No pay, no spray: Firefighters let home burn

[Asher]

The question of precisely how to define the inputs to the grand utility calculator

Do you say this with a straight face?

[Asher]

is a much subtler question than Asher is capable of understanding at his infant stage of moral understanding

I seriously hope you become more mature in your understanding of the world at some point. It's borderline sociopathic how much you lean on economics to determine morality.

[Kuciwalker]

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.

You are, of course, being Ben-level disingenuous here again. You

1) don't know which parts of the US government use it
2) how effective they are compared to other parts, and how effective they are compared to similar agencies in other countries that don't use that general method
3) whether it this method is used in Canadian regulatory agencies, or those of other countries.

So it's pretty clear that "it's used in the US, therefore it sucks" is terrible logic. It's equally clear that "it's actually used in the field in the US" is evidence that the mechanism isn't completely impractical.

And it's even clearer than either of these that you don't have an answer at all.

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.

Regardless of its relevance to "morality", the question of "what should we do" is very relevant to the issue raised in the OP: you spent half the thread arguing that the firefighters should have put out the fire while KH was arguing that they shouldn't have. And I've disclaimed half a dozen times a desire for numbers, and provided an example of the type of answer I'm looking for - you should be able to provide some very abstract guideline for how you think the government should decide to stop spending more money even if it would save more lives.

If you are really unwilling to answer that question, then answer these:

1) Is there any point short of the actual inability to raise more money that the government should stop allocating more money if it will save more lives? Does that point exist?

2) Do you think that that point is much higher, much lower, or about the same as the current level of spending? ("I don't know" is fine for this.)

And one final point: this question had better not be completely unanswerable, because your parliament decides an answer to that question every year. Saying "I think it's unanswerable" is basically the same as "I think however much Parliament decides to spend on it each year is the right amount".

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.

You are much better than I at avoiding rhetorically uncomfortable questions, of course. But I counterpose - say we replace Steve Jobs with Norman Borlaug. Do you think it would be a worthy tradeoff, the mother and the child for the one scientist?

[Kuciwalker]

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

Quite the opposite, many people's "moral thinking" says that we should let people on life support with no hope of survival pass on. And even if it didn't, I counterpose: what if we took the money spent on keeping that person alive (probably a fair sum) and used it to feed several Africans who would otherwise starve?

[GePap]

I am back - decided to take the easy route on my chore...

Anyways, something I had to get off my back:

What exactly was rational about setting up a system in which this outcome would happen? I have seen people argue against a system which would impose a charge post fire on the individuals, claiming that this would lead to endless free ridding and thus defeat the whole purpose. What is the empirical basis for that statement? Most people follow rules even when they are not necessary, merely because they are rules, and people as hierarchical animals generally do as they are told by higher ups in the chain of command. People argue that a logical individual would figure the odds and thus game the system - newsflash, most people aren't logical. People are more fearful of extraordinary dangers than common ones - which is why they fear an armed stranger more than an armed acquaintance, even though most people murdered knew their killer, or why they fear dying on a plane more than dying in a car, even though you are far more likely to die in a car, even if just on a metric of deaths per miles traveled. If you give people the illusion of control, they feel safer, even if there is no logical basis to that belief. Give most people the belief that paying a nominal fee is all they have to do to avoid the extreme outcome of a bad event and they will pay it.

I would also bring up again the issue of what was the cost to society of this event. The main cost to the City for fire services is the initial cost of equipment (already paid in this case) and the firefighters time. The firefighters came out and then sat around doing nothing (but surely still getting paid) and eventually had to take action, as Boris pointed out, to prevent even greater damage to the neighboring property that the fire eventually spread to. How much then would it have actually cost the City to put out the initial fire? Water isn't that expensive, and this hardly sounded like a five alarm blaze, so the likelihood of harm to the firefighters does not sound to have been significant. So, in order to make the point about this fee, the City allowed thousands of dollars in property damage to one property, a much smaller amount of damage to a second property, and will still have to bear the cost of the firefighters going out and having to take action - I doubt that in the end having had the firefighters actually put out the original blaze would have come out to much more than what the City did have to pay while letting the initial house burn down.

As for the issue of payment, you could create rules that placed a lien on the property of the individuals saved until the debt was paid off, something that would most likely induce payment of the debt, and even if the debt was not paid immediately, the City would still get its money if the owners tried to unload the property. While this might increase the incentive for a protection racket scheme (since this is so much like Crassus' behavior as Alby pointed out), the entire system of fee based fire fighting is an incentive to that kind of behavior, so I doubt it would make abuses that much more likely.

