EPTOn August 27 2024 15:51 Uldridge wrote:
If it's so unfathomable; just give 50% of it away. Won't make a dent.
If it's so unfathomable; just give 50% of it away. Won't make a dent.
But then that other billionaire would have a bigger number!
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4362
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Simberto
Germany11902 Posts
But then that other billionaire would have a bigger number! | ||
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Fleetfeet
Canada2759 Posts
On August 27 2024 16:35 Simberto wrote: But then that other billionaire would have a bigger number! Yes but if one dollar is a million dollars, then they have the same number  | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 15:07 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean there's the 'probably not actually stated by Stalin but still attributed to him'- quote: "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." Aptly put. People are missing the point I'm making because they miss the part where I attribute infinite value to every single individual life. Infinity times a million is not a greater infinity than infinity times one. It's the same. One murder equates to a million murders. What people are also missing is that the utility of human life - unlike value - is finite. The greater utility of a million people can never be used to rationalize murdering one person, because the act of murder steals infinite value. Value, due to being infinite, always surpasses utility. I could describe it this way: my reasoning makes absolutely sure that murder is never right and always wrong. Putting the utility of numbers above the value of individual life does the opposite: it incentivizes murder. | ||
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Uldridge
Belgium5183 Posts
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JoinTheRain
Bulgaria409 Posts
On August 27 2024 19:40 Magic Powers wrote: People are missing the point I'm making because they miss the part where I attribute infinite value to every single individual life. Can you clarify something for me - are other mammals or life forms covered by the infinity value rule or is it only humans? If nothing else is covered and it is Homo sapiens' life where you draw the line, where does this evolutionary chauvinism stem from? What is it the logical foundation of your claim? | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 19:54 JoinTheRain wrote: Can you clarify something for me - are other mammals or life forms covered by the infinity value rule or is it only humans? If nothing else is covered and it is Homo sapiens' life where you draw the line, where does this evolutionary chauvinism stem from? What is it the logical foundation of your claim? That's a problem I haven't been able to solve yet. Animals (or more specifically non-humans) are a big question mark that desperately needs answers since humans have placed themselves on top of the food chain. It is in most people's nature to regularly eat animal meat (only vegans would disagree), whereas murder is only in the nature of a fringe minority of people such as serial killers (only serial killers would disagree). Beyond that admittedly simplistic answer I haven't made much progress figuring out this problem. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 19:47 Uldridge wrote: Mercy killing is also always wrong then? Mercy killing? You mean if someone begs for their own death because they're suffering? That's a tricky question that falls into a grey area. I don't have an answer to that question, it's too complicated for me. I try to keep it more simple and straight forward and let the big philosophers find answers to the complicated questions. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland27032 Posts
On August 27 2024 20:11 Magic Powers wrote: Mercy killing? You mean if someone begs for their own death because they're suffering? That's a tricky question that falls into a grey area. I don't have an answer to that question, it's too complicated for me. I try to keep it more simple and straight forward and let the big philosophers find answers to the complicated questions. Is it that tricky? If someone’s daily existence is that horrendous that they’d prefer not to be around, I don’t see why one wouldn’t grant it. With the exception of people who may temporarily experience such suffering for mental health reasons. If we mercy killed everyone who had a suicidal spell I wouldn’t have many friends, but it’d be immaterial anyway as I also would have been smothered for my own good. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 20:15 WombaT wrote: Is it that tricky? If someone’s daily existence is that horrendous that they’d prefer not to be around, I don’t see why one wouldn’t grant it. With the exception of people who may temporarily experience such suffering for mental health reasons. If we mercy killed everyone who had a suicidal spell I wouldn’t have many friends, but it’d be immaterial anyway as I also would have been smothered for my own good. I consider it tricky because doctors consider it tricky. The ethics of a doctor strictly forbid killing a suffering patient. They are only allowed a certain grey area where they don't attempt a life saving procedure (i.e. let a dying patient pass away peacefully with their prior consent). They're not allowed to inflict death when the patient is able to stay alive without outside interference. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28822 Posts
