No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn

[Asher]

No, my question is "how much money should we spend on it?" I don't want you to give a very detailed answer at all, just a vague idea of how you think the government should figure out when to stop spending more.

My answer to the question would be, roughly, "they should try to figure out a way of valuing lives in terms of dollars, and then stop spending more when the value of the additional lives they think will be saved is less than the value of the extra money they would spend". But that is evil economics-thinking that might ask the government to cruelly not save a person that they could, so I'm guessing you'll dismiss it out of hand.

By the way, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess CMU never made you take an ethics course?

[Asher]

So? If our goal is, roughly, the greatest good for the greatest number, I don't see how you reason from that to "we shouldn't bother with doing good for people who can't give us anything in return".

Of course you don't.

[Kuciwalker]

Your answer is simultaneously stupid, irrelevant, and amusing.

Amusingly enough, it's exactly the methodology used when trying to answer this sort of question in the real world (with which you are not, apparently, familiar). e.g. many the US safety regulators explicitly try to estimate the value of a life in order to compare to the estimated cost of regulations. IIRC the EPA values one at $8m. Whereas in Asher-land presumably the answer is "however much is feasible" - you haven't answered the question yet.

[giblets]

So? If our goal is, roughly, the greatest good for the greatest number, I don't see how you reason from that to "we shouldn't bother with doing good for people who can't give us anything in return".

Well, why devote resources to feeding and housing senior citizens if those resources could instead be invested in, say, more education so people can produce more stuff? Then there's more good.

[Asher]

Amusingly enough, it's exactly the methodology used when trying to answer this sort of question in the real world (with which you are not, apparently, familiar). e.g. many the US safety regulators explicitly try to estimate the value of a life in order to compare to the estimated cost of regulations. IIRC the EPA values one at $8m. Whereas in Asher-land presumably the answer is "however much is feasible" - you haven't answered the question yet.

So your answer is because the US government does it, that makes it right? Because the government computes morality in terms of monetary value, that's what people need to do also?

The world is more than economics, Kuci. One day you will understand that.

You have to save one of two people: an illegal Mexican immigrant who is pregnant, or Steve Jobs. Who do you choose? Using your heuristic, the obvious answer is Steve Jobs.

Most people would choose the pregnant woman.

[DaShi]

Well, why devote resources to feeding and housing senior citizens if those resources could instead be invested in, say, more education so people can produce more stuff? Then there's more good.

Or better healthcare so that they can also produce more.

[Kuciwalker]

Well, why devote resources to feeding and housing senior citizens if those resources could instead be invested in, say, more education so people can produce more stuff? Then there's more good.

Thank you for articulating the precise tradeoff that every single society in the world faces, and thank you for demonstrating how economics is essential to most large-scale moral questions. The answer is, of course, that we need to get some idea of the relative good of each of those things, and allocate resources in proportion.

[Asher]

Or better healthcare so that they can also produce more.

The thing that REALLY bugs me with the attitude of people against public healthcare is they seem to assume it's AGAINST good economic principles. It's clearly a far more cost effective system than the US'. The access to preventive medicine for everyone saves billions and billions of dollars alone, IN ADDITION to saving lives. People who are ALIVE tend to be contributing members of society. Not only does the society spend less on health care, they tend to live longer and as a result "produce" more economically also.

It's really a no brainer.

[Asher]

Thank you for articulating the precise tradeoff that every single society in the world faces, and thank you for demonstrating how economics is essential to most large-scale moral questions. The answer is, of course, that we need to get some idea of the relative good of each of those things, and allocate resources in proportion.

Economics is NOT essential to the question "should we kill retired people"? The answer is NO, regardless of economics.



If you do answer that question with economics, you are a terrible person.

[Kuciwalker]

So your answer is because the US government does it, that makes it right? Because the government computes morality in terms of monetary value, that's what people need to do also?

You are being as bad or worse than Ben when you engage in this kind of dishonesty.

No, it's not right because the US government does it. The fact that the method is used with some degree of success in the real world is just evidence in support of the idea that it can be a useful method and isn't just abstract filosofizing. The fact that you dismissed it out of hand is evidence that you don't really know what you're talking about.

The world is more than economics, Kuci. One day you will understand that.

