other philosophers in this area aside from Peter Singer, the Effective Altruism community and trolley car problems.
These moral scales philosophers employ do seem to rest on unquestioned axioms about the value of human time spent alive. I constantly wonder why if they are philosophers that they don't examine the axioms themselves more? Often it feels like they try to weigh say the potential of a younger person to live longer versus the weight of an older person with less time to live. I don't know that this kind of calculus really makes sense - it feels like it quickly leads to logical conundrums because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another.
If I had to decide between two lives (or say if the Earth was going to be struck by an asteroid) it feels like a better scheme is to weight 'diversity' - to focus less on the happiness or joy or quality of life and more on trying to select for many different kinds of minds. So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship, or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes. I'd probably bias mostly towards humans simply because I don't know of anything else that can cogitate, but I'd also try to include larger systems of living organisms. Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking.
- akira2501 4y ago> because it's extremely hard to precisely weigh one life versus another. I'd say it's impossible to do this in any ethical way without perfect knowledge of the future. When it comes to solving this as a civil issue, this is not at all what we do. We look at the future potential value of that individual persons life and then ask a jury to decide the award. > So for example I'd try to save a diverse mixture of kinds of people from a sinking ship Assuming you can actually measure diversity acceptably in such conditions. > or I'd try to select for people from say indigenous tribal cultures that were under-represented in outcomes Without asking why they're under represented? Is a tribe of cannibals or a classroom of children more valuable? > Selecting for diversity rather than quality of life feels like it avoids some of the tyranny of the masses kind of thinking and the worst of human-centric thinking. You've only described racial diversity. What about diversity of lived experience? Diversity of thought? Diversity of religion? Where do these rank against race?