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Originally Posted by Contra_Mundum  I went ahead and voted "no", even knowing all the discussion gone on.
Why?
1) Honesty. I'm inherently conservative, and would likely be one of those who (having advance knowledge of a whopping hazard) would voluntarily avoid it as too risky. This would mean I also understood the word "vote" as a "personal choice" to involve myself or not in the risky behavior. But also, adding information (such as showing actual likelihood of 1 injury per X usages) would affect my perception of the risk, and lower my resistance to personal involvement.
2) The voting thing. The way the question was first framed, I'd have thought I was imposing an unwanted risk on those 75,000 people. However, if we find that the 75,000 are only a fraction of 7,500,000 voluntary participants, then "voting" on voluntary association still seems flawed to me. But if it is simply the affirmation of preexisting property rights, then I would change and vote "yes".
So, at heart, I do not place the "absolute value" of life ahead of "convenience", because the two are not predicable on a linear scale. The relationships between the concepts are multidimensional, and are subject to wild skewing of the data apart from other necessary concepts such as "liberty" and "property"  |
I guess I wasn't thinking in terms of the voting thing but realized that there was some component here that was kind of tricking the mind into first considering against the idea until it weighted all the other factors.
I also wouldn't have phrased the idea simply by calling it a "convenience machine". If the only thing that the machine does is add convenience to an otherwise lazy person's day then any loss of life simply for the sake of convenience is illegitimate.
I started musing on this because I didn't want to get all fuzzy and indeterminate because I know Paul likes to ask a billion questions. I will say that ethics is a matter of prudence or wisdom and that it doesn't always have a quantitative measure.
What I immediately thought of, however, is the Law regarding Oxes and how you've got to destroy your ox if he gores another ox or gores another person and all the liabilities that the Law brings. Thus, from the general equity of the Law, we know that Oxes are not forbidden. It's not as if God is unaware of the dangers of using a large beast on the farm but he doesn't mollycoddle farmers and tell them they're just going to have to do it all by hand because Oxes sometimes kill people.
Oxes, then, aren't just a "convenience device" but they enhance productivity. If someone was only to approach the use of oxes in farming from the danger aspect then you would only focus on the number of children gored by oxes every year and ask the community to vote on whether or not it was worth allowing farmers to use oxes in farming anymore because the cost in human lives is too high. The question about zoning and what you allow in your community is a legitimate use of the vote or the power of the magistrate after all.
Of course, the magistrate would lack wisdom if he only approached the issue like the Sierra Club and saw every machine or animal used for productivity for the harm that it causes unintentionally at times. In fact, that's why the question immediately raises hackles in the poll because it presents the issue the way someone at PETA would like: "Would you torture an animal just for the convenience of a man...." When you peel back the layer a little you find they're talking about animal testing for new drugs to help in medicinal advances.
I guess I'm sensitive to these statistical discussions because my undergrad was in Nuclear Engineering and I've never been more shocked by the blind irrationalism of people when it comes to a technology. One could ask the question: Is it worth killing people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just so we can power a lightbulb?
Of course that question would be a twisted way of discussing Nuclear Fission and whether or not it has any other uses. There is always going to be an unethical use of something like fissionable material but some people live in abject fear of Nuclear Energy and think that reactors are just like bombs and could devestate an entire community if somebody just slips up a little bit. They also think that any radiation is a bad thing.
One of my professors was lecturing to some New York state representatives about radiation one time. Before the presentation, he had purchased some ceramic plates that were very commonly sold on shelves. Most people don't know that the earth has a natural "background radiation" to it but marble and ceramic are typically more radioactive. Harmlessly so but don't tell that to an irrationally frightened person.
Anyhow, he first held up a vile with black "marble like" glass in it explaining that he was holding some sand that had been glassified by a Nuclear Weapons test a number of years ago. He placed a geiger counter next to it and it started clicking and the needle rose to the quarter mark based on the sensitivity set. Harmless but oh so scary to them. He asked if any would like to hold the bottle. They recoiled in horror. Let the weirdo hold that stuff right?
He then picked up one of the plates that a female State representative (a Democrat) had been eating from and held the geiger counter next to it. The counter went crazy and it pegged the needle. Still harmless but try telling that to the politicians in the room. One of them left the room to go throw up.
The point is that these kinds of questions can never be asked in a way that is not colored by someone's perceptions either rational or irrational. It's also not unrealistic to assume that the issue will be brought to a vote. If there is going to be a nuclear power plant built in a neighborhood you can be certain that a vote is going to be held no matter how "socialist" that sounds. The bottom line is that everyone uses electricity and some kind of plant is going to need to be built.
The interesting thing about human beings though is that they'd rather have a coal burning plant with mounds of coal that are eminating tons of Carbon 14 radiation naturally (and harmlessly) but you're always going to get the abject fear of a Nuclear Power plant that radiates virtually none.
From the standpoint of benefit to the environment, safety, and sustainability, the Nuclear Power plant would win out as the choice every single time but people prefer the things they know and want to die by their own hand rather than a mysterious technology. Because of this, they force power plants to do risk calculations to figure out the likelihood that 100,000 people would be killed by their plant. When the calculations are completed, the risk is akin to being killed by a meteor falling to the earth and hitting you but people say: "See, this thing can kill 100,000 people" because such risk calculations are never performed on the other things we use in daily life.