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Bill_McGrath comments on Open thread, August 26 - September 1, 2013 - Less Wrong
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I have a moral question.
Is it better for the last million people of a certain population to die, or for two million people all around the world, randomly selected and evenly distributed, to die? For the first group, their death would not just result in loss of human life, but potentially loss of a lot of cultural information; their language, their religion, their mythology and folklore, their music. I feel like this cultural information has value.
Thoughts?
In order:
1:This kind of thing does not come up.
2:If it did, the moral obligation is to find a third option.
3: The million would be the lesser evil, but is exceedingly unlikely to to actually die, as an identifiable group faced with the prospect of a loosing that high a number of its membership is going to exert a lot more leverage than the world at large is going to exert over a one in 3.500 chance of death.
I would kill the million, every time. (I can imagine populations of size 1,000,000 which I would value more than 2,000,000 random humans, but I don't think any have yet existed.)
What about 1,000,000 versus 1,000,001? I'm not sure. I think that could depend on the population in question.
I would generally value a million lives over cultural information. We're always producing more culture, anyway; it's kind of what we do, as a species. Any particular set of in-jokes, songs, and stories is, I think, less valuable than a million people who will make more.
Depends on whether that culture was going to disappear anyway (quite a few cultures seem doomed today), and how valuable and unique it is. It's sad that we lost a lot of information about the ancient greeks, but information about say the various central asian seems less regretted.
I'd like to preserve the culture, but not at the cost of a million lives.
That depends. Is knowledge of a culture worth a million people's lives?
That depends on how you define the population. Killing the worst 1 million people (people who have caused the most harm to other people, and would continue to cause significant harm) instead of 2 million random people would be a very large net benefit. There have probably been few or no traditional populations (nations, cultures, political movements, etc.) that would be worth completely eradicating, and probably never an entire 1 million people in such a population worth killing out of hand, but if I was forced to choose, I think I could find examples in the 20th century.
You might find the last couple of paragraphs of this quote useful.
What do you mean with "certain population"? Any selection of one million people describes a population.
people are mostly interchangeable. i'd save the million.
Fortunately, it's not the kind of choice we're generally offered in the real world.
Yes it is. We can focus on preserving culture, or we can focus on preserving life. We only have a finite amount of money, so we have to decide which is more important, or if something else altogether is.
To give a concrete example, it is compulsory for school-children in Wales to learn the Welsh language, even if they are not ethnically Welsh, and even though most people in Wales do not speak Welsh. This public policy choice is justified on the grounds of preserving Welsh culture. Whether or not you approve of this decision, it's clearly an allocation of limited time and money which could be put to other uses.
My first guess on reading Bill_McGrath's thought experiment was indeed that he had in mind something about Irish-language-related public policy choices.
Generally it's good to have choices. :)