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cwillu comments on Memory is Everything - Less Wrong
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I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.
Do you still take the money?
This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I'd have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I'd treat the babyeaters. It's almost exactly the same moral equation.
With a billion dollars one can save thousands of lives, which seems like a bigger deal than one person being tortured for a day. I can certainly see reasons for not taking that offer, but taking it doesn't seem very babyeaterish to me if the taker's intention is to use much of the money to do a lot more good than the donor does harm.
That seems to be conceding the point that it has moral weight.
"It" is the day's torture for the hostage? Yes, I think it has moral weight. I'm not sure why you use the word "conceding"; I never suggested that it doesn't, and I'm not sure anyone else did.