would start with the worst criminals and the terminally ill. — DingoJones

You're still robbing people of choice, and that is the problem. You're still robbing the worst criminal and preventing them from rehabilitating themselves to be a productive citizen. For the terminally ill the same rules apply, but more importantly the issue is taking away a person's autonomy.

Also, how do you know you'd be fair?

Yes well it is a messy scenario, thats the point. You are not going to get 1 billion volunteers, so someone is going to have to have their personal autonomy violated or there will be no more humans at all.
Its bound to not be “fair”, its not a fair scenario. Again, that is the point...to explore a difficult decision, not a childishly simple one like “is it wrong to kill a billion people?”. Most of is have that one figured out already don’t you think?

Ah, I was taking lottery in the more concrete sense of randomly selecting particular individuals to die vs finding ways to randomize the process in general - eg by releasing a non selective agent or some other way. The reason I prefer randomness is because it is not influenced by prejudice and it respects our ‘lottery of birth’ situation. I just simply think it’s a more fair system. Choosing by criteria can quickly become ethically complicated I think, particularly after exhausting whom we all collectively agree are ‘bad’. 1 billion is a lot

Yes well it is a messy scenario, thats the point. You are not going to get 1 billion volunteers, so someone is going to have to have their personal autonomy violated or there will be no more humans at all.
Its bound to not be “fair”, its not a fair scenario. Again, that is the point...to explore a difficult decision, not a childishly simple one like “is it wrong to kill a billion people?”. Most of is have that one figured out already don’t you think? — DingoJones

What's scary are people who are able to answer this......

I wonder how you'd feel if I had the ability to terminate your mother, father, or anyone in your family that you may have loved as "expendable assets?"

I think murderers would be a fair choice. And other violent criminals perhaps too. They may be losing the chance to be rehabilitated, but any innocent/decent person killed in their stead is losing the chance to continue living the life they earned by actually being good and decent people. Not all non-criminals are decent people, but say you're killing Mr. Rogers cause you hope Charles Manson will "come around" or something is not fair.

The biggest flaw I see in that plan is how to KNOW who's a criminal. (Btw, this has also always been my biggest issue with the death penalty.) The statistics of how many people are proven innocent is kinda scary. The Innocence Project has it at 4.1% , which is kinda high when you're talking about being put to death.

If 4.1% of your 1 billion criminals were innocent, you'd have killed 41 million people unfairly. That's more than the population of California!

What's scary are people who are able to answer this... — Anaxagoras

It's just a hypothetical.

Hypothetically I know whom in my family I would choose over whom as well. My mom over my dad, my husband over either of them, and my kid over any person in the universe. Just cause it's simple in the abstract doesn't mean it would be easy in real life or that it wouldn't psychologically crush me to live with the guilt.

Well it’s an inescapably horrid predicament, and I think taking a lottery approach doesn’t do away with that fact. Maybe it adds issues in that it distributes the guilt since no particular person is the one to press the button..

What is the point of mocking the thought experiment? — DingoJones

I have nothing against thought experiments, but this one seems silly. It ask us to put ourselves in the position of performing a great evil to prevent a greater evil for no particular positive reason. At least the trolley thought problem involves a handful of people rather than the entire species.

It is difficult to get at the extremes of what people might do. The Holocaust would have been difficult to imagine ahead of time. Genocide had either been tried or achieved before the Holocaust, but it hadn't been industrialized. In 1942 it would have been very difficult to imagine the United States and the Soviet Union possessing weapons that could kill off most of the species. By 1950, it was on its way to being fact

Sushi, why don't you propose a thought experiment of this sort involving fewer people, maybe under a thousand. It could be more realistic, and consequently more compelling.

No, whats scary is when someone wastes time trying to hold a moral high ground when in this scenario the alternative to finding an answer for the 1 billion is that ALL humans die.

Good points. I agree about the death penalty, id be all for it if the justice system were more reliable but it isnt, anywhere.

I don’t think the scale really changes the principal of whats being done, except the increase in horror due to the increase in magnitude. Exploring what should be done doesnt change based on the numbers. Lesser of evils and all that.

I'd destroy countries, I think anything else is pretty cruel, the human race will continue and it would be better trying to reduce those left mourning and filled with hate. I don't know if we're factoring in methodology but other methods will involve millions of people trying to kill the billion, I'd rather just shoulder the responsibility alone and do something that doesn't require people seeing and causing so much death. As for which countries, start from the one I'd least like to live in and go up. Maybe I could think of a better way to decide which countries but there's no good way really.

I think the whole "what if it was you" attitude is stupid, nothing works that way well. Very few contexts where groups could function that way.

If we aren't allowed a lottery system, it seems that the desire here is to prevent us from escaping the decision about who dies, so just being arbitrary in any way shouldn't be allowed. We must be forced into a position in which we either become responsible for ending humanity forever or we choose certain kinds of people to die, presumably because some kinds of people have less value than others. Thus we reveal ourselves to be something like Nazis. Some people are better than others by virtue of some factor X and should therefore be among those saved. And this reveals our value system. We might rank people based on their usefulness, their virtue, their obedience to laws, their general uprightness and respectability, their intelligence, their religion, their earning power, their geographic situation, their genetic health, or their capacity for Y.

The question naturally arises of what class(es) of people are least worth keeping. This assumes obviously that people are not equally valuable. This opens a can of worms that can quickly go bad places. Regardless, it reveals something about the person deciding. What is more interesting to me is that the way we evaluate the worth of our fellow humans itself comes into question. Some might not even question the value system by which they will immediately tend to rank people. For example, one might say that some "earn" their existence more than others, that some are more useful than others, and so on, and that what determines ultimately whether a being ought to exist is how useful they are, how much they have "earned" their existence, and so forth. But how do we know any such criterion is the right one? How do we select the right values by which to make the evaluation? Which values ought we to have? It would seem that we might want to rank different value systems. Some values are better than others! Which is the best value by which to decide human worth? But that itself requires another value or set of values. Where does this terminate?

I think it really interesting that so many people think it unproblematic to say that non-criminals ought to exist preferentially over criminals. It raises a multitude of troubling questions!

If we decide to kill a billion to save humanity, we have already committed ourselves to a certain important valuation, namely that humanity is worth saving, perhaps that humanity is in some sense superior to other forms of existence. Perhaps whatever criterion we used to decide that humanity should be saved should also be used to decide which portion of humanity best exemplifies the qualities that make humanity worth saving.

What makes humanity worth saving? Suppose someone says that our experience is more rich than that of worms, and that this is why we are more valuable than worms or the dust we might otherwise be or whatever. We can appreciate Mozart's music, for example, or the night sky, whereas a worm or a pile of dust cannot. Or we can appreciate the fact that we exist. Or... But what makes non-criminals necessarily better at any of this? Perhaps it is in the minds of some criminals, or old people, or sick people, or rejected people, or whatever, where certain potentials reach their highest levels of realization.

And what of this "earning" business? Does anyone really ultimately earn their existence? Think about that one thoroughly.

Is the question of whether a being ought to exist answered by whether or not they earned or otherwise "deserve" their existence? Should the Earth exist? Did the planet "earn" its existence? Does it "deserve" to live? Why this kind of language? Why these words like "earn" and "deserve"? What does our use of them reveal about how we are thinking? Ought we to question all this? This seems to come from our past in which we thought about ourselves in relation to a God with laws who decides who goes up and who goes down based on whether or not we are good boys and girls, based on whether we are obeying and serving properly. But this is all rooted in a primitive fear of powerful storm spirits who are upset because humans have been too noisy. It also must be recognized that the widespreadness of such beliefs serves the interests of certain human powers. "Be useful", "earn your bread", "be good", and so on are maxims often taught by masters to slaves. I am imagining dogs deciding which dogs should die based on which ones are least house-trained, these well-behaved good-doggies obviously thinking themselves the most upright and good and thus worthwhile. Master tells them how good they are, after all! They cause the least trouble in the house! The master here could be the white plantation owner, the pope, the king, the community in relation to the individual, the selfish genes in relation to the organism, and so on.

We might decide whether or not to keep a table saw based on whether or not it serves us well, whether or not it is useful, whether or not it "earns" its place in our workshop. More problematically, we might similarly decide whether or not to keep a slave based on the same criteria. Good versus bad slaves might be evaluated based on the return on investment they give us. Are they worth feeding? Do they produce more money for us than they consume? Are they profitable? And we might teach them to evaluate themselves in this way, so as to better serve us. As an amusing side-note, notice that we might want to teach our slaves that suicide is very, very bad, and that all suicides go to Hell! Of course we don't want our tools offing themselves when their lives suck, especially when their lives naturally suck under our power! We have invested too much in them!

Should human beings be evaluated in this way?

What are the ends to which all that are useful are a means? Is human existence never self-justifying? Must we always appeal to some external benefit? Or are we ends in ourselves? Is a criminal less an end in himself than an "upright" person?

And what makes someone a criminal? The laws of the land? But which land? Which laws? Are these laws always good ones? How do we decide?

And if usefulness is to be a criterion for deciding whether a person ought to live, what about humanity as a whole? Can we use that criterion to justify saving humanity? To whom or what are we useful as a whole? To the planet? Hardly! To God? Really? To intelligence itself? What? To ourselves?

Suppose we try that line, that we ought to exist because we are useful to ourselves. What does it mean to be useful? To feed? I feed myself, therefore I ought to exist. Sounds funny when put that way, right?

Some people seem to think usefulness to the community is what makes a person's existence worthwhile. A person who contributes nothing, perhaps only consuming resources, is considered "worthless". But what of the last person on Earth? How do we decide if that person ought to live? Is their existence evaluated according to whether they benefit the animals and plants around them? Where does this end? And of course, the fact is, they are not beneficial to their environment, but rather largely parasitic/predatory, preying on weaker forms of life, like a lion killing gazelles, like a mugger knocking over old ladies... Ah, the beauty of predators! Might makes right! Right?

Perhaps that is the right principle! Maybe we should say that if humans ought to live far into the future, then we ought to select for continued existence those kinds of humans most likely to live far into the future. Select for existence those with the strongest tendency to exist! Kill the weak! Kill the dumb! Kill the ugly! Maybe those capable of murder are some of those we should keep! Maybe we should just take away a portion of the water and food and let people fight over it so whoever survives shows that they have the strongest ability to ensure their own existence and therefore should exist. Wait... Did I take a wrong turn here somewhere?

I’m more interested in what the process makes you think about and feel like. Not really interested in an actual reply — I like sushi

What it makes me feel is regret at the Hollywoodisation of ethics. Rather than deliberate over real problems that actually occur in our world, people make up sci-fi scenarios that have nothing to do with real ethics. The blithe amusement with which people have reacted is entirely appropriate.

I blame Phillippa Foote (sp?). But I don't see that anything is added by changing one person to a billion.

All answers lead towards fascism to the problem, so that's a reductio for ya.

I should explain. Any rationale (one of which I wanted to propose), such as a utilitarian analysis of the utility of each individual, or a rationale based on bias (genocide), promote a totalitarian and fascist approach to the problem. Without an objective standard (the only one that comes to my mind is a lottery), you are inevitably going to promote a totalitarian or fascistic approach to the problem. And, that's the reductio ad absurdom to the problem.

Ya, and? Are you saying forcing people to do something is never the answer? Forcing a population to do something is never the answer?
Or are you worried the practice will stick after the extinction of the human race is avoided?

Ya, and? Are you saying forcing people to do something is never the answer? Forcing a population to do something is never the answer?
Or are you worried the practice will stick after the extinction of the human race is avoided? — DingoJones

I'm saying that no method ought to be applied, it inevitably leads to a reductio ad absurdom if we truly or sincerely believe in the democratic method.

Isnt that just a refusal to answer the question? In the scenario, every human being in world dies as you stand on a podium saying “do nothing, democratic method and reductio ad absurdum” before you yourself die.

Isnt that just a refusal to answer the question? In the scenario, every human being in world dies as you stand on a podium saying “do nothing, democratic method and reductio ad absurdum” before you yourself die. — DingoJones

Not necessarily. I would simply recuse myself due to bias. Hopefully, everyone would do that. Those that don't perhaps would qualify for extermination.

No, whats scary is when someone wastes time trying to hold a moral high ground when in this scenario the alternative to finding an answer for the 1 billion is that ALL humans die. — DingoJones

If you say so...

Not necessarily. I would simply recuse myself due to bias. Hopefully, everyone would do that. Those that don't perhaps would qualify for extermination. — Wallows

Don't worry apparently @DingoJones is comfortable pulling the trigger. I'm quite sure if it was his family the was on the end of that barrel he wouldn't have the position he holds now. In fact, if an apathetic leader was to make the decision using these forum members families I think many people would take issue here as opposed to having a stoic mindset.

If any forum member has seen a human take their last breath especially someone they love they would know how it feels to watch someone die. I happen to have had the unfortunate reality of watching my mother take her last breath at the age of 19 (I am 36 now). Yeah sure humanity will die but for those of us who have loved ones, the answer isn't so simple.

It's revealing to see some members so quick to find some "solution" to this problem, where there really is none. Those that would praise someone as "confident" or "non-apathetic" towards some proposed 'objective standard' is eye-opening.

Right.

If any forum member has seen a human take their last breath especially someone they love they would know how it feels to watch someone die. — Anaxagoras

I think it's pretty dangerous to assume you know what a room full of strangers has been through.

And, for the record, we do make these kinds of choices all the time. For example when we invest money in cancer research over drug rehabilitation. I personally think it's important to think about whom we save and why and if our reasons for doing so are faulty.

Have you ever saw someone die in front of you? You personally. Not other people on the forum, but you.

we do make these kinds of choices all the time. For example when we invest money in cancer research over drug rehabilitation. I personally think it's important to think about whom we save and why and if our reasons for doing so are faulty. — NKBJ

I agree. The difference between those health policy decisions and the sci-fi thought experiments is context. Everything depends on context, so a thought experiment that just asks if one would kill a billion people to save the rest of the human race from extinction is just silly.

I will PM you.

Everything depends on context, so a thought experiment that just asks if one would kill a billion people to save the rest of the human race from extinction is just silly. — andrewk

I think the value in it, and other thought experiments like the trolley problem, is that it tries to simplify some moral dilemmas, and through that simplification figure out what we would do, should do, and why.

For example, when you ask "how much funding should we give to cancer research versus drug rehabilitation" you get all sorts of political messiness in there ranging from the socialist to the conservative to the libertarian to the anarchist point of view. The question then is derailed from one of the basic considerations of who should live.

By the time I’m done I hope you’ll see that you’re missing the point.