MichaelVassar comments on Circular Altruism vs. Personal Preference - Less Wrong

7 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 26 October 2009 01:43AM

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Comment author: MichaelVassar 27 October 2009 12:32:40PM 3 points [-]

My guess is that Americans don't consider it immoral to inconvenience people while they do consider it immoral to kill people and thus the latter triggers a special schema. Killing yourself doesn't trigger that schema except for suicide, but normally neither does imposing small risks on others. Sensitivity to unnaturally small probabilities screws the system up.