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The annoying part of debating morality is that it is indeed very presuppositional so we do need to figure out what axioms we're disagreeing on here.
I think a large part of our disagreement is that you place value on intent, while I don't. I think intent is almost completely meaningless.
Babies aren't really a good way of thinking about this problem because the whole point is to test decision making, so the actor has to understand the premise in the first place. Let's rather think about someone who's totally irrational, but can understand the premise, otherwise we're discussing some completely different thought experiment.
If that irrational person lack the instinct not to walk in blenders yeah they do deserve to die for making an incorrect decision, that's how nature works.
Now there's a separate argument to be had about whether you should try to save them through sacrifice or risk. To me, the morality of sacrifice hinges on the utility you get out of the sacrifice, which in this case is engineered to be zero.
Really any deviation from the original thought experiment changes the answer. As I mentioned here an equally natural framing is that nobody dies unless >50% of people step onto the "blend everybody else" button.
I'll grant that babies should maybe be ignored, since I missed that the original sample was "everybody in this poll" rather than "everybody". Still, there is at least one person out there who chooses blue by mistake, and it's worth coordinating to save them.
What does appealing to nature have to do with people deserving things? I don't like the state of nature. I want to improve things from that state. Plenty of us would "deserve to die" for making mistakes in a state of nature, but due to the cooperation of others we live in an easier world now.
Like moral value? I'm not sure what you mean here. I definitely ascribe moral value to intent.
Right, I mean, if your moral value of saving others is zero, the obvious choice is red. What else could it be? Red has a greater chance to save your own life which is all you care about. But that turns this into a moral debate rather than a game theory one. I don't share your values, so the right answer for me is different than it is for you.
I think I see our actual disagreement here.
I believe that one of the realities of nature that can't be escaped is the need for self preservation, and that any order we build to escape brutish nature still has to acknowledge that as a zeroth principle. Because people who don't exist do not get to make moral judgements, so existing isn't just moral, it's pre-moral.
In some sense, if you disregard self-preservation we are returned to the state of nature because pumping infinite ressources into saving people who don't care to live is not sustainable. For civilization to work, people need to not pump all the utility out of it.
Saving others can have varying levels of utility, though I understand this particular thought experiment is too vague to actually get at that, which is why people intuit different ones including on the framing.
But I think our fundamental disagreement isn't about those levels but about purely selfless sacrifice which I indeed view as immoral.
Taken seriously, this forbids dying for any cause, or even risking your life / shortening it by a couple of minutes for any cause. I definitely believe morality has an objective basis outside of people's minds, similar to math. Otherwise, how does morality survive at all? Even if your choices are moral when you're alive they vanish into nothingness when you die, so how are they ever moral in the first place? Realistically they are moral (or immoral) whether or not anyone is around to observe them and consider them as such.
I don't think any sacrifice is purely selfless. Besides extremely evil people, even the worst that humanity has to offer shares plenty of values with me. Saving them grants me utility.
I agree we can't pump infinite resources into self-destructive people. If the threshold for blue were higher and harder to coordinate I might change my answer. But 50% is pretty attainable, and was attained in the original poll.
Yet none of that is in the premise of the question. We don't get fully automatic luxury communism if >50% of the people choose blue. There's no carrot, only stick. The options are live or die, and there's a simple choice between choosing the former and risking the latter.
What I was saying there had nothing to do with the red/blue pill question.
The carrot is saving everyone rather than only those who coordinate around red.
The carrot is saving people who chose the stick, from the stick?
Yes?
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It's eugenic. Platonism isn't needed to explain it at all.
Saying a choice is moral without context is saying morality is true a priori, and Kantianism is heavily flawed. I take the empiricist view on this one. It's just a social behavior.
Let's not reach into such wild assumptions, please.
I'm not sure how I should take this. But we definitely disagree that most of humanity is inherently worth taking a risk for. Much less one that would require high trust.
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