Directly killing someone versus indirectly killing someone

[NickNack]

@Jebus
But maybe someone who caused harm without knowing they are causing harm doesn't need to make up for it? Or would you disagree?

[Jamie in Chile]

@Jamie in Chile
I guess when I really think about it, humans kind of suck just in general for the wellbeing of others vegan or non vegan. And what would you say to someone who said they would kill any person to create more positive net wellbeing overall? I think it would be stupid for anyone to do so because jail, but I don't know if I could call it immoral if they are killing any person (vegan or non vegan) for the sake of raising wellbeing. What are your other arguments for why its immoral?

I am not sure it really would create more net wellbeing overall when you consider the wider effects on society of living in a world where any such person could be a target.

Also I am not fully utilitarian I see myself as partly deontological. So I don't think any action is justified by a net wellbeing increase.

My argument here might be expressed by saying that deontological arguments have some value, and so do utilitarian arguments and that if we combine and weight them both we get to something like:

I can agree with killing 1 innocent person to save a million but not killing 1 innocent person to save 2.

[brimstoneSalad]

Here is a question for everyone to ponder:
Which of the following individuals would you kill if you knew that no one would ever find out who did the killing: If the answer is not all, then please justify why.

A person you know will kill you if you don't kill him/her first

All other things being equal I would, but out of self defense; that doesn't equate to it being the moral thing to do. In fact it could very easily be the wrong things to do. The only reason it might be a safe moral assumption is that you're removing a murderer from the population and protecting others as well, not just trading a life for a life out of self interest (which would be the same as killing an innocent person for an organ you need to live).

A person who will set off a nuclear bomb on NYC before the end of the day.
A serial killer who averages one victim per week.

Yes, and that assumes that killing the average person is doing more harm than good, so killing somebody who is killing many average people is preventing that harm.
I think you'd have to explain why you'd kill all of them given that this is the average person:

A meat eater whose daily habits cause the death and suffering of 100 animals per year.

The best defense of the value of human lives despite current harm is the value of society and it's capital. Getting society to improve is far better than destroying it, and we have been and continue to be on a track of progressive self improvement as a society. The only members who are truly harmful to that are not the average people, but the laggards who intentionally fight progress. I.E. not the non-vegans, but the anti-vegans.

[NickNack]

@Jamie in Chile
The question becomes when should you use deontology and when should you use consequentialism? Can you give an argument in support of threshold deontology (I assume that's what you adhere to but correct me if I'm wrong) or does it only come down to personal preference in the end? Because the way Is see it, you and others are more likely to be harmed if net well being isn't always increased to the most maximal point possible. But I'll explain my moral system. I only have one deontological rule.

The only rule is that whatever someone truly believes to be moral obligations they must follow, or else they are being immoral, but if moral obligations exist but they are not following them because they don't believe they are moral obligations, then they are not being immoral.

This is the only rule now that I think about it. I'm just trying to convince you what to believe when I say that you should follow a more consequentialist approach but in the end, I guess I technically follow deontology. But only the kind with this one rule.

[Jamie in Chile]

I don't see it as being "when should you use deontology and when should you use consequentialism" but rather that, at least in theory, my ethical judgements are based on always blending/considering the two.

I never heard of threshold deontology but I just googled it and it seems to be a correct description of what I adhere to so thank you that is helpful to know.

I'd rather not give an argument in support of threshold deontology since I've only just heard of it I'm obviously not the best person to defend or debate it. What I can say is that trying to argue deontology vs utilitarianism in a robust way is not something I feel capable of doing.

For some world real arguments I can likely justify things by pointing out that my hypothetical response actually satisfies both utilitarian and deontological ethics. However if you try to keep pushing me back to the fundamental reasons behind some of my arguments using hypothetical thought experiments unlikely in the real world, I would likely eventually have to fall back on things like "well, this is just my instinct" or "but surely killing is just wrong" rather than some brilliantly thought out argument that would impress a philosophy major.

Where I do have a strong knowledge is on the topic of climate change and how other issues like psychology, economics and ethics relate to climate change. The more this becomes a debate purely about philosophy rather than climate change, the less likely I'll have anything of value to contribute, and the more likely it makes sense for me to defer to others with better knowledge.

[NickNack]

Is there a moral difference between killing someone by stabbing them versus killing someone through climate change? Are we no better then a murderer when we drive our cars or use technology that contributes to global warming?

I think there is a moral difference because in the case of stabbing there is a clearer knowledge about what you are doing and a more direct cause and effect. So in my view a person that kills someone through stabbing has usually committed a morally worse action.

However, killing someone through global