mattnewport comments on Open Thread: May 2009 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: steven0461 01 May 2009 04:16PM

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Comment author: mattnewport 11 May 2009 10:28:09PM *  0 points [-]

That would fall in the territory I describe as fuzzy above. At a sufficiently low cost inaction begins to seem morally questionable. That is largely driven by intuition though and I'm skeptical of attempts to scale it up and draw moral conclusions. I believe there are reasons the intuition exists that do not scale up simply. In other words, scaling up from this to conclude that if a very small cost is obligatory to save a single person then a very large cost is obligatory to save a million people is faulty reasoning in my opinion.