Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
It comes down to this: if you are in a situation where you must decide on who lives and why dies, and you have two groups and can only help one of them, by which standards do you decide?
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That is
another 'either one scenario, or the other' case.
You should choose the lesser. The lesser would be least bad.
If
both scenarios have already taken place, interdependently of each other,
then it is not an 'either-or' case and there is no longer anyone for whom
either scenario was any better or worse than the other.
I will try to give another example:
Lets say two farmers have 10 goats each. Additionally, there are two herds
of wild goats; each heard comprising of 10 goats.
The area floods.
One farm loses 8 goats, one 4 goats.
One heard of wild goats loses 8 goats, the other 4.
For the goats on the farm, it is clear that we can say that the loss of 8 is
worse because the farmer has lost more. The farmer is the point of view from
which one of the losses is the greater.
However, the wild goats have no farmer.
None of the surviving wild goats is any worse off than any other surviving wild
goats and none of the dead wild goats is any worse off than any of the other
dead wild goats. Both goat-losses are bad because each dead goat has lost
out, but there is no goat, dead or alive, for which the events in either group
was better or worse.
No dead goat in the group that lost 8 goats has lost any more than any given
dead goat in the group that lost 4.
Likewise, no surviving goat in the group that lost 8 goats has lost any more
than any given surviving goat in the group that lost 4.
If we postulate the existence of an observing goat belonging to neither herd,
it has not lost or gain anything at all from either event.