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Lumifer comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Harvest organs from living, healthy, poor donors. Go to a poor country and find batches of 100 people earning $1 a day who are willing to give up their lives with probability .01 in return for 20 years wages. You will have to pay out $730,000 per batch, but in return you get the healthy organs from a living donor which should be worth a lot more than this. Run the operation as a charity to reduce negative publicity, and truthfully stress that the prime goal of the charity is to help the poorest of the poor.
Most of the world has deontological ethics, not consequentialist.
Why does my idea violate deontological ethics if I get the legal approval of the relevant governments and individuals? Would it violate deontological ethics for me to build a factory in a poor country in which workers are knowlingly exposed to a small risk of death?
Since when "legal" == "ethical"?
No. What violates deontological ethics is not you running this program -- it's the actual killing at the end that matters.
Deontology is funny like that. Making a one-in-a-million chance of each of a million people dying is fine, but killing one is not. Not even if you make it a lottery so each of them has a one-in-a-million chance of dying, since you're still killing them.
You can't treat "deontological ethics" as if that phrase gives specific rules. It refers to an entire class of ethical systems.
However, you can look at various real world systems and cases to make predictions about how your factory would be received. It is common in a situation like this for people to believe that if you know that there is a risk, and you do not tell people about the risk, then you are morally (and often legally) negligent. If you do tell people of the risk, and then people get hurt, people will find you morally (and often legally) negligent, because most people actually hold teleological ethic beliefs on an emotional level.
tl;dr -- neither of these cases necessarily violate deontological ethical systems. Get a good lawyer anyway.
EDIT: Fixed typo.