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rwallace comments on The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies - Less Wrong
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I'm not convinced informational complexity gets you what you want here (a cloud of gas in thermal equilibrium has maximum informational complexity). I also don't agree that the last spotted owl is worth more than the 10 billionth human.
Yes, it does kind of depend on "worth more to whom?". To the 10-billionth human's mother, no way. The aggregate worth to all humans who benefit in some small way from the existence of spotted owls, maybe.
If you took a vote, most of those humans still might say no (because who knows if the next vote will be whether they themselves are worth less than the last of some species of shrew).
Upvoted. In the words of Penn Fraser Jillette: "Teller and I would personally kill EVERY chimp in the world, with our bare hands, to save ONE street junkie with AIDS."
That statement has always puzzled me a bit. Why does it matter that the junkie has AIDS? That's a death sentence, so either "saving" the junkie means curing the AIDS and it doesn't add anything to stipulate that it was originally suffered (unless it's just an intuition pump about AIDS sufferers tending to be seen as a particularly worthless echelon of humanity?). Or, it means rescuing the junkie from a more immediate danger and leaving the AIDS intact, in which case no real saving has happened - the cause of death has just changed and been put off for a while. And over those remaining years of the junkie's life there's a nontrivial chance that the voluntary slaughter of all those chimps will ultimately result in another AIDS infection, which is another death sentence!
I always took the statement to be more about: Ignoring real-world effects of chimpanzees going extinct, no amount of animal death, in and of itself, is considered more horrible than any amount of human death. Animal life has no inherent worth. None.
Neither does most human life, according to many people who agree with this statement.
I assumed the meaning was 'to save one junkie with AIDS from some imminent death that has nothing to do with junkie-ness or AIDS'. I.e., I would value even a few extra months of a junkie's life over any amount of chimpanzee lives.