Why on earth would you doubt it? People have refused to kill people trying to kill them. IOW despite losing everything possible. How much money would it take for you to rape a child, Carleas? I mean, you could use that money to help other children.
In any case, we know from observation that plenty of people do in fact kill random people for substantially less than everything.
Sure. People will kill over a couple of bucks or who drank the last beer. Does this mean the price of a beer is the value of killing someone? Your proposal rests on some kind of at least vague consensus, not only on money as the measure, but what the measures tend to be.
If instead it is suggested, as Phyllo does, that one might prefer to die than to kill an innocent, it only entails that that person values their own continued existence less than they value the life of the other (or rather, the moral belief that they shouldn’t kill).
Well, if we are accepting it, as you do here, we are accepting that money is not the correct measure.
Let’s put it differently: Take Singer’s parable of the drowning child. How much do you sacrifice to save the drowning child? Put differently, how much do you currently contribute to charitable causes that demonstrably save the lives on innocents for around a thousand dollars? If the amount you currently donate to those causes is zero, you probably aren’t as committed to not killing people as you claim. Moreover, if you currently choose to buy yourself food instead of contributing every cent you earn to saving those lives until you die from hunger and exhaustion, you probably aren’t so strongly committed to dying rather than killing.
So for you not saving someone is the same as not killing someone.
Here’s a thought experiment. You need a babysitter or a coworker. You can have a person who does not donate to charities or you can have someone who does donate to charities but who will kill a random person for 1000 dollars. Which category of person would you consider hiring?
Me, there is not a chance in hell I would hire a hit man.
It may be that you just aren’t a consequentialist, and you base your morality in the opinion of some all loving god who could care less about what happens to anyone around you so long as you don’t participate directly in the causal chain that leads to their death. That morality is nonsense for a number of reasons, but that is a different discussion and my argument here doesn’t address it.
Wow, look at the assumptions here
- there are no consequentialist arguments against your position
- all deontologists are theists
On the other hand, it may just be that the idea of accepting money in exchange for committing moral wrongs is seen as taboo. That’s understandable, because signaling a commitment to moral positions that is strong enough to overcome any personal gain is important for social cohesion and alliance building.
Ah, there you go, one possible consequentialist argument AND NOTE: IT IS VERY VERY HARD TO TRACK THE CONSEQUENCES of such things. I say this, because most consequentialists tend to treat only those effects that can be tracked as the set of effects and/or show to me a kind of hubris in the ability to track consequences.
Here is one test: if you think that it’s right to pull the lever in the trolley problem, to save five lives by killing one, then why would it be the case that you can’t accept $10,000 to kill a random person and then donate that money to a charitable initiative that reliably saves a life for each $1,000 it receives? You would on net save 9 lives, 5 lives better than in the trolley problem. What gives? We’re just replacing the trolley switch with a check for killing the one person followed by an alms collection to save the five.
I’ve made it so far without having to make such decisions. And what are the consequences of having these kinds of scenarios BEING A REGULAR PART OF HUMAN INTERACTIONS? Oh, we don’t have to think of that. Indirect effects, those that deal with how we think and the way it affects how we views others, oh those are hard to track, so we don’t have to consider them.
The idea that decisions and effects can be narrowed down this way, expecially when we are talking about a new system of evaluation behavior, is pathological and confused.
Here’s another way to approach the problem, which is probably where we should have started: I think lying is always wrong, but surely you would tell a white lie for $1 million, right? Think of all the orphans you could save! Murder is an extreme case, and when we start there it’s easy to take our gut rejection as an indication that there’s nothing to this price-of-morality argument. But start with tiny moral wrongs, and (I hope) it’s clear that we would take money for small moral wrongs. If nothing else, we can differentiate moral wrongs for which it’s not taboo to discuss accepting money to violate, and ones for which it is.[
And again what are the side effects of making this kind of thinking the main guideline in a society? How does that monetary evaluation, when taught to children, when it becomes the common way of evaluating actions in adult society…how does that affect how we view and then treat each other? Ah, that’s hard to figure out, we don’t have to think of that.
Morality is like a chess puzzle. Causes and effects can be easily broken down and tracked.
I tell white lies for free.
So, Carleas, in the time you wrote these posts, you could have worked for enough money to help a starving child somewhere. It’s nice you never tell white lies
but you just contributed to the starvation of an African child.
Seriously, there is something extremely unpleasant here. Not because of what such thinking is and does.
I mean that from the bottom of both my consequentialist and deontological hearts.