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Nick_Tarleton comments on Shut Up and Divide? - Less Wrong
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Ah, okay. Thanks for clarifying.
That phrase did not mean to imply anything about diluted burdens. It is there to ask the question, "Wait, if you're killing all of these people, isn't everyone killing all of these people?" Your response seems to be, "Yes, they are."
The followup question is: If one of the people who receives aid is included in the swath of killers? Theoretically, the recipient could have given the aid to someone else and that person could have lived. Instead, the recipient was selfish and chose to live by killing another person. Actually, everyone who could have received the aid but didn't and died was killed by the one who did receive.
Something is going wrong here. What is it?
Possibly that "killing people" is connotationally a horrible unforgivable thing, but you (correctly) perceive that it's a bad idea to regard letting people die as always a horrible unforgivable thing. Certainly that you're disputing mere definitions.
I don't understand a morality system can look at someone who is dying receive aid and blame them for the deaths of the people next to them when the aid ran out. Why in the world should they be given any moral responsibility in the situation?
Agreed. This is part of what I meant by "it's a bad idea to regard letting people die as always a horrible unforgivable thing"; I also meant that even comfortable First Worlders wouldn't necessarily do the most good by regarding themselves, or other comfortable First Worlders, as horrible people for acting suboptimally.
(In contexts like this, I see "moral responsibility" as purely instrumental: A's moral responsibilities are just those things it would be expected-utility-maximizing to hold A responsible for. Ditto praise/blameworthiness and which actions to label as "killing".)
Fair enough.
I have not convinced myself that "drinking lattes is killing people" necessarily leads to "accepting aid is killing people." I followed a path there, but I am assuming that people who believe "drinking lattes is killing people" don't believe "accepting aid is killing people." Where did I step differently?
Others are probably just not willing to bite the bullet of blaming people (if only connotationally) for accepting aid. Or they may be thinking about it instrumentally, like me, in which case the different reasonableness of the demands actually is relevant.
Also, there's what Nisan said.