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.
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.