lmm comments on Does utilitarianism "require" extreme self sacrifice? If not why do people commonly say it does? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Interesting; that may be a real difference in our intuitions. My sense is that unless I'm deliberately paying attention I tend to think of people quite binarily as either decent people or bad people.
Significantly more than you think of them binarily regarding those other categories? Then it is a real difference.
My view of people is that there are a few saints and a few cancers, and a big decent majority in between who sometimes fall short of obligations and sometimes exceed them depending on the situation. The 'saint' and 'cancer' categories are very small.
What do your 'good' and 'bad' categories look like, and what are their relative sizes?
I think of a large population of "decent", who generically never do anything outright bad (I realise this is probably inaccurate, I'm talking about intuitions). There's some variation within that category in terms of how much outright good they do, but that's a lot less important. And then a smaller but substantial chunk, say 10%, of "bad" people, people who do outright bad things on occasion (and some variation in how frequently they do them, but again that's much less important).