Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally justified in killing all children that are found torturing small animals? It would unquestionably save the world the most suffering the only cost would be killing one innocent kid for every 9 who would turn in to a monster. Is that an acceptable loss?
This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
The problem with this scenario is that it vastly oversimplifies utilitarianism, presuming that only deaths matter and that a utilitarian model of ethics would demand the death of the child; an emotionally repugnant act.
In fact, the quantifiable harm from society intentionally killing a child due to its potential risk could be far greater than the eventual potential deaths from letting that child survive. It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
>This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
Eh? He was just bringing up one of the standard counterexamples to the kind of simplistic utilitarianism that Harris is advocating. I don't know what the "your idea kills children argument" is, but he certainly wasn't making any such argument.
>It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
That's the rub. It doesn't require any of those fancy methods to know that it would be wrong to kill the child. Hence the implausibility of full-on utilitarianism as a reasonable moral philosophy.
(Of course, one can reject full-on utilitarianism without denying that the consequences of our actions for human happiness play a very big role in determining whether they're right or wrong.)
This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
The problem with this scenario is that it vastly oversimplifies utilitarianism, presuming that only deaths matter and that a utilitarian model of ethics would demand the death of the child; an emotionally repugnant act.
In fact, the quantifiable harm from society intentionally killing a child due to its potential risk could be far greater than the eventual potential deaths from letting that child survive. It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.