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    Moral catastrophes, such as a million deaths, are not rea... — Carmelics
    Home/Consequentialism
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Moral catastrophes, such as a million deaths, are not really a million times more catastrophic than one death.

    Consequentialism
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The badness of an outcome is not simply the sum of individual badnesses, as Parfit's 'Repugnant Conclusion' reveals aggregation produces morally absurd results.
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    • 2.If aggregation were valid, we would be obligated to sacrifice any individual for sufficiently large trivial gains to others, which violates basic moral intuitions.
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    • 3.Taurek's 1977 argument establishes that numbers do not count in isolation from whose interests and relationships are at stake in a given moral situation.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Each death is an absolute loss of an irreplaceable perspective, not a unit in a fungible quantity, as Nagel's account of agent-relative value demonstrates.
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    • 2.Catastrophic scale does not multiply moral weight linearly because threshold effects and diminishing marginal significance apply to collective harms, per threshold deontology.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Each person who suffers harm suffers only their own harm, not the harm of others.
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    • 2.Harms to two persons cannot be combined into a single aggregate harm experienced by any one entity.
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    Consequentialism

    Related

    Catastrophic scale does not multiply moral weight linearly because threshold eff...Each death is an absolute loss of an irreplaceable perspective, not a unit in a ...Each person who suffers harm suffers only their own harm, not the harm of others...Harms to two persons cannot be combined into a single aggregate harm experienced...
    +3 moreShow less
    If aggregation were valid, we would be obligated to sacrifice any individual for...Taurek's 1977 argument establishes that numbers do not count in isolation from w...The badness of an outcome is not simply the sum of individual badnesses, as Parf...

    Similar

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    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: ethics-deontological
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    This first response to “moral catastrophes,” which is to ignore them, might be further justified by denying that moral catastrophes, such as a million deaths, are really a million times more catastrophic than one death. This is the so-called “aggregation” problem, which we alluded to in section 2.2 in discussing the paradox of deontological constraints. John Taurek famously argued that it is a mistake to assume harms to two persons are twice as bad as a comparable harm to one person. For each
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit