Play Nice Lives Matter - The hypothetical game of ethics

[Gethelred]

Taking this hypothetical rather personally.

How do you select 2 billion?

Just China? That would just be pandering to your team's sponsor and owner.

I almost said you'd cut down on racial and religious wars, but that isn't true is it?

 

[Taylor]

But relative value is not a fair/just means of denoting value overall. Your stay at home gold digging mother could be the mother of 4, all of whom go on to become surgeons because their mother believed in them and gave them the help they needed.

Placing people on a hierarchy is a chilling way to solve this exercise. Either people are created equal, or they are not.

I agree that all people are created with equal value, I also think that some skills aren't inherent and need to be prioritised. I wouldn't expect any child care workers to be given a ticket over primary school teachers etc

It's not supposed to be an easy discussion.

 

[Taylor]

I almost said you'd cut down on racial and religious wars, but that isn't true is it?

I think common experience, loss and prevailing over hardship would bond humanity together - as long as our mutual negative feelings are directed at a very external and differentiated other.

 

[iBeng]

We are just going to ignore those big old elephants in the room huh.

 

[Gethelred]

I agree that all people are created with equal value, I also think that some skills aren't inherent and need to be prioritised. I wouldn't expect any child care workers to be given a ticket over primary school teachers etc

It's not supposed to be an easy discussion.

I think that your reasoning is spurious and disgusting. In the above cases, both of these lives you are presuming to value have their own inherent value, and skills that set them apart. The easiness or lack thereof in this discussion doesn't change the fact that for the purposes of it you are ranking people by job, IQ, earnings etc.

My point is that ranking people is wrong, ergo the only way to do this is a purely random lottery. I do not care for racial statistics or ability; we are who we are, and no-one is so able that their child cannot be a fool.

I think common experience, loss and prevailing over hardship would bond humanity together - as long as our mutual negative feelings are directed at a very external and differentiated other.

It was more black humour thrown at the idea that by taking the majority of 2 billion from China would theoretically solve a number of racial/cultural issues, but China has deep problems of their own there.

Thanks for channelling Alan Moore and coming to the same depressing conclusion.

 

[Taylor]

I think that your reasoning is spurious and disgusting. In the above cases, both of these lives you are presuming to value have their own inherent value, and skills that set them apart. The easiness or lack thereof in this discussion doesn't change the fact that for the purposes of it you are ranking people by job, IQ, earnings etc.

My point is that ranking people is wrong, ergo the only way to do this is a purely random lottery. I do not care for racial statistics or ability; we are who we are, and no-one is so able that their child cannot be a fool.
It was more black humour thrown at the idea that by taking the majority of 2 billion from China would theoretically solve a number of racial/cultural issues, but China has deep problems of their own there.

Thanks for channelling Alan Moore and coming to the same depressing conclusion.

So why do I get to leave the sinking ship when the men stay behind?

Humans don't all have equal social value.

 

[Gethelred]

So why do I get to leave the sinking ship when the men stay behind?

Humans don't all have equal social value.

They should; that's the crux of my argument.

And as if, numerically speaking, the human race would have the poverty of luck to have zero men chosen by the lottery. And as if that isn't solvable with medical science.

 

[Taylor]

They should; that's the crux of my argument.

And as if, numerically speaking, the human race would have the poverty of luck to have zero men chosen by the lottery. And as if that isn't solvable with medical science.

I agree that in a pure equal style world everyone would have equal value and contribution to society, but that's not the world we live in now.

 

[Gethelred]

I agree that in a pure equal style world everyone would have equal value and contribution to society, but that's not the world we live in now.

...

So what precisely are we arguing about? Are you trying to persuade me to take your point of view?

I don't like some of the things about the world we live in now, which is part of what your hypothetical poses (in this thread with the click-bait name). Are you interested in responses to your scenario, or what it exposes about the people who choose to comment on it?

For me, what your scenario exposes is the underlying fact that most people value some lives above others. I think that's wrong. Do you not agree?

 

[Taylor]

...

So what precisely are we arguing about? Are you trying to persuade me to take your point of view?

I don't like some of the things about the world we live in now, which is part of what your hypothetical poses (in this thread with the click-bait name). Are you interested in responses to your scenario, or what it exposes about the people who choose to comment on it?

For me, what your scenario exposes is the underlying fact that most people value some lives above others. I think that's wrong. Do you not agree?

No, I agree with you that all life has equal inherent value. I don't think all people have equal utility or function for society and I think that losing those that keep the rest of society going under the guise of fair would be short sighted - but I'd understand.

Humans have an array of ability and that means our usefulness in our communities is different. Some people work harder, some people skate by.

The ideology of equality when pressed to the extreme either drives the human race into the ground together equally or falls apart.

 

[Gethelred]

.The ideology of equality when pressed to the extreme either drives the human race into the ground together equally or falls apart.

Citation needed.

 

[Taylor]

Citation needed.

Random lottery will not capture enough of the elite repositories of knowledge in my opinion.

 

[Gethelred]

Random lottery will not capture enough of the elite repositories of knowledge in my opinion.

Then it is the task of the humans a year ahead to collate and concentrate knowledge that is essential, to give those remaining the best shot available.

It's funny. You continue to unearth supposed problems with a pure lottery, but they aren't difficult to overcome. Could it be that the challenges of preparing a world to come are the point that your ultimate being is going for?

 

[Taylor]

Then it is the task of the humans a year ahead to collate and concentrate knowledge that is essential, to give those remaining the best shot available.

