Iâm not saying youâre not legally entitled to the money.
Iâm saying that, in an ultimate sense, the kid is more morally entitled not to die from malaria than you are to retain your $6k.
And there are no norms that would develop in the thought experiment. Your activity would be totally secret. The further policy issues might indicate that people ought to have a right to their money, but that does not bear on whether they would be morally obligated to exercise it in certain ways.
Yes but I think itâs significant that one is morally entitled, not just legally entitled. In other words, imagine replacing pressing the button with actually doing the work to earn 6k. Do you think you are, for example, obligated to drive 12 hours each way in order to pull a drowning child out of a lake? The amount of money in your bank account is endogenous to how much work and effort you put into filling it, whereas I think the way this thought experiment is framed makes it sound like that money fell from the sky.
If you think you are in fact obligated drive 24 hours/âincrease your own risk of death by taking on a risky job/âgive up time with your children in order to save a stranger, then I am more sympathetic to the idea that you are obligated give up money for that stranger. However I do not share that intuition.
My intuition doesnât really change significantly if you change the obligation from a financial one to the amount of labor that would correspond to the financial one.
If I recall correctly, the value of a statistical life used by government agencies is $10 mil/âlife, which is calculated by using how much people value their own lives implicitly through choices they make that entail avoiding risk by incurring costs and getting benefits by incurring risk to themselves.
If we round up the cost to save a life in the developing world to $10k, people in the developing world could save 1,000 lives for the cost at which they value their own lives.
I simply think that acting in a way that you value another person 1,000 times less than you do yourself is immoral. This is why I do think that incorporating the value of other conscious beings to some degree is morally required.
I am curious where you think it stops. What standard of living are people âobligatedâ to sink to in order to help strangers? I donât deny any of this is good or praiseworthy, but it doesnât seem to have any limiting principle. Should everyone live in squalor, forego a family/âdeep friendships, and not pursue any passions because time and money can always be spent saving another stranger?
I think Peter Singerâs book, The Life You Can Save, addresses this question more fully. But I would say that the obligations of people in wealthy countries is to make life choices, including sharing of their own wealth, in a way that shows some degree of consideration for their ability to help others in such an efficient way.
Failing to make some significant effort to help, perhaps to the degree of the 10% pledge (though I would probably think more than that even would in many situations be morally required). I do not know where exactly I would draw the line, but some degree of consideration similar to that of the 10% pledge would be a minimum.
I definitely think that the very demanding requirement you stated above would make more sense than none whatsoever in which one implicitly values others less than a thousandth of how one values oneself.
Iâm not saying youâre not legally entitled to the money.
Iâm saying that, in an ultimate sense, the kid is more morally entitled not to die from malaria than you are to retain your $6k.
And there are no norms that would develop in the thought experiment. Your activity would be totally secret. The further policy issues might indicate that people ought to have a right to their money, but that does not bear on whether they would be morally obligated to exercise it in certain ways.
Yes but I think itâs significant that one is morally entitled, not just legally entitled. In other words, imagine replacing pressing the button with actually doing the work to earn 6k. Do you think you are, for example, obligated to drive 12 hours each way in order to pull a drowning child out of a lake? The amount of money in your bank account is endogenous to how much work and effort you put into filling it, whereas I think the way this thought experiment is framed makes it sound like that money fell from the sky.
If you think you are in fact obligated drive 24 hours/âincrease your own risk of death by taking on a risky job/âgive up time with your children in order to save a stranger, then I am more sympathetic to the idea that you are obligated give up money for that stranger. However I do not share that intuition.
My intuition doesnât really change significantly if you change the obligation from a financial one to the amount of labor that would correspond to the financial one.
If I recall correctly, the value of a statistical life used by government agencies is $10 mil/âlife, which is calculated by using how much people value their own lives implicitly through choices they make that entail avoiding risk by incurring costs and getting benefits by incurring risk to themselves.
If we round up the cost to save a life in the developing world to $10k, people in the developing world could save 1,000 lives for the cost at which they value their own lives.
I simply think that acting in a way that you value another person 1,000 times less than you do yourself is immoral. This is why I do think that incorporating the value of other conscious beings to some degree is morally required.
I am curious where you think it stops. What standard of living are people âobligatedâ to sink to in order to help strangers? I donât deny any of this is good or praiseworthy, but it doesnât seem to have any limiting principle. Should everyone live in squalor, forego a family/âdeep friendships, and not pursue any passions because time and money can always be spent saving another stranger?
I think Peter Singerâs book, The Life You Can Save, addresses this question more fully. But I would say that the obligations of people in wealthy countries is to make life choices, including sharing of their own wealth, in a way that shows some degree of consideration for their ability to help others in such an efficient way.
Failing to make some significant effort to help, perhaps to the degree of the 10% pledge (though I would probably think more than that even would in many situations be morally required). I do not know where exactly I would draw the line, but some degree of consideration similar to that of the 10% pledge would be a minimum.
I definitely think that the very demanding requirement you stated above would make more sense than none whatsoever in which one implicitly values others less than a thousandth of how one values oneself.