Thanks for sharing this interesting Draft Amnesty post. I’ve been thinking a lot about these sorts of things, and want to make a couple of points that may or may not relate to your current beliefs/understandings (I think they’ll relate to someone’s):
Any theory of consequentialism that doesn’t take into account the effects of our actions/inactions on our consciences and thus our well-beings is an incomplete theory of consequentialism (it doesn’t include all consequences). By considering conscience effects, a difference between killing and letting die becomes apparent.
I personally like the “limited number of bets in our lifetimes” argument against following a decision theory fanatically dependent on expected value calculations, i.e., even when probabilities are super low. Basically, if I could make on the order of 10^20 bets in my lifetime, it might make sense to take a bet at a chance of 1 in 10^20 because eventually I’d end up winning, but since I’ll never live long enough to make 10^20 such bets, I shouldn’t take this one bet.
I think there are two concepts one could consider for responsibility for damages: one is for who’s responsible to pay for the damages, and one is for whether someone feels responsible in their conscience for the damages. The first would be affected by how many other people are involved such as if 3 of us pushed a car off a cliff, I might be responsible to pay for 1/3rd of the damages, or even up to the full damages if the other 2 people didn’t have the ability to pay. The second would be affected by if I thought I significantly directly contributed to at least some fraction of the damages, no matter how many other people were involved. Under this second concept of responsibility, I may choose not to eat meat because if I did, I’d feel that I was significantly contributing to the pain and killing of some amount of animals on factory farms.
Thanks for sharing this interesting Draft Amnesty post. I’ve been thinking a lot about these sorts of things, and want to make a couple of points that may or may not relate to your current beliefs/understandings (I think they’ll relate to someone’s):
Any theory of consequentialism that doesn’t take into account the effects of our actions/inactions on our consciences and thus our well-beings is an incomplete theory of consequentialism (it doesn’t include all consequences). By considering conscience effects, a difference between killing and letting die becomes apparent.
I personally like the “limited number of bets in our lifetimes” argument against following a decision theory fanatically dependent on expected value calculations, i.e., even when probabilities are super low. Basically, if I could make on the order of 10^20 bets in my lifetime, it might make sense to take a bet at a chance of 1 in 10^20 because eventually I’d end up winning, but since I’ll never live long enough to make 10^20 such bets, I shouldn’t take this one bet.
I think there are two concepts one could consider for responsibility for damages: one is for who’s responsible to pay for the damages, and one is for whether someone feels responsible in their conscience for the damages. The first would be affected by how many other people are involved such as if 3 of us pushed a car off a cliff, I might be responsible to pay for 1/3rd of the damages, or even up to the full damages if the other 2 people didn’t have the ability to pay. The second would be affected by if I thought I significantly directly contributed to at least some fraction of the damages, no matter how many other people were involved. Under this second concept of responsibility, I may choose not to eat meat because if I did, I’d feel that I was significantly contributing to the pain and killing of some amount of animals on factory farms.