It's funny. You continue to unearth supposed problems with a pure lottery, but they aren't difficult to overcome. Could it be that the challenges of preparing a world to come are the point that your ultimate being is going for?

Exactly! It would bring out the best of us.

 

[Gethelred]

Exactly! It would bring out the best of us.

... then why are you, in your solutions as proposed, suggesting the worst?

 

[Taylor]

... then why are you, in your solutions as proposed, suggesting the worst?

Because we have to cover everything and discussing ideals like they don't have long and hard paths to get there is just unrealistic

 

[Leeda]

Ethics is what it is .. down to the bottom and shallow is all we speak of... I dress in. a cotton nightie and I pat my dog who speaks no
language other than what I want her to speak..

we are living the Dream,//
but we are satisfied with a lovely right handle on the shattering welcome to it all..

be with you later...

 

[HairyO]

I almost said you'd cut down on racial and religious wars, but that isn't true is it?

When China chose their people they would only choose Han Chinese from the Party. So they would certainly cut down on racial and religious wars.

Maybe for the Americans we need to ask one question:
Did God create the world around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago?

 

[Gethelred]

Because we have to cover everything and discussing ideals like they don't have long and hard paths to get there is just unrealistic

...

Taylor, you're being silly. You've confronted us with an absurd hypothetical, and then you've derided what I've suggested as unrealistic. If you want to know what I think is realistic, I'd expect there to be no small level of bluster from our world leaders, up to and including attempts to shoot said powerful force with bullets to missiles. I'd expect the wealthy to try to buy it off, the religious to try and offer it their worship in exchange for it sparing them, the defiant and the fatalistic doing whatever they were going to do. I'd expect no small level of denial, and no small level of humans getting on with what time they have left.

Expecting a singular and/or coherent outcome or decision about how to deal with the problem from this world isn't realistic. You don't get to sledge my outcome as unrealistic when your scenario is even worse.

 

[Taylor]

If we agree that the lottery is the fairest, how do we ensure the survival of our collective achievement as a society? How do we have support for people who might have lost everyone?

These are the same sort of discussions that start out with square wheels and result in the invention of a suspension system to make that work.

 

[RobbieK]

If we agree that the lottery is the fairest, how do we ensure the survival of our collective achievement as a society? How do we have support for people who might have lost everyone?

These are the same sort of discussions that start out with square wheels and result in the invention of a suspension system to make that work.

Why should we care about the survival of our collective achievement as a society?

Maybe it would be better instead to allow the new society to do a better job than we have to this point?

To what end have we used our brilliant technological advances? We have killed millions with ever more power weapons, we have done so much damage to the planet that put it on a path towards uninhabitability...

Maybe the best thing for humanity's longevitiy would be the chance to start again, fresh, without dragging the anchor of the status quo with them?

 

[Gethelred]

Why should we care about the survival of our collective achievement as a society?

Maybe it would be better instead to allow the new society to do a better job than we have to this point?

To what end have we used our brilliant technological advances? We have killed millions with ever more power weapons, we have done so much damage to the planet that put it on a path towards uninhabitability...

Maybe the best thing for humanity's longevitiy would be the chance to start again, fresh, without dragging the anchor of the status quo with them?

That just there evinces difference between us - progressives - and Taylor - a conservative. We view the past as a millstone, dragging us down as much as we might eventually need to use it to grind some grain; she sees the past as a testament to our exceptionalism as a species, and the current age as its pinnacle.

It's part of why she wants to rank people in order of importance in order to kill off the least important; keeping and sustaining the old world in the new, the best bits of it at least. But then you consider what she's choosing to leave behind; the poor, the ill educated, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the ostracized and the other. It's all cossetted up in terms for polite company, but there it is.

If we agree that the lottery is the fairest, how do we ensure the survival of our collective achievement as a society? How do we have support for people who might have lost everyone?

These are the same sort of discussions that start out with square wheels and result in the invention of a suspension system to make that work.

We have a year, and some might slip through the cracks; how is that any different from the time before?

We have support because it is a shared trauma, in which every single person has lost someone. You're effectively shedding 2/3 of the human race. We can work with the time before to decide who gets what, leave guides and strictures for how to do things to keep the lights running. There's no end of how you'd go about trying to simplify things to make them easier to run. But there are 6 billion of us, and - for the purposes of this scenario - we can make it work.

 

[RobbieK]

It's part of why she wants to rank people in order of importance in order to kill off the least important; keeping and sustaining the old world in the new, the best bits of it at least. But then you consider what she's choosing to leave behind; the poor, the ill educated, the disabled, the disenfranchised, the ostracized and the other. It's all cossetted up in terms for polite company, but there it is.

Yes, Taylor thinks that a solution based on the equality of all individuals is "ideological", but fails to see that any attempt she makes to define "superior utility" is also entirely ideological.

 

[Taylor]

The technology you are using to comment here is an example of the intellectual achievement that could be lost.

As much as it might burn your tongue to say it, the life for humans in this nation has never been better.

Not to mention our medical technology.

 

[Taylor]

Yes, Taylor thinks that a solution based on the equality of all individuals is "ideological", but fails to see that any attempt she makes to define "superior utility" is also entirely ideological.

Oh I haven't failed to see it at all. It's very utilitarian.

It's why killing all the farmers hasn't worked so well when humans have done that in the past. Some people and their skills are more important than other people's skills.

Most of us fit into the less important category.