No, except by interpreting the words “morally equivalent” in that sentence in a way that nobody does, including Peter Singer. Most people, including Peter Singer, think of a pair of good shoes (or perhaps the comparison was to an expensive suit, it doesn’t matter) as something nice to have, and the death of a child as a tragedy. These two values are not being equated. Singer is drawing attention to the causal connection between spending your money on the first and not spending it on the second. This makes buying the shoes a very bad thing to do: its value is that of (a nice thing) - (a really good thing); saving the child has the value (a really good thing) - (a nice thing).
The only symmetry here is that of “equal and opposite”.
The claimed moral equivalence is between buying shoes and killing—not saving—a child. It’s also claimed equivalence between actions, not between values.
A lot of people around here see little difference between actively murdering someone and standing by while someone is killed while we could easily save them. This runs contrary to the general societal views that say it’s much worse to kill someone by your own hand than to let them die without interfering. Or even if you interfere, but your interference is sufficiently removed from the actual death.
For instance, what do you think George Bush Sr’s worst action was? A war? No; he enacted an embargo against Iraq that extended over a decade and restricted basic medical supplies from going into the country. The infant moratily rate jumped up to 25% during that period, and other people didn’t fare much better. And yet few people would think an embargo makes Bush more evil than the killers at Columbine.
This is utterly bizarre on many levels, but I’m grateful too—I can avoid thinking of myself as a bad person for not donating any appreciable amount of money to charity, when I could easily pay to cure a thousand people of malaria per year.
When you ask how bad an action is, you can mean (at least) two different things.
How much harm does it do?
How strongly does it indicate that the person who did it is likely to do other bad things in future?
Killing someone in person is psychologically harder for normal decent people than letting them die, especially if the victim is a stranger far away, and even more so if there isn’t some specific person who’s dying. So actually killing someone is “worse”, if by that you mean that it gives a stronger indication of being callous or malicious or something, even if there’s no difference in harm done.
In some contexts this sort of character evaluation really is what you care about. If you want to know whether someone’s going to be safe and enjoyable company if you have a drink with them, you probably do prefer someone who’d put in place an embargo that kills millions rather than someone who would shoot dozens of schoolchildren.
That’s perfectly consistent with (1) saying that in terms of actual harm done spending money on yourself rather than giving it to effective charities is as bad as killing people, and (2) attempting to choose one’s own actions on the basis of harm done rather than evidence of character.
How strongly does it indicate that the person who did it is likely to do other bad things in future?
But this recurses until all the leaf nodes are “how much harm does it do?” so it’s exactly equivalent to how much harm we expect this person to inflict over the course of their lives.
Killing someone in person is psychologically harder for normal decent people than letting them die, especially if the victim is a stranger far away, and even more so if there isn’t some specific person who’s dying. So actually killing someone is “worse”, if by that you mean that it gives a stronger indication of being callous or malicious or something, even if there’s no difference in harm done.
By the same token, it’s easier to kill people far away and indirectly than up close and personal, so someone using indirect means and killing lots of people will continue to have an easy time killing more people indirectly. So this doesn’t change the analysis that the embargo was ten thousand times worse than the school shooting.
But this recurses [...] so it’s exactly equivalent to how much harm we expect [...]
For an idealized consequentialist, yes. However, most of us find that our moral intuitions are not those of an idealized consequentialist. (They might be some sort of evolution-computed approximation to something slightly resembling idealized consequentialism.)
So this doesn’t change the analysis that the embargo was ten thousand times worse [...]
That depends on the opportunities the person in question has to engage in similar indirectly harmful behaviour. GHWB is no longer in a position to cause millions of deaths by putting embargoes in place, after all.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying any of this in order to deny (1) that the embargo was a more harmful action than the Columbine massacre, or (2) that the sort of consequentialism frequently advocated (or assumed) on LW leads to the conclusion that the embargo was a more harmful action than the Columbine massacre. (It isn’t perfectly clear to me whether you think 1, or think 2-but-not-1 and are using this partly as an argument against full-on consequentialism.)
But if the question is who is more evil*, GHWB or the Columbine killers?”, the answer depends on what you mean by “evil” and most people most of the time don’t mean “causing harm”; they mean something they probably couldn’t express in words but that probably ends up being close to “having personality traits that in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness correlate with being dangerous to be closely involved with”—which would include, e.g., a tendency to respond to (real or imagined) slights with extreme violence, but probably wouldn’t include a tendency to callousness when dealing with the lives of strangers thousands of miles away.
Reminds me of the time the Texas state legislature forgot that ‘similar to’ and ‘identical to’ are reflexive.
I’m somewhat persuaded by arguments that choices not made, which have consequences, like X preventably dying, can have moral costs.
Not INFINITELY EXPLODING costs, which is what you need in order to experience the full brunt of responsibility of “We are the last two people alive, and you’re dying right in front of me, and I could help you, but I’m not going to.” when deciding to buy shoes or not, when there are 7 billion of us, and you’re actually dying over there, and someone closer to you is not helping you.
Reminds me of the time the Texas state legislature forgot that ‘similar to’ and ‘identical to’ are reflexive.
