Facewon wrote:To backtrack a second. Apart from it being questionable that you're right that redistribution couldn't or wouldn't result from "halving our access to painkillers," which is a strange phrase for it by the way, doing a Harris with your hypotheticals here ignores the issues around pricing, patents and general supply control that goes on with medicines, in particular. Its not a simple case of hoarding. Your example doesn't demonstrate much. Why did you use the term access, btw? For well proven drugs what do you think is holding back access? Either in the west or in poorer countries?
Face wrote:
“But why was the trolley left unsupervised?”
“Who tied those people to the tracks in the first place?”
“The real issue here is railway health and safety legislation”.
JRPC wrote:
You’re missing the point, and I have to say as for someone who claims an interest in philosophy you seem suspiciously unfamiliar it’s foundational building block of the thought experiment
The point is that I could give you a thousand examples, theoretical and real world, where inequality is reduced producing worse outcomes without any silver lining.
I feel like I should spell out more clearly my objections to Stophs list that so many seem so impressed by and feel like I’m ignoring.
“Inequality causes X” with X being some bad thing. This is not[/size] an argument.
JRPC wrote:You’re missing the point, and I have to say as for someone who claims an interest in philosophy you seem suspiciously unfamiliar it’s foundational building block of the thought experiment.
JRPC wrote:Face wrote:“But why was the trolley left unsupervised?”
“Who tied those people to the tracks in the first place?”
“The real issue here is railway health and safety legislation”.
It doesn't matter.
If poor people in America today are better off than poor people were during the Great Depression, then poverty isn’t a moral outrage. Arguments of this variety are deployed throughout Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which downplays the complaints of leftists by showing that human beings now are better off than they were during, say, the Holocaust or the Great Irish Famine.
We can see why arguments of this type fail. If I say that sweatshops are “good,” and my evidence is that when sweatshops were introduced into a country, the wages of those who went to work in the sweatshops were higher than the country’s average wages, I may sound persuasive. But if the factories I am talking about are crowded, unsafe, abusive places in which people exhaust themselves, destroy their bodies, and have little control over their work, it’s perverse to describe this situation as good merely because it is marginally better than what came before. We have to have a notion of “good” independent of mere “better” and “worse.” Otherwise, if “better” means “good,” then a kidnapper who said they would either kill one of my children or both of them would be offering me a “good” choice. Instead, they are offering me two horrific options, one of which I may be stuck with, but which is only “better” in the narrowest sense of the word.
If poor people in America today are better off than poor people were during the Great Depression, then poverty isn’t a moral outrage. Arguments of this variety are deployed throughout Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which downplays the complaints of leftists by showing that human beings now are better off than they were during, say, the Holocaust or the Great Irish Famine.
LolOtherwise, if “better” means “good,” then a kidnapper who said they would either kill one of my children or both of them would be offering me a “good” choice. Instead, they are offering me two horrific options, one of which I may be stuck with, but which is only “better” in the narrowest sense of the word.
So what are we all thinking the odds are that JRPC actually read the article? Or just jumped straight on the quote?JRPC wrote:
...Deliberate or just ignorant? I could easily imagine he hasn't actually read the book from that, but I'm still going with the former. Gotta get those clicks!
D-
I'd recommend actually reading the book.
...
djchump wrote:So what are we all thinking the odds are that JRPC actually read the article? Or just jumped straight on the quote?JRPC wrote:
...Deliberate or just ignorant? I could easily imagine he hasn't actually read the book from that, but I'm still going with the former. Gotta get those clicks!
D-
I'd recommend actually reading the book.
...
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