On August 27 2024 19:40 Magic Powers wrote: Aptly put. People are missing the point I'm making because they miss the part where I attribute infinite value to every single individual life. Infinity times a million is not a greater infinity than infinity times one. It's the same. One murder equates to a million murders. What people are also missing is that the utility of human life - unlike value - is finite. The greater utility of a million people can never be used to rationalize murdering one person, because the act of murder steals infinite value. Value, due to being infinite, always surpasses utility. I could describe it this way: my reasoning makes absolutely sure that murder is never right and always wrong. Putting the utility of numbers above the value of individual life does the opposite: it incentivizes murder. Tbh I also don't really see how your logic makes any sense. Like Acro said, if one life has infinite value then the value of one life would be the same as the value of all life. Saying 'we can't possibly attempt to quantify the value of one life and any attempt at doing such runs the risk of validating policies that take life' is coherent and gives you a way out, (even if say, doctors/hospital staff necessarily must at some point try to make these calculations) but putting the value of one life at 'infinite' just fundamentally doesn't make any sense. Honestly the whole notion that 'taking one life is as bad as taking a million lives' is just a weird approach. You don't have to be willing to quantify where your line goes, and if you want to argue against making the trolley switch, that's fine, but unless you're approaching it from a thanos-y perspective then clearly taking a million lives is worse than taking one life. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 20:41 Liquid`Drone wrote: Tbh I also don't really see how your logic makes any sense. Like Acro said, if one life has infinite value then the value of one life would be the same as the value of all life. Saying 'we can't possibly attempt to quantify the value of one life and any attempt at doing such runs the risk of validating policies that take life' is coherent and gives you a way out, (even if say, doctors/hospital staff necessarily must at some point try to make these calculations) but putting the value of one life at 'infinite' just fundamentally doesn't make any sense. Honestly the whole notion that 'taking one life is as bad as taking a million lives' is just a weird approach. You don't have to be willing to quantify where your line goes, and if you want to argue against making the trolley switch, that's fine, but unless you're approaching it from a thanos-y perspective then clearly taking a million lives is worse than taking one life. You can disagree with my assumption that the value of each life is infinite, that's ok. But if you do, you'll have to live with the consequence that murder is sometimes ok. If you become the target of murder, you might have to agree to it on an ideological level despite disagreeing emotionally. | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28822 Posts
Like your perspective, logically, is that in a trolly situation, you might as well tie both groups to the same track and run them all over because they're all equally bad. That, to me, is clearly a worse solution than either of the ones you'd normally choose from. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 21:37 Liquid`Drone wrote: Or it's sometimes 'the lesser of two evils', distinctly different from 'ok'. I have absolutely no problem imagining a whole plethora of hypotheticals where the death / killing of one person is less bad than the other choice, starting with the death/killing of two people. (Assuming all else is equal, just that the amount of people is different). Like your perspective, logically, is that in a trolly situation, you might as well tie both groups to the same track and run them all over because they're all equally bad. That, to me, is clearly a worse solution than either of the ones you'd normally choose from. This is certainly not a correct extrapolation of the trolley problem. If you tie both groups to the same track, you're just strictly committing murder and there's no other nuance. It's certainly not about saying "fuck it, kill them all". There are variations of the trolley problem, but yours is certainly not one of them. The third option of killing every subject is just strictly anti-social. It's psychopathic. The trolley problem is about saving multiple lives in exchange for one life, with you being in charge of this decision. It exposes your view on whether or not murder is ever the right choice. It's - as you say correctly in the first part of your comment - a decision on what's the lesser evil. The only way you can argue that murder is ever justified is if you put the utility of multiple people above individual value. You can reasonably make that argument, but it would require that you view individual lives as expendable given certain circumstances. There are real life instances of the trolley problem. A story that I heard is of Vietnamese refugees starving on a tiny boat having to make the decision to kill and eat the sick among each other. They all chose their own likely death over the murder of the sick. Murder was strictly unacceptable to them. The survivors lived to tell the story. In your mind it would've been right for them to committ a "lesser evilism". But when presented with that choice, it's not so simple anymore. There are moral, emotional, psychological, social and other barriers that stop us from enacting our ideology so readily. They decided that murder would be the greater evil despite it likely saving more lives. | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28822 Posts
