Or is it? What if you care more about other people’s lives in proportion to their comfort than you care about your own life in proportion to your own comfort?
This is interesting, because I think we actually do this in the US. Life and death fits into our binary way of thinking. Comfort doesn’t; and so we don’t quantify and consider it except in the very specific circumstances of our own lives.
I wonder if Asian countries may think in less binary terms, and thus place more value on comfort and other non-binary measures; resulting in Western nations perceiving them as placing a low value on life.
My guess is that Americans don’t consider it immoral to inconvenience people while they do consider it immoral to kill people and thus the latter triggers a special schema. Killing yourself doesn’t trigger that schema except for suicide, but normally neither does imposing small risks on others. Sensitivity to unnaturally small probabilities screws the system up.
This is interesting, because I think we actually do this in the US. Life and death fits into our binary way of thinking. Comfort doesn’t; and so we don’t quantify and consider it except in the very specific circumstances of our own lives.
I wonder if Asian countries may think in less binary terms, and thus place more value on comfort and other non-binary measures; resulting in Western nations perceiving them as placing a low value on life.
My guess is that Americans don’t consider it immoral to inconvenience people while they do consider it immoral to kill people and thus the latter triggers a special schema. Killing yourself doesn’t trigger that schema except for suicide, but normally neither does imposing small risks on others. Sensitivity to unnaturally small probabilities screws the system up.