And yet you still haven't been able to even begin to answer the question of "how much money should we spend on healthcare". You haven't been able to even describe where you would start.

You have to save one of two people: an illegal Mexican immigrant who is pregnant, or Steve Jobs. Who do you choose? Using your heuristic, the obvious answer is Steve Jobs.

I disagree that it's obvious; the glib answer is that the world would be better off without Steven Jobs, and the serious answer is that it's not clear that his future economic contribution to society is more valuable than the life and contributions of the child (presumably, the value of Jobs' life and the mother's are roughly balanced). Momentarily replace Jobs with Norman Borlaug - it's very plausible that it would have been worth sacrificing millions of lives to save his, given that he's accredited with saving billions.

[giblets]

Thank you for articulating the precise tradeoff that every single society in the world faces, and thank you for demonstrating how economics is essential to most large-scale moral questions. The answer is, of course, that we need to get some idea of the relative good of each of those things, and allocate resources in proportion.

Is it average happiness or total units of happiness you're trying to maximize? Or something else?

[Asher]

You are being as bad or worse than Ben when you engage in this kind of dishonesty.

No, it's not right because the US government does it. The fact that the method is used with some degree of success in the real world is just evidence in support of the idea that it can be a useful method and isn't just abstract filosofizing. The fact that you dismissed it out of hand is evidence that you don't really know what you're talking about.

No, it's evidence that I've a more well-rounded viewpoint than you do. I disagree that it's being used to any degree of success "in the real world". The US is the perfect example of fiscal mismanagement -- the richest country in the world with terrible living standards compared to most Western countries. I think it's a condemnation for the heuristics the US government uses on determining the "right" actions.

And yet you still haven't been able to even begin to answer the question of "how much money should we spend on healthcare". You haven't been able to even describe where you would start.

Because it's irrelevant to the statement of morality. I also have not studied the specifics of health care costs, so it would waste my time to even invent numbers. You do know this, I hope, and you're just trying to save face here by continuing to ask unanswerable questions...or you are dumber than I ever imagined.

I disagree that it's obvious; the glib answer is that the world would be better off without Steven Jobs, and the serious answer is that it's not clear that his future economic contribution to society is more valuable than the life and contributions of the child (presumably, the value of Jobs' life and the mother's are roughly balanced).

Don't **** around with me. You and I both know the odds of child of an illegal Mexican woman having more impact on this world (economically or otherwise) to Steve Jobs is pretty much non-existent. You are avoiding the question, and not doing a very good job at it.

That whole point illustrates why morality is separate from economics. Economics is just a tool used to IMPLEMENT many moral values in practical ways in the real world. Morality is a concept on a level above the practical implementations. Something you still do not understand.

[Asher]

And why do we value the life of children so much? Because it's future potential -- we hope for the kid to grow up to be a healthy and productive member of society.

Why do Americans not apply this same logic to public healthcare? Why do you deny access to millions of children to preventive medicine so they can grow up to be healthy and productive members of society?

[Kuciwalker]

Is it average happiness or total units of happiness you're trying to maximize? Or something else?

The question of precisely how to define the inputs to the grand utility calculator, as it were, is a much subtler question than Asher is capable of understanding at his infant stage of moral understanding. I'm willing to admit that I don't have a precise answer to the question; as it turns out, the question of how we should find it (equivalently, how we should judge between two different proposed measures) is fairly interesting. Interesting enough to deserve another thread, if you actually want to talk about it.

[Proteus_MST]

We could have a better thought experiment...
take people lying in Coma without any hope of revival...

Economic thinking would tell us to kill them outright.
Why?
They only waste resources (manpower to care for them, probably also money for the machines that keep them alive).
It also wastes time resources of relatives who come to visit them...time that they might spend on more productive tasks.
There might be a miraculous recovery, but the chances of this happening are so low that it definitely wouldn´t justify the resources that are wasted in keeping them alive.

If we kill them outright, however, their relatives will (after a short period of mourning) be free to be more productive again, and the medical resources (manpower, money, devices) that would have been spent into keeping these comatose patients alive are now again free to be spent into other patients that have a better chance of recovery.
So, from an economic standpoint, killing said comatose patients would be the right thing to do.

Moral thinking on the other hand tells us to keep them alive