I agree that there are interesting, different approaches to the trolley problem, and I don't necessarily fully ascribe to the type of utilitarian view which would make switching from 2 to 1 the right thing to do. Honestly I imagine myself freezing and not doing anything, if I have such a dillemma. But there's a big difference between saying 'there are situations where consistently applying simplified utilitarianism could lead to a corruption of morality through making life seem expendable' and saying 'there's no difference between the murder of 1 and the murder of 1 million'. The former makes total sense to me, and is the point I think you would actually like to argue, but you're arguing the latter, which is nonsense. I'm pretty late to the party of explaining this though, and I don't really see the point in arguing it any further. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 22:16 Liquid`Drone wrote: I mean those people survived so they didn't actually die. Makes it a pretty different scenario. If they had survived through killing and eating their sick friends, I could be on board with that being less moral of an action than not killing their sick friends and themselves dying. I agree that there are interesting, different approaches to the trolley problem, and I don't necessarily fully ascribe to the type of utilitarian view which would make switching from 2 to 1 the right thing to do. Honestly I imagine myself freezing and not doing anything, if I have such a dillemma. But there's a big difference between saying 'there are situations where consistently applying simplified utilitarianism could lead to a corruption of morality through making life seem expendable' and saying 'there's no difference between the murder of 1 and the murder of 1 million'. The former makes total sense to me, and is the point I think you would actually like to argue, but you're arguing the latter, which is nonsense. I'm pretty late to the party of explaining this though, and I don't really see the point in arguing it any further. The people on the boat didn't all survive, I thought that was clear. My bad if I failed to express that clearly. You can call my view nonsense as much as you like, I know it's not nonsense at all. It's just not a view you subscribe to for your own reasons. At the end of the day I'm against all murder, and you're not against all murder. | ||
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Velr
Switzerland10910 Posts
Your knowingly letting more harm in the world happen, for the sole reason of not wanting to be personaly involved, despite it not even being any hassle to you or affecting you in any further way. By doing nothing, you create the worst possible outcome. Your plain arguing to go for the worse outcome. It's ultimate cowardice in face of responsibilty. | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States46126 Posts
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JoinTheRain
Bulgaria409 Posts
On August 27 2024 20:10 Magic Powers wrote: That's a problem I haven't been able to solve yet. I see. Is it then safe to conclude that your previous statements lack any logical ground then? Because, you know, you admit inability to tackle the matter. And this renders further inquiry useless. On August 27 2024 20:10 Magic Powers wrote: Animals (or more specifically non-humans) are a big question mark that desperately needs answers since humans have placed themselves on top of the food chain. Let me baffle you even more then. I hope you are aware that, scientifically speaking, "animals" is a huge umbrella term that includes most bacteria. So it is up to deniers of animal eating to draw the distinction - what is ethical to eat and what isn't. Also, I don't think humans have put themselves on top of the food chain. Humans are a product of biological evolution, just one of many species on the battlefield for the finite resources on the planet. Yes, we now have reached some evolutionary stage where we can and do influence processes that have global impact. Yet if you want to know high high you're up in the food chain, just jump in the middle of the sea or go hike in Alaska. Anyway, hone your arguments would be my advice. As you're now you say "murder is wrong," because of x but x isn't a correct assumption in the first place. So your whole position is unstable and indefensible. Enough diluting this thread, back to reading. I wish you well! | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States46126 Posts
On August 27 2024 23:17 JoinTheRain wrote: I hope you are aware that, scientifically speaking, "animals" is a huge umbrella term that includes most bacteria. Bacteria are not part of the animal kingdom. | ||
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Magic Powers
Austria4478 Posts
On August 27 2024 23:17 JoinTheRain wrote: I see. Is it then safe to conclude that your previous statements lack any logical ground then? Because, you know, you admit inability to tackle the matter. And this renders further inquiry useless. Let me baffle you even more then. I hope you are aware that, scientifically speaking, "animals" is a huge umbrella term that includes most bacteria. So it is up to deniers of animal eating to draw the distinction - what is ethical to eat and what isn't. Also, I don't think humans have put themselves on top of the food chain. Humans are a product of biological evolution, just one of many species on the battlefield for the finite resources on the planet. Yes, we now have reached some evolutionary stage where we can and do influence processes that have global impact. Yet if you want to know high high you're up in the food chain, just jump in the middle of the sea or go hike in Alaska. Anyway, hone your arguments would be my advice. As you're now you say "murder is wrong," because of x but x isn't a correct assumption in the first place. So your whole position is unstable and indefensible. Enough diluting this thread, back to reading. I wish you well! Huh? Ok, can you solve every mathematical equation? No, you can't? Ok then you're inept at math altogether. I win the argument. That's not how things work. | ||
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