Where there are no special inflection points, a bad repeated action should be a bad individual action, a good repeated action should be a good individual action. Talking about the repeated case changes your intuitions and gets around your scope insensitivity, it doesn’t change the normative shape of the problem (IMHO).
Hmm, I see your point. I can’t help like feeling that there are cases where repetition does matter, though. For instance, assuming for a moment that radical life-extension and the Singularity and all that won’t happen, and assuming that we consider humanity’s continued existence to be a valuable thing—how about the choice of having/not having children? Not having children causes a very small harm to everybody else in the same generation (they’ll have less people supporting them when old). Doesn’t your reasoning imply that every couple should be forced into having children even if they weren’t of the type who’d want that (the “torture” option), to avoid causing a small harm to all the others? This even though society could continue to function without major trouble even if a fraction of the population did choose to remain childfree, for as long as sufficiently many others had enough children?
Where there are no special inflection points, a bad repeated action should be a bad individual action, a good repeated action should be a good individual action. Talking about the repeated case changes your intuitions and gets around your scope insensitivity, it doesn’t change the normative shape of the problem (IMHO).
Hmm, I see your point. I can’t help like feeling that there are cases where repetition does matter, though. For instance, assuming for a moment that radical life-extension and the Singularity and all that won’t happen, and assuming that we consider humanity’s continued existence to be a valuable thing—how about the choice of having/not having children? Not having children causes a very small harm to everybody else in the same generation (they’ll have less people supporting them when old). Doesn’t your reasoning imply that every couple should be forced into having children even if they weren’t of the type who’d want that (the “torture” option), to avoid causing a small harm to all the others? This even though society could continue to function without major trouble even if a fraction of the population did choose to remain childfree, for as long as sufficiently many others had enough children?