In case anyone else was curious about this, here’s a quote:
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, a Houston lawyer and Democratic candidate for attorney general, says that a 22-word clause in a 2005 constitutional amendment designed to ban gay marriages erroneously endangers the legal status of all marriages in the state.
The amendment, approved by the Legislature and overwhelmingly ratified by voters, declares that “marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman.” But the troublemaking phrase, as Radnofsky sees it, is Subsection B, which declares:
“This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.”
No, except by interpreting the words “morally equivalent” in that sentence in a way that nobody does, including Peter Singer. Most people, including Peter Singer, think of a pair of good shoes (or perhaps the comparison was to an expensive suit, it doesn’t matter) as something nice to have, and the death of a child as a tragedy. These two values are not being equated. Singer is drawing attention to the causal connection between spending your money on the first and not spending it on the second. This makes buying the shoes a very bad thing to do: its value is that of (a nice thing) - (a really good thing); saving the child has the value (a really good thing) - (a nice thing).
The only symmetry here is that of “equal and opposite”.
Did anyone actually need that spelled out?
These verbal contortions do not look convincing.
The claimed moral equivalence is between buying shoes and killing—not saving—a child. It’s also claimed equivalence between actions, not between values.
A lot of people around here see little difference between actively murdering someone and standing by while someone is killed while we could easily save them. This runs contrary to the general societal views that say it’s much worse to kill someone by your own hand than to let them die without interfering. Or even if you interfere, but your interference is sufficiently removed from the actual death.
For instance, what do you think George Bush Sr’s worst action was? A war? No; he enacted an embargo against Iraq that extended over a decade and restricted basic medical supplies from going into the country. The infant moratily rate jumped up to 25% during that period, and other people didn’t fare much better. And yet few people would think an embargo makes Bush more evil than the killers at Columbine.
This is utterly bizarre on many levels, but I’m grateful too—I can avoid thinking of myself as a bad person for not donating any appreciable amount of money to charity, when I could easily pay to cure a thousand people of malaria per year.
When you ask how bad an action is, you can mean (at least) two different things.
How much harm does it do?
How strongly does it indicate that the person who did it is likely to do other bad things in future?
Killing someone in person is psychologically harder for normal decent people than letting them die, especially if the victim is a stranger far away, and even more so if there isn’t some specific person who’s dying. So actually killing someone is “worse”, if by that you mean that it gives a stronger indication of being callous or malicious or something, even if there’s no difference in harm done.
In some contexts this sort of character evaluation really is what you care about. If you want to know whether someone’s going to be safe and enjoyable company if you have a drink with them, you probably do prefer someone who’d put in place an embargo that kills millions rather than someone who would shoot dozens of schoolchildren.
That’s perfectly consistent with (1) saying that in terms of actual harm done spending money on yourself rather than giving it to effective charities is as bad as killing people, and (2) attempting to choose one’s own actions on the basis of harm done rather than evidence of character.
But this recurses until all the leaf nodes are “how much harm does it do?” so it’s exactly equivalent to how much harm we expect this person to inflict over the course of their lives.
By the same token, it’s easier to kill people far away and indirectly than up close and personal, so someone using indirect means and killing lots of people will continue to have an easy time killing more people indirectly. So this doesn’t change the analysis that the embargo was ten thousand times worse than the school shooting.
For an idealized consequentialist, yes. However, most of us find that our moral intuitions are not those of an idealized consequentialist. (They might be some sort of evolution-computed approximation to something slightly resembling idealized consequentialism.)
That depends on the opportunities the person in question has to engage in similar indirectly harmful behaviour. GHWB is no longer in a position to cause millions of deaths by putting embargoes in place, after all.
For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not saying any of this in order to deny (1) that the embargo was a more harmful action than the Columbine massacre, or (2) that the sort of consequentialism frequently advocated (or assumed) on LW leads to the conclusion that the embargo was a more harmful action than the Columbine massacre. (It isn’t perfectly clear to me whether you think 1, or think 2-but-not-1 and are using this partly as an argument against full-on consequentialism.)
But if the question is who is more evil*, GHWB or the Columbine killers?”, the answer depends on what you mean by “evil” and most people most of the time don’t mean “causing harm”; they mean something they probably couldn’t express in words but that probably ends up being close to “having personality traits that in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness correlate with being dangerous to be closely involved with”—which would include, e.g., a tendency to respond to (real or imagined) slights with extreme violence, but probably wouldn’t include a tendency to callousness when dealing with the lives of strangers thousands of miles away.
Reminds me of the time the Texas state legislature forgot that ‘similar to’ and ‘identical to’ are reflexive.
I’m somewhat persuaded by arguments that choices not made, which have consequences, like X preventably dying, can have moral costs.
Not INFINITELY EXPLODING costs, which is what you need in order to experience the full brunt of responsibility of “We are the last two people alive, and you’re dying right in front of me, and I could help you, but I’m not going to.” when deciding to buy shoes or not, when there are 7 billion of us, and you’re actually dying over there, and someone closer to you is not helping you.
In case anyone else was curious about this, here’s a quote:
Oops.