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Pentashagon 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?
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.