Philosophical Vegan Forum

I don't think this an ignorable objection to pushing the fat guy.

So, Your reason not to kill the fat man is that it could result in people feeling unsafe? This 'safeness' being more important than the lives you could possibly save. Am I mistaken? What's your stance on the so called fundamental rights?

DarlBundren wrote:So, Your reason not to kill the fat man is that it could result in people feeling unsafe? This 'safeness' being more important than the lives you could possibly save. Am I mistaken? What's your stance on the so called fundamental rights?

Its that the amount of people feeling unsafe would be a far larger amount that the people who would lose there lives. It must also be acknowledged that the feeling of un-safeness is not a minor one. A lesser evil you could say, but in a quantity that makes it large enough to make it noticeable. Remember that this happens in other situations to, like the organ transplant version. so this fear would be constant, and world wide, and not a minor fear.

Rights do not apply to consequentialist, they are a deontological term.

bobo0100 wrote:This is another great non-book on the topic, but the whole lecture series is like 18 lectures long
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY

That is amazing, thanks for sharing it!

DarlBundren wrote: Are you interested in philosophy? Do you think that those ideas are covered in Singer's book? Thanks.

Yes, and no. Singer misses a lot of things; he's just the best popular/mainstream voice I know of. Although Sam Harris is also very good. You may want to read The Moral Landscape, or see one of his talks on that.

DarlBundren wrote: So, Your reason not to kill the fat man is that it could result in people feeling unsafe? This 'safeness' being more important than the lives you could possibly save. Am I mistaken? What's your stance on the so called fundamental rights?

We can value the social construct of "rights" for its practical value and consequences. E.g. sometimes there are good reasons to put limits on what the government can do to prevent abuses of power.

It doesn't mean it's going to be right every time, but that a small wrong from a rigid rule may prevent a greater wrong down the line.

So, in some sense, the right thing to do might be for the scientist to kill that person to cure the cancer, and then for the scientist to go to jail for that as a matter of social necessity. It gets messy when we start looking at larger social systems.