Sure, in the abstract, of course. But then you seemed to doubt it was possible I was correct.
I think it is important that you actually make a clear statement here of amounts of money.
I disagree. I also think the Hoover Dam has a dollar value, I have no idea what it is, and I don’t need to float an estimate for us to have a productive discussion about whether that value exists.
Buit you wanted other people to do this. Further, you are presenting this as a moral choice. IOW if we disagree you think we are either being immoral or not good or both. I think that is a fair conclusion from how you have argued. Since I think this is an implicit judgment on those who would not kill a random person for money, I think it is honorable to take a stand and weigh in yourself.
Would you kill a random person for a billion dollars?
If I’ve given this impression, I apologize. Substitute (X_t) for any time I used X, to signify X-at-time-t. The fact that X can change over time does not affect my argument.
It does in context, since it shows that there is a contrast with other types of value, like the not being raped state of my wife. This does not fluctuate with my mood or finances. Even I am really pissed at her and have lost my job, it does not change.
This is probably the crux of our disagreement. People do not need to accept money in a direct exchange for something in order to price that thing. It’s illegal in the US to buy a human life. Nonetheless, we can and people do calculate the value of human lives all the time. People implicitly price their own lives when they accept dangerous work, or when they buy or don’t buy safety precautions. People implicitly price the lives of others in much the same way.
I think most of that is wrong. Here I am in a system that works like that. But mainly - there is a difference between my taking dangerous work and my agreeing to be killed or kill for money. Such an agreement is a social interaction with another person or persons. It is an express choice to be paid to kill. It is a choice to satisfy the needs of the other person whose express intent is to kill this random person. It is a direct going along with a pernicious entity that is not hiding or complicating its perniciousness.
Only God can tell me that the consequences of this interaction are contained to me getting money, what I do with that and the dead random person. This is one of the misleading aspects of thought experiments like this one - as opposed to, say, thought experiments in physics.
And it’s incoherent to argue otherwise, in the sense that it leads to absurdities. Above, I made an argument for Ecmandu that the value of a human life cannot be infinity, because it leads to absurd conclusions like him having to send me all his money all the time.
aWhich is part of the same thought experiment fallacy. This like this are never contained, not in real life. There are always consequences sliding around and away from the simple exchange of fee for murder. I would not want to live in a society where everyone agreed with you that it is rational and good to accept large sums of money for murder. Hard to track the effects of everyone accepting this way of thinking about others and a willingness to be, as it were, always on call to be murderers. But those effects will be there.
I am also not arguing that a human life is worth infinity. This is really confused.
Money means absolutely nothing above some really quite finite number. A 100 million dollars or a billion. Both those numbers are more than I will ever want or need. My wife’s non-raped state is not worth an infinity. I don’t know what that means. I am a specific person, in a specific life, and you can’t give me money to rape her. It’s a kind of category error. I wouldn’t want people who would take those large sums of money to set of a rape of their spouses to be near me, at my workplace, teaching my kids. There is something missing from their brains. They are not quite social mammals anymore. Even if this seems to indicate contradictions.
The consequences of accepting that this could be a moral acts are disastrous for human relations. And sure, there is a lot already in place that is disastrous. This would simply be a further step in a sick direction.
I cannot solve all the problems created by capitalist society and I muddle through it as well as a I can. This does not mean I must accept the next supposedly logical step.
These kinds of thought experiments assume a God’s eye view of consequences. I think sometimes we assume that one part of the evolved human brain is the only one that is necessary: the higher brain, deduction using, verbal part of the brain. But we evolved our brains with a mixture of intuitive and rational, consequentialist and deontological. (not argueing this all falls neatly into brain modules).
There are good reasons to resist what seems logical to you, Carleas. Let’s remember that according to your own argument evolution selected for moralities and emotions. Well, it did this also for rationality, those portions of the brain. And what we are is a mix of ways of determining what to do. Both rationality and emotions are fallible. In fact, according to neuroscience, rationality is fallible without emotions, precisely in functioning with others. People cannot function or make decisions without their emotions. See, Damasio. What you have here is one part of the brain telling another part of the brain, you do not contribute anything. You are irrational. The limbic system is not necessary - since it makes mistakes - and thus all reactions based on this system and all individuals who still give weight to it are irrational/bad.
But I tend to think the way we evolved is more adaptive than the suppressed limbic system version of humanity you are advocating for. The one where decisions are made just by the pfc or whatever.
Like some corporation trying to patent the Neem tree.
Like Monsanto seeing us as purely modular machines that they have the intellect to tweak, since they too denigrate the limbic system when it reacts to their hubris when assuming they can track variables.
Here it’s with money.
There is enough of this irrational idea about what values are and should be all around me.
I actually, now, appreciate getting it presented here, in such a pure and condescening form.