I would endorse choosing a broken leg for one person if that guaranteed that nobody in the world had two broken legs, certainly. This seems to have drifted rather far from the original problem statement.
I would also vaccinate a few billion people to avoid a few hundred deaths/year, if the vaccination caused no negative consequences beyond mild discomfort (e.g., no chance of a fatal allergic reaction to the vaccine, no chance of someone starving to death for lack of the resources that went towards vaccination, etc).
I’m not sure I would vaccinate a few billion people to avoid a dozen deaths though… maybe, maybe not. I suspect it depends on how much I value the people involved.
I probably wouldn’t vaccinate a few billion people to avoid a .000001 chance of someone dying. Though if I assume that people normally live a few million years instead of a few dozen, I might change my mind. I’m not sure though… it’s hard to estimate with real numbers in such an implausible scenario; my intuitions about real scenarios (with opportunity costs, knock-on effects, etc.) keep interfering.
Which doesn’t change my belief that scale matters. Breaking one person’s leg is preferable to breaking two people’s legs. Breaking both of one person’s legs is preferable to breaking one of a million people’s legs.
I would endorse choosing a broken leg for one person if that guaranteed that nobody in the world had two broken legs, certainly. This seems to have drifted rather far from the original problem statement.
I would also vaccinate a few billion people to avoid a few hundred deaths/year, if the vaccination caused no negative consequences beyond mild discomfort (e.g., no chance of a fatal allergic reaction to the vaccine, no chance of someone starving to death for lack of the resources that went towards vaccination, etc).
I’m not sure I would vaccinate a few billion people to avoid a dozen deaths though… maybe, maybe not. I suspect it depends on how much I value the people involved.
I probably wouldn’t vaccinate a few billion people to avoid a .000001 chance of someone dying. Though if I assume that people normally live a few million years instead of a few dozen, I might change my mind. I’m not sure though… it’s hard to estimate with real numbers in such an implausible scenario; my intuitions about real scenarios (with opportunity costs, knock-on effects, etc.) keep interfering.
Which doesn’t change my belief that scale matters. Breaking one person’s leg is preferable to breaking two people’s legs. Breaking both of one person’s legs is preferable to breaking one of a million people’s legs.