I’ve never seen any proof of this. It’s also rather easy to approximate to acceptable levels of certainty:
I’ve loaded a pistol, read a manual on pistol operation that I purchased in a big bookstore that lots of people recommend, made sure myself that the pistol was in working order according to what I learned in that manual, and now I’m pointing that pistol at a glass bottle according to the instructions in the manual, and I start pulling the trigger. I expect that soon I will have to use this pistol to defend the lives of many people.
I’m rather confident that it is, in the above scenario, instrumentally useful towards bringing about worldstates where I successfully protect lives to practice rather than not practice, since the result will depend on my skills. However, you’d call this “morally neutral”, since there’s no moral good being made by the shooting of glass bottles in itself, and it isn’t exactly praiseworthy.
However, its expected consequence is that once I later decide to take an action to save lives, I will be more likely to succeed. Whether this practice is praiseworthy or not is irrelevant to me. It increases the chances of saving lives, therefore it is morally good, for me. This is according to a model of which the accuracy can be evaluated or at least estimated. And given the probability of the model’s accuracy, there is a tractable probability of lives saved.
I’m having a hard time seeing what else could be missing.
I mean there is no runnable algorithm, I can’t see how “approximations” could work because of divergences. Any life you save could be the future killer of 10 people one of whom is the future saviour of a 100 people, one of whom is the future killer of 1000 people. Well, I do see how approximations could work: deontologically.
I’ve never seen any proof of this. It’s also rather easy to approximate to acceptable levels of certainty:
I’ve loaded a pistol, read a manual on pistol operation that I purchased in a big bookstore that lots of people recommend, made sure myself that the pistol was in working order according to what I learned in that manual, and now I’m pointing that pistol at a glass bottle according to the instructions in the manual, and I start pulling the trigger. I expect that soon I will have to use this pistol to defend the lives of many people.
I’m rather confident that it is, in the above scenario, instrumentally useful towards bringing about worldstates where I successfully protect lives to practice rather than not practice, since the result will depend on my skills. However, you’d call this “morally neutral”, since there’s no moral good being made by the shooting of glass bottles in itself, and it isn’t exactly praiseworthy.
However, its expected consequence is that once I later decide to take an action to save lives, I will be more likely to succeed. Whether this practice is praiseworthy or not is irrelevant to me. It increases the chances of saving lives, therefore it is morally good, for me. This is according to a model of which the accuracy can be evaluated or at least estimated. And given the probability of the model’s accuracy, there is a tractable probability of lives saved.
I’m having a hard time seeing what else could be missing.
I mean there is no runnable algorithm, I can’t see how “approximations” could work because of divergences. Any life you save could be the future killer of 10 people one of whom is the future saviour of a 100 people, one of whom is the future killer of 1000 people. Well, I do see how approximations could work: deontologically.