Or many people in expectation; the same goes when the alternative is to save many people for sure as long as it is unclear who of a sufficiently large population will be saved
Yep you’re right. And importantly, this isn’t a far-off hypothetical: as Jaime alludes to, under most reasonable statistical assumptions AMF will almost certainly save a great number of lives with probability close to 1, not just save many lives in expectation. The only problem is that you don’t know for sure who those people are, ex ante.
Yes indeed! When it comes to assessing the plausibility of moral theories, I generally prefer to make “all else equal” to avoid potentially distorting factors, but the AMF example comes close to being a perfect real-world example of (what I consider to be) the more severe version of the problem.
Yep you’re right. And importantly, this isn’t a far-off hypothetical: as Jaime alludes to, under most reasonable statistical assumptions AMF will almost certainly save a great number of lives with probability close to 1, not just save many lives in expectation. The only problem is that you don’t know for sure who those people are, ex ante.
Yes indeed! When it comes to assessing the plausibility of moral theories, I generally prefer to make “all else equal” to avoid potentially distorting factors, but the AMF example comes close to being a perfect real-world example of (what I consider to be) the more severe version of the problem.