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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   24407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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But then you find out people agree that it's silly to spend more than 10m to save a child's life from cancer (so child's life is worth 10m max), but they wouldn't accept 20m to shoot a child (so child's life worth greater than 20m??? wat do).

This is blowing my mind.

I think part of it is that shooting them is a direct action you must take, whereas the cancer absolves some of the "ethical responsibility"

I guess the immediate counter is "assume that the 10m treatment will cure them perfectly and permanently with 0% chance of remission"

I agree that 10 million is probably a bit much to spend, but I also would not accept 20 million to shoot a child.

I'm not sure how to reconcile this.

This only seems paradoxical because of the framing. You're a human with normal desires. You want to be prosperous, high status/self esteem and comfortable. You want to balance all of these things. That means you're neither willing to sacrifice your prosperity and comfort for the status/self esteem of child savior nor are you willing to take on the status and self esteem of a baby murderer even if it would secure higher prosperity and comfort. This is all perfectly rational. It is like finding it shocking that someone on a desert island would neither trade all of the water for a thousand lbs of dry food nor all of their food for a thousand gallons of clean water.

Not being a child murderer is worth >10m to you seems simple enough. Combined with the same sort of distinguishing between action and inaction that's required for basically any human to function, as otherwise you're killing a statistical african for every ~5k you spend on anything besides lifesaving charity.

We need to get a "fmab" account going and then we can be the three fmaX musketeers

It probably matters that you are receiving the 20m and could not possibly be giving the 10m. (Unless you actually have that much, in which case, apologies for assuming.)

It also probably matters that deontology is an excellent representation of how humans reason about truly heinous acts, and that to act is greatly different than to not act. Hence cowardice (short of desertion) and treason both being rewarded with a rope, excepting that in the latter case it gets tied in a loop first.

I would strongly trust those moral intuitions.

It also matters that a person who is in position to exchange 10m for one child's life is often in position to exchange that same 10m for multiple children's lives.

Right? There’s a mess of heuristics going on under the hood.

For example, many people see a strong moral difference between ‘doing X’ and ‘not preventing X’ as you say.

Then we seem to see a distinction made between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ values. People can relatively easily trade off profane dilemmas like ‘I could finish up my uber job for the day, or I could take another few passengers and earn enough to have a nice burger on the way back home’. But then they point-blank refuse to trade off ‘sacred’ values like not shooting children against any ‘profane’ sum of money.

And of course different people seem to have different sets of heuristics. Some people just don’t seem to see any moral difference between action and inaction, for example, and then those with and without the heuristic get baffled or angry when they try to debate each other.

Did you ever come across Jonathon Haidt’s moral foundations theory from 2010ish? His book was called “The Righteous Mind” and it goes into his research trying to identify the different moral foundations that people seem to use (harm, caring, purity, etc.) and the fact that different people seem to use different sets.

In economics there's a concept called willingness to pay and willingness to accept that comes up occasionally. It arises because people are limited by their budget, and psychology but there's no upper limit on what one can accept.

It's similar to bid and ask prices in most markets, but when certain goods come up the spread can get massive indeed.

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