RE: Is 10,000 people suffering identically equal bad as one of them?
December 17, 2010 at 8:00 pm
(November 5, 2010 at 12:51 am)theVOID Wrote: No it doesn't Jason, human instinct can be used to justify belief in all kinds of falsities. We use our instincts at best as working assumptions until methods can be established, it just so happens that our instincts lead to pseudo methodologies in every day life with experiential patterns. However, lending favor to one argument or the other based on instinct when evaluating the thing in question isn't rational.
We may initially act instinctively, but only until we have enough data for our pseudo models, then our actions are very much informed by a set of beliefs we have about the situation relative to the outcome we desire, so instincts take a back seat to calculated responses.
You're right, of course. I guess my problem with this philosophical question is that of most philosophical questions, it's about defining a concept. All these questions do is highlight our own imperfect labeling of the world.
The short answer is that there's no human benefit to equate suffering to a single mathematical unit. There's a more natural benefit to equate suffering to zero.
