Jiro comments on The Least Convenient Possible World - Less Wrong

165 Post author: Yvain 14 March 2009 02:11AM

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Comment author: Epictetus 10 February 2015 10:17:58PM 2 points [-]

The least convenient world is one where there's no traveler and the doctor debates whether to harvest organs from another villager. I figure that if it's okay to kill the traveler for organs, then it should be okay to kill a villager. Similarly, if it's against general principle to kill a villager for organs, then it shouldn't be okay to kill the traveler. Perhaps someone can come up with a clever argument why the life of a villager is worth intrinsically more than the life of the traveler, but let's keep things simple for now.

So, let us suppose that N sick people is the threshold wherein it is okay to kill a traveler, and hence a villager. If it's good to do once, it's good to do anytime this situation comes up. So we have ourselves a society where whenever the doctor needs is in dire need of organs for N patients, a villager is sacrificed. If we scale it up to the national level we should have ourselves a proper system wherein each month a certain number of people are chosen (perhaps by lottery) for sacrifice and their organs are harvested. I should imagine an epidemic of obesity and alcoholism as people seek to make their organs undesirable and so avoid being sacrificed.

I find that a fair number of morality puzzles of this sort exhibit interesting behavior under scaling.

Comment author: Jiro 10 February 2015 10:37:54PM *  2 points [-]

We have two such systems today, except

  1. We call it "taxes".
  2. People die on an overall statistical basis (because people who are poorer die sooner, and paying taxes makes them poorer) rather than by loss of organs so it is hard to point to an individual death caused by taking things from one person to give them to someone who is more needy.

For the second system,

  1. We call it "a justice system".
  2. The harm to innocent people is again statistical--because all justice systems are imperfect, they will convict X innocent people, and we've decided that harming X innocent people is an acceptable price to pay to convict more guilty people and protect the populace from criminals.