prase comments on Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists - Less Wrong

33 Post author: Will_Newsome 04 June 2010 04:08PM

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Comment author: mattnewport 04 June 2010 11:43:25PM 4 points [-]

assuming we are speaking about consequentialists with typical human values, for whom death is wrong and more deaths are more wrong, ceteris paribus.

I would question whether these are typical human values. People generally think the deaths of some people are more wrong than the deaths of other people. Most people do not value all human life equally. For typical humans ceteris almost never is paribus when it comes to choosing who lives and who dies.

Comment author: prase 05 June 2010 12:14:32AM 0 points [-]

I am clearly unable to express myself clearly today.

I haven't said that it's typical to value all life equally. I tried to say that set X of x deaths is typically worse than set Y of y deaths, if x>y. Almost always it holds when Y is a subset of X (that was the intended meaning of ceteris paribus), but if x>>y, it often holds even if the sets are disjoint.

Also, the context of the trolley scenario is that the fat man isn't your relative or friend; he's a random stranger, fully comparable with those on the track.