Suppose that two dozen bees sting a human, and the human dies of anaphylaxis. Is the majority of the tragedy in this scenario the deaths of the bees?
FYI, this isn’t a good characterization of the view that I’m sympathetic to here.
The moral relevance of pain and the moral relevance of death are importantly different. The badness of pain is very simple, and doesn’t have to have have much relationship to higher-order functions relating to planning, goal-tracking, or narrativizing, or relationships with others. The badness of death is tied up in all that.
I could totally believe that, at reflective equilibrium, I’ll think that if I were to amputate the limb of a bee without anesthetic, the resulting pain is morally equivalent to that of amputating a human limb without anesthetic. But I would be surprised if I come to think that it’s equally bad for a human to die and a bee to die.
FYI, this isn’t a good characterization of the view that I’m sympathetic to here.
The moral relevance of pain and the moral relevance of death are importantly different. The badness of pain is very simple, and doesn’t have to have have much relationship to higher-order functions relating to planning, goal-tracking, or narrativizing, or relationships with others. The badness of death is tied up in all that.
I could totally believe that, at reflective equilibrium, I’ll think that if I were to amputate the limb of a bee without anesthetic, the resulting pain is morally equivalent to that of amputating a human limb without anesthetic. But I would be surprised if I come to think that it’s equally bad for a human to die and a bee to die.
Expand? This seems like a crucial and very false part of this argument.