Your redheads example is either terrible or disingenuous or you're just innumerate; you're comparing 10k traffic accidents / annum with redheads, of whom there'

Your redheads example is either terrible or disingenuous or you're just innumerate; you're comparing 10k traffic accidents / annum with redheads, of whom there's several millions. If you're going to try and have an honest debate you ought to pick an example that's not so laughable on its face; it's too hard for me to "forget" the actual sizes of the groups in question even when I try to assume they're comparable. I pretty much give up on you; the sequence here is: - some dude points out "if you could show that forcibly staying within the speedlimit => many more lives saved due to fewer accidents than are lost due to inability to speed to the hospital, it might be justified to hard-code the speed limit" - rather than debate on the actual merits of the specific point in question, you pop over to trying to argue that on general principles the road to hell is paved with utilitarianism - to make your case you invent a contrived example that's so far off as to be close to intellectual dishonesty - you give up on your example and revert to just saying what it was supposed to accomplish -- showing that acting on utilitarian-calculus 'lives vs. lives' has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side of a decision -- while missing the point: utilitarianism is a tool for choosing between shitty alternatives, and that going the other way (picking the other alternative) has revolting implications for the individuals on the wrong side, too...which is why this is hard Generally the best you can do is pray you're never finding yourself in a position where any of your decisions will inevitably have shitty consequences for other people; part of the general cussedness of life is that you can really only escape such positions -- or at least your awareness of being within one -- by shirking responsibility, adopting willful blindness, limiting the scope of your options, or becoming a jerk.