7 Comments

“Surely, they should prefer you kill one to prevent two killings to you killing one indiscriminately.

Thus, if you killed one indiscriminately, that would be no worse than killing one to prevent two killings, from the standpoint of a third party.”

This makes no sense to me. It’s obviously worse to kill someone for no reason than it is to kill someone to save two people’s lives. Is there a typo in that?

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No, if you killed one indiscriminately that would be worse. If you prefer A to B, B is worse than A. So if you prefer killling ont o prevent two killings then killing one indiscriminately is worse.

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Are you a pure materialist? what do you think love is?

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I'm not a materialist. Love is some complex conscious state that is associated with fondness, affection, and various other things.

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I suppose it depends on what kind of love. What do you think about the highest form of love being unconditional love, for example, sacrificing oneself for others?

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I don't know if there's a precise fact about the highness of various forms of love, but if there is, I'd imagine this would be a pretty high form of love.

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"If deontology is true, then you shouldn’t kill one person to prevent two killings.

This is true by definition."

No, it's not. Deontology only needs hold that some side constraints exist, but these need not be the broadest or most universal versions. For eample, I suspect that many ordinary people think it can be right to kill one to save two if one has some kind of formal authority over the moral patients involved (police officer, army general, pandemic response coordinator), but not if one is Joe Schmoe, philosophy buff.

EDIT: Or, the deontologist might have a number between 1 and 2 as the cutoff, e.g. "It's wrong to kill one person to save one person plus have a 20% chance of saving a second person", or "it's wrong to kill a 40-year-old person to save a 25-year-old person expected to have more enjoyable life in front of them". Just as most actual deontologists are fine with killing one to save a million, this hypothetical deontologist might have a cutoff at 1.5, but still not be fully consequentialist.

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