Letting so much be destroyed for the sake of making a moralistic point (which is what "let them suffer" is) isn't very rational in my opinion.

[Al B. Sure!]

I have no idea why this child's uncertain future is being mentioned. Obviously, any consequentialist determination of ethics like Kuci is espousing is limited by knowledge of the future and since that is obviously uncertain, there would be no way of determining the 'rightness' of an action until after it is done and the consequences measured. It's kind of silly because that limitation hamstrings the entire ethical model. Instead, the 'right' alternative is being chosen based on EXPECTED measures of some value (whatever Kuci wants to define economic utility as).

If the expected value of the child's future is that he will be a criminal and murdered in a gang fight at age 17 and his mother will die soon after childbirth, who here would believe that Norman Borlaug's life is more valuable than the lives of these two individuals?

How does an uncertainty of their future change your opinion, if at all?

If it does, what does that say about your ethical system's usefulness?

[GePap]

You are quite correct, and this is why we should not particularly shed tears for the guy in the OP when he's better off than 95% of the human beings on the planet. We have much more urgent priorities.

A society unwilling to prevent harm (and in this statement I am limiting myself to harm as in the loss of limbs, health, or the basics needed to survive, not any amount of harm whatsoever) even to a relatively affluent person is not one likely to take any action to solve the greater issues you pointed out. If people set up a system in which even known individuals are left to suffer, how likely is it that they will attempt to set up systems that benefit utter strangers?

[Kuciwalker]

A society unwilling to prevent harm (and in this statement I am limiting myself to harm as in the loss of limbs, health, or the basics needed to survive, not any amount of harm whatsoever) even to a relatively affluent person is not one likely to take any action to solve the greater issues you pointed out. If people set up a system in which even known individuals are left to suffer, how likely is it that they will attempt to set up systems that benefit utter strangers?

A reasonable point. The response is that systems that never let people suffer harm that could be prevented just end up not working. Sometimes we have to harm to some people to prevent harm to others. Example: prison. Sometimes the cost of preventing harm to everyone is much, much higher than the cost of preventing harm to almost everyone, too.

[KrazyHorse]

xpost, @ gepap

The US consumes ~10tn barrels of oil each year (order of magnitude). Would an entire year's supply of oil be a worthy trade for one life? What about half a year? And so on...

*= 0.001

[giblets]

I have no idea why this child's uncertain future is being mentioned. Obviously, any consequentialist determination of ethics like Kuci is espousing is limited by knowledge of the future and since that is obviously uncertain, there would be no way of determining the 'rightness' of an action until after it is done and the consequences measured. It's kind of silly because that limitation hamstrings the entire ethical model. Instead, the 'right' alternative is being chosen based on EXPECTED measures of some value (whatever Kuci wants to define economic utility as).

If the expected value of the child's future is that he will be a criminal and murdered in a gang fight at age 17 and his mother will die soon after childbirth, who here would believe that Norman Borlaug's life is more valuable than the lives of these two individuals?

Are you sure you understand what "expected value" means? Why would the expected value be a particular outcome?

[Kuciwalker]

What exactly was rational about setting up a system in which this outcome would happen? I have seen people argue against a system which would impose a charge post fire on the individuals, claiming that this would lead to endless free ridding and thus defeat the whole purpose. What is the empirical basis for that statement?

The empirical basis is KH's (and, I believe, some others' who work in the insurance industry) that the rate they would have to charge would be high enough that too many people would be unable or unwilling to pay, and ultimately it would collapse. That said, I don't know if he's right, and if he isn't then the fire department is probably better off offering that payment as well.

And, of course, there's the fact that the first-best solution - levying a $75 tax on all homes - has been explicitly rejected by the county multiple times. We all agree it would be better, but it's not the system that they actually have and that the firefighters are actually working in.

As for the issue of payment, you could create rules that placed a lien on the property of the individuals saved until the debt was paid off, something that would most likely induce payment of the debt, and even if the debt was not paid immediately, the City would still get its money if the owners tried to unload the property.

The evidence against this is the rate of nonpayment on ER bills. If hospitals can't get such liens for saving lives, why would the fire department be able to for saving houses?

[KrazyHorse]

Are you sure you understand what "expected value" means?

I'm also interested in the answer to this question.

I'm most interested in what measure the expectation is taken under...

[KrazyHorse]

The longer I work this job, the more certain I get that probability doesn't exist as a clearly-defined concept.

[Kuciwalker]

*= 0.001

um, yeah

[Kuciwalker]

The longer I work this job, the more certain I get that probability doesn't exist as a clearly-defined concept.

Try defining propensity!