Play Nice Lives Matter - The hypothetical game of ethics

[Taylor]

Within a single generation, on any single moment? Yes. Over the course of time? No.

My problem with what you are and have suggested is that each human is represented by X. Some humans are x+1, and some x+2, but every human by default starts off at x. A human can be x+3 and have a single child who is x-1; a human can be x-2 and have 4 children who are x+1. A human also undergoes changes in societal value over the course of their lives; a mother who is a heart surgeon in her older years is more valuable then than she was when she was a single mother of two in her twenties. Susan Kiefal is more valuable now as the head of the High Court of Australia than she was as a high school dropout in her teens (check her out, she's come a long way).

Who are you to determine future competence based upon any single moment in time?

I haven't disputed that all human lives have the same inherent value but there are definitely skills and attributes valued by the community that increase the value of individuals to that community.

In this circumstance that community needs to be able to survive a generation without starving, so farmers and botanists, environmental science would be a +1 for those people.

I'm not suggesting that I choose anybody. I'm saying that a random selection doesn't account for the needs of the community.

 

[Gethelred]

I haven't disputed that all human lives have the same inherent value but there are definitely skills and attributes valued by the community that increase the value of individuals to that community.

In this circumstance that community needs to be able to survive a generation without starving, so farmers and botanists, environmental science would be a +1 for those people.

I'm not suggesting that I choose anybody. I'm saying that a random selection doesn't account for the needs of the community.

And I'm saying, provided basic knowledge - how to read and write, rudimentary carpentry and scientific principles, and food cultivation techniques - is provided, you truly do not need all that much to perpetuate the species.

You're hanging on to this world for all its ills, out of fear of the new.

You also haven't actually responded to the notion that personal value can change over the course of a person's life.

 

[HairyO]

No. I don't agree about the lottery. How about my highest IQ idea?

Brave New World dealt with this.

The Controllers had the island of Cyprus cleared of all its existing inhabitants and re-colonized with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas. All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.

We need average people to do average jobs. We need smart people to do the inventing.

 

[Better Loosen Up]

First to go are people with terminal illnesses or bleak health records. How many does that leave us with?

 

[Frank Bunn]

Brave New World dealt with this.

We need average people to do average jobs. We need smart people to do the inventing.

Brilliant of Huxley to be so prescient. But he didn't predict that many of the average jobs would be replaced by machines.

Would my proposal of an IQ measure catch enough factory workers, builders, nurses, plumbers, soldiers, order pickers, hairdressers, shop assistants? Probably not. What's your proposal?

 

[HairyO]

Brilliant of Huxley to be so prescient. But he didn't predict that many of the average jobs would be replaced by machines.

Would my proposal of an IQ measure catch enough factory workers, builders, nurses, plumbers, soldiers, order pickers, hairdressers, shop assistants? Probably not. What's your proposal?

I gave mine.

Some didntlike me abandoning Africa, China, the Middle East and South America.

 

[Power Raid]

In reality, those with the biggest and best military, supported by the war machine of manufacturing capabilities decide.



However we kill black kids every day to mine our cobalt for our renewables, mobiles, EVs and laptops. No one cares about the poor and thus the 2 billion have already been decided, even without military might.

 

[Run n Spread]

The world is visited by an overwhelming and impossible to counter power that has grown angry with humanity, it says our planet can only sustain 2 billion people and it will give us one year to choose which 2 billion are saved as it wipes out the rest and resets the globe to factory settings.

If we do not choose, everyone dies.

How do you select the 2 billion to survive?

Probably pointless to select anyone over 35 (rules me out). Have a few 35yo for experience and leadership beyond that fitness and mental testing for a wild card or lottery. Otherwise a war is risked.
Or survival of the fittest kind of happens in every day life anyway.

 

[Leeda]

...

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.

now that is the kind of language and attitude and perseverance I like..

trying hard to say a lot without saying anything.. and all to let everyone know that you are serious..

but you have liked me so I will like you...

rough road ahead..

 

[Geelong_Sicko]

I'm still sad that we've (as a species) pissed Xenu off enough to kill a whole load of us. I know that with enough auditing (at $800 an hour it's the best deal in town!) and further regulation of our thetan levels as a species we can avoid this looming apocalypse. Open our wallets. Save ourselves.

We also have to change Earth's name back to Teegeeack.

 

[Seeds]

you could use this as a chance to end the religion virus and keep atheists alive.

 

[Ben The Donkey]

Brave New World dealt with this.
We need average people to do average jobs. We need smart people to do the inventing.

Brave New World is a work of fiction.
The reality is that we have plenty of smart people doing menial or (relatively) low paid work. For some it's out of necessity, for others a lifestyle choice. The depiction of the Cyprus experiment in BNW is not all that realistic in my view; the idea that intelligent people having no choice but to do low paid menial work would stage a revolution as a result is simply not an accurate predictor of reality. In my view, society would simply balance itself out and shift the goalposts.
There are many factors influencing what come to be our values; intelligence, in itself, is only one of them.

History would tell us that revolutions are, by and large, the result of hordes of disenfranchised, poor or average folks being swayed by a few charismatic leaders to overthrow whatever is presented or perceived as (often the two are one and the same) "the enemy". Smart people tend to be far more pragmatic about things. There is a reason the "intelligentsia" are the first to go during either a revolution or a purge - any time, in effect, that the status quo won't do and balanced opinions offered up as a form of counter-dissention only serve as a complication.

*edit - I did quite enjoy the idea of the countries/continents you'd have depopulated though. I do agree with you on that.
At the end of the day, a question like this couldn't be decided easily using objective measures. Subjectively, however, it could be decided quite easily, and in half the time. Actually, when I come to think about it, the fighting over who gets to decide would probably achieve half the job for you. Power Raid was quite correct about that. That's known as evolution.

Frankly, I find the current trend of disguising subjective morality as objective vaguely disturbing.

 

[Better Loosen Up]

The world is visited by an overwhelming and impossible to counter power that has grown angry with humanity, it says our planet can only sustain 2 billion people and it will give us one year to choose which 2 billion are saved as it wipes out the rest and resets the globe to factory settings.

If we do not choose, everyone dies.

How do you select the 2 billion to survive?

I'd cull in this order:

Vegans
Activists
The woke
Communists
Terminally Ill