RE: Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds
May 8, 2021 at 2:46 pm
(This post was last modified: May 8, 2021 at 2:49 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
That would seem to be the thing that's different between a necessary and unnecessary evil as I conceive of them, yes. Necessity - both are evil.
I think I dropped a line about this one a few responses back - so long as we have to stick a kid with a needle to vaccinate them - that's what we're going to do. In either case, the killing of a person or the vaccinating of a child - if we constrain the field to nothing but bad things - it may be the case that some of those bad things leads to better outcomes than others but that doesn't suggest that we don't recognize or work to eliminate the bad in that thing as we see it.
Vaccinating kids is immensely instructive in this regard. Sure, we see the necessity or the practicality - and we want that enough to allay our concerns about whatever pain or fear it causes beyond some point. We tell our kids "hey, it's just one little prick". We expect the provider to be skilled and careful. If we could deliver the medication another way - we would. Yes, pricking kids with needles is pricking kids with needles in any situation. There can be all kinds of diffeences between the two situations, but the similarity there is the pricking of the kid with the needle - which is something that concerns us, which we take steps to address.
(my kids are giant assholes about this, btw, they're all afraid of needles but they just love sticking each other with pushpins - wtf is that?)
I think I dropped a line about this one a few responses back - so long as we have to stick a kid with a needle to vaccinate them - that's what we're going to do. In either case, the killing of a person or the vaccinating of a child - if we constrain the field to nothing but bad things - it may be the case that some of those bad things leads to better outcomes than others but that doesn't suggest that we don't recognize or work to eliminate the bad in that thing as we see it.
Vaccinating kids is immensely instructive in this regard. Sure, we see the necessity or the practicality - and we want that enough to allay our concerns about whatever pain or fear it causes beyond some point. We tell our kids "hey, it's just one little prick". We expect the provider to be skilled and careful. If we could deliver the medication another way - we would. Yes, pricking kids with needles is pricking kids with needles in any situation. There can be all kinds of diffeences between the two situations, but the similarity there is the pricking of the kid with the needle - which is something that concerns us, which we take steps to address.
(my kids are giant assholes about this, btw, they're all afraid of needles but they just love sticking each other with pushpins - wtf is that?)
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