When you bring up things like the law, you’re breaking thought experiments, and dodging the real interesting question someone is trying to ask. The obvious intent of the question is to weigh how much you care about one day old infants vs how much you care about mentally healthy adults. Whoever posed the experiment can clarify and add things like “Assume it’s legal,” or “Assume you won’t get caught.” But if you force them to, you are wasting their time. And especially over an online forum, there is no incentive to, because if they do, you might just respond with other similar dodges such as “I don’t want to kill enough that it becomes a significant fraction of the species,” or “By killing, I would damage my inhibitions against killing babies which I want to preserve,” or “I don’t want to create grieving parents,” or “If people find out someone is killing babies, they will take costly countermeasures to protect their babies, which will cause harm across society.”
If you don’t want to answer without these objections out of the way, bring up the obvious fix to the thought experiment in your first answer, like “Assuming it was legal/ I wouldn’t caught, then I would kill N babies,” or “I wouldn’t kill any babies even if it was legal and I wouldn’t get caught, because I value babies so much,” and then explain the difference which is important to you between babies and chickens, because that’s obviously what Locaha was driving at.
I wouldn’t dismiss those that quickly. The more unrealistic assumptions you make, the less the answer to the dilemma in the thought experiment will be relevant to any decision I’ll ever have to make in the real world.
Yes it’s less relevant to that, but the thought experiment isn’t intended to directly glean information about what you’d do in the real world, it’s supposed to gain information about the processes that decide what you would do in the real world. Once enough of this information is gained, it can be used to predict what you’d do in the real world, and also to identify real-world situations where your behavior is determined by your ignorance of facts in the real world, or otherwise deviating from your goals, and in doing so perhaps change that behavior.
None. You get thrown in jail or put to death for that kind of thing.
See The Least Convenient Possible World, Better Disagreement.
When you bring up things like the law, you’re breaking thought experiments, and dodging the real interesting question someone is trying to ask. The obvious intent of the question is to weigh how much you care about one day old infants vs how much you care about mentally healthy adults. Whoever posed the experiment can clarify and add things like “Assume it’s legal,” or “Assume you won’t get caught.” But if you force them to, you are wasting their time. And especially over an online forum, there is no incentive to, because if they do, you might just respond with other similar dodges such as “I don’t want to kill enough that it becomes a significant fraction of the species,” or “By killing, I would damage my inhibitions against killing babies which I want to preserve,” or “I don’t want to create grieving parents,” or “If people find out someone is killing babies, they will take costly countermeasures to protect their babies, which will cause harm across society.”
If you don’t want to answer without these objections out of the way, bring up the obvious fix to the thought experiment in your first answer, like “Assuming it was legal/ I wouldn’t caught, then I would kill N babies,” or “I wouldn’t kill any babies even if it was legal and I wouldn’t get caught, because I value babies so much,” and then explain the difference which is important to you between babies and chickens, because that’s obviously what Locaha was driving at.
I wouldn’t dismiss those that quickly. The more unrealistic assumptions you make, the less the answer to the dilemma in the thought experiment will be relevant to any decision I’ll ever have to make in the real world.
Yes it’s less relevant to that, but the thought experiment isn’t intended to directly glean information about what you’d do in the real world, it’s supposed to gain information about the processes that decide what you would do in the real world. Once enough of this information is gained, it can be used to predict what you’d do in the real world, and also to identify real-world situations where your behavior is determined by your ignorance of facts in the real world, or otherwise deviating from your goals, and in doing so perhaps change that behavior.