Third: We don't have to stack-rank every two possible scenes in order to have a consequentialist ethical system. By "possible scene" I mean something much smaller than a "possible world", something deliberately disregarding consequences outside of an artificially-defined neighborhood. "Save Alice's life and let Bob die" is a possible scene, not a possible world.
That is not at all what I did. I proposed a metric for evaluating a health care system. For all intents and purposes, I said a health care system where the population lives 80 years and 10% of them are disabled was better than one where the health care system cost the same and the population lives 80 years but 20% of them are disabled.
Is that a rank ordering you would agree with?
For all intents and purposes, I said a health care system where the population lives 80 years and 10% of them are disabled was better than one where the health care system cost the same and the population lives 80 years but 20% of them are disabled.
Well, what you said was:
lifespan metric is weighted by degree of full functionality, that is various deficits [...] would all and each reduce the weighting of years of life in the metric.
That's a weighting applied to individuals, implied to be used when making individual decisions. And you clarified:
...But
In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.