Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) While I'm not sure that I agree entirely with Ayn Rand on the subject, she addressed what she called "the ethics of emergencies" in terms of their distorting influence. (TK
Almost all of political ethics is in effect defined by edge cases. There aren't really any interesting ethical dilemmas on the playground at my four-year-old's daycare center. The central mistake of anarcholibertarianism is believing that sandbox morality completely generalizes to the grown-up world of how humans behave in groups: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem> free riders, the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons> tragedy of the commons, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_externality> negative externalities, the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma> Prisoner's dilemma, the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox> Liberal paradox, the <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox> Allais paradox, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_biases> bounded rationality in general, and the possibility of <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor-Hicks_efficiency> Kaldor-Hicks-efficient social policies -- and these are just the problems that obtain when nobody is trying to hurt anybody else. TK) Oh, by the way, the individual at the end of Track A is your wife. (TK The other ten people probably include several wives, too. The whole point of ethical philosophy is to get people beyond the default morality that tells us to engage in any action -- including cooperative ones like reciprocal altruism -- that maximizes the gratification of instincts designed to maximize our reproductive inclusive fitness. Anyway, been there, answered that. I forgive you for not noticing me repeat this to Susan on Saturday: SH) Would you kill your mother to save ten strangers? (SH BH) If her death were the only thing that could save them, then I probably would -- and she'd probably insist that I do so. Would your mother let ten strangers die just to save herself? (BH Predictably, Susan was mum about her Mum. Note that I'm not saying my own personal interests would never be a part of my calculus, as I also told Susan that I wouldn't save a million and one innocents by killing a million other innocents. However, that I don't put a zero value on having clean hands does not justify Susan apparently putting infinite value on having clean hands. (I can only say "apparently", because Susan is, when it suits her, anti-intellectual enough that she would rule out as "stupid" any thought experiment in which her dirty hands would, say, save the Earth's biosphere from an existential risk. Ah, the irony of an anarchist refusing to engage in thought experiments... )
