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(it's not worth noting but i'm going to do so anyway: we know what kind of guy he is before we know what kind of girl she is, but no one even points that out. we focus on her because she's indecisive?)
The million-dollar question is interesting *because it forces her to really decide* what kind of girl she is. The question actually isn't very interesting at all, because the it suggests there is still a choice to be made. In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price. The price may be a million dollars, saving a hundred people's lives, getting revenge…
Maybe. But in practice, it might be a simplifying assumption that either you or them are "deontologists" in the context of the negotiations because there is nothing you have to offer that has any chance of budging their position.
In other words, she may be that kind of girl for a million dollars, but you don't have a million dollars.
The million-dollar question is interesting *because it forces her to really decide* what kind of girl she is. The question actually isn't very interesting at all, because the it suggests there is still a choice to be made. In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price. The price may be a million dollars, saving a hundred people's lives, getting revenge…
You say:
In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price.
And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made.
I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of [volunteer] fellow students (both male and female) with interesting results. I pitched the question exactly as outlined here (a girlfriend asked the male members). The aim was to force this self-realisation of their "price" and subsequently we "bartered" for the real price they would accept.
I realised a couple of things; firstly in realistic terms 1 million pounds is generally a lot lower than the "realistic price". When I followed up with the question "would you really sleep with me for a million" the answer was usually "no". The reason the girl says "maybe" in the initial instance is because she doesn't believe that I have a million pounds to offer.
When I substituted £100,000 for a million the response rate tipped much harder towards "unlikely". To further test this theory I asked one of my more well of friends (who looked stereotypically rich) to conduct a similar survey - but this time to show them a cheque made of for £1 Million at the same time. Again the responses tended towards "unlikely" (and there was, actually, a larger amount of disgust at the idea).
Once I got past this stage we bartered on what the "price" might be; invariably money was quickly removed from the table. Favours were preferred; for example attending as a date to a wedding was one price. When I forced conversations back to money the price went a lot higher. £10 Million was the minimum (this is possibly because 1 Million is not considered so much any more, I don't know). My well off friend had even more dramatic rises; one girl requested £5 Million a year for the next three years.
More sex was generally offered in return for more complex rewards; for example in the above example (£5,000,0000/yr for 3 yrs) it was hashed out that a number of sexual encounters and "weekend breaks" were on the cards.
For the men things were a lot simpler; they balked at any ides of being paid full stop. Almost to the man they refused payment and offered to sleep with the girl anyway. Out of interest I got a much plainer girl to ask the same question; there was still a general refusal to take money (although one or two "accepted" £100, preferring it to 1 Million) but also several outright refusals. With the plainer girl men offered to sleep with her (for no money), for my more attractive friend they offered to sleep with her and take her out to dinner.
In fact dinner featured a lot in negotiations; there was actually a general aversion amongst the men (particularly, for some interesting reason, among the "jock" types) to simply having sex, a big majority preferred to offer a more complete "package". I have a partial theory that some were sidestepping the issue of money by proposing that the girl paid for dinner (or whatever date was agreed).
This was conducted on a group of about 100 people I randomly grabbed outside our student union over a couple of afternoons :) there isn't a lot of structure to what we did, we just followed our noses. But I think there was some interesting stuff we discovered.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could cure a lot of cancer for $1 trillion. By turning the offer down, are you sure you're not "influencing" someone else's mortality? (That's a rhetorical question, of course. I don't have an answer.)
So, I did say "any amount of money", not any amount of lives. I do think it's morally okay to trade one life for many (definitely ambiguous in terms of amounts because I don't feel like trying to figure that one out). In fact, I don't think you could justify war without also justifying this moral decision so I don't think it's very rare even if people don't often think about it.
So you're a Spock, not a Kirk.
Is it just me or is there someone going on a downvoting spree here? I've seen at least 8 comments at 0, and I only checked the thread twice. It's kind of weird, since there's quite a high karma threshold for downvoting.
You guys really don't see how misogynistic these articles are, do you?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For an individual you can make those proclamations, but individuals don't operate in a vacuum. There is such a thing as morals and utility in a society. There is value in participating in a society. Therefor, there is value is having individual morals and calculating the utility of actions at least on a societal level.
Right—that's, effectively, the difference between "cultural meta-ethics" and "moral relativism." What I'm saying is that, on an individual level, ethics is a problem that will be completely solved by neuropsychology: once we find out our particular utility function, we just have obey it optimally. Thus, Ethics as a field of endeavor should drop that kind of individual-level moral quandary, and focus on inter-societal…
Is this function computable?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And I've always ignored that sort of question—there's no such thing as morals or utility, really, only what animals are programmed to think in their animal brains. Robotic arms don't care when other robotic arms die—and neither do we. Paperclips don't care about increasing in number, even if someone is trying to make it so. What we have to ask is not "what does the universe say about right and wrong?" (because the an…
I came to the same conclusion a while ago. I like to phrase it as: morality is a function of evolution.
A thought: if someone offered me a trillion dollars to kill a person, I would get trillion-dollar loan, invent brain-uploading and emulation technology with it, copy the person into the machine, and then kill them. To put that more simply: past a certain point, the idea of marginal value in a cost/benefit analysis breaks down, because the benefit "changes the game." (That is, creates a discontinuity in the valuation…
If you're going to invent scenarios, you should invent realistic one's. For example, I'm fairly confident that you couldn't solve the problem of brain duplication for a trillion dollars. The NIH budget in 2010 was ~32 billion which isn't close to a trillion, but it's a lot closer to a trillion than we are to duplicating a brain. On a philosophical level though, a lot of people would probably disagree with your propos…
The million-dollar question is interesting *because it forces her to really decide* what kind of girl she is. The question actually isn't very interesting at all, because the it suggests there is still a choice to be made. In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price. The price may be a million dollars, saving a hundred people's lives, getting revenge…
Agreed. Actually the question does still hold interest IMO because it forces her to acknowledge to herself that she may have a price. You say: In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price. And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made. I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They traded freedom of speech for ~1.3 billion people for a decidedly limited amount of money. To me that's a moral calculation and they chose money.
In what way did they trade freedom of speech? Did people in China have more freedom of speech before they came to China? Could they have forced the chinese government to limit censoring? Of course not... The only thing they could do and did is give another reliable search engine that censored less than their competitors...