Also, dangerous sweatshops in poor countries that employ eight-year-olds become praiseworthy if they provide the children with better outcomes than the children would otherwise receive.
This is actually a serious, mainstream policy argument that I’ve heard several times. It goes like “If you ban sweatshops, sweatshop workers won’t have better jobs; they’ll just revert to subsistence farming or starve to death as urban homeless”. I’m not getting into whether it’s a correct analysis (and it probably depends on where and how exactly ‘sweatshops’ are ‘banned’), but my point is that it wouldn’t work quite well as an “outrageous” example.
Interesting observation: You talked about that in terms the effects of banning sweatshops, rather than talking about it in terms of the effects of opening them. It’s of course the exact same action and the same result in every way- deontological as well as consequentialist- but it changes from “causing people to work in horrible sweatshop conditions” to “leaving people to starve to death as urban homeless”, so it switches around the “killing vs. allowing to die” burden.
(I’m not complaining, FYI, I think it’s actually an excellent technique. Although maybe it would be better if we came up with language to list two alternatives neutrally with no burden of action.)
This is actually a serious, mainstream policy argument that I’ve heard several times. It goes like “If you ban sweatshops, sweatshop workers won’t have better jobs; they’ll just revert to subsistence farming or starve to death as urban homeless”. I’m not getting into whether it’s a correct analysis (and it probably depends on where and how exactly ‘sweatshops’ are ‘banned’), but my point is that it wouldn’t work quite well as an “outrageous” example.
That’s why I wrote “horribly ‘seeming’” and not just horribly.
Interesting observation: You talked about that in terms the effects of banning sweatshops, rather than talking about it in terms of the effects of opening them. It’s of course the exact same action and the same result in every way- deontological as well as consequentialist- but it changes from “causing people to work in horrible sweatshop conditions” to “leaving people to starve to death as urban homeless”, so it switches around the “killing vs. allowing to die” burden. (I’m not complaining, FYI, I think it’s actually an excellent technique. Although maybe it would be better if we came up with language to list two alternatives neutrally with no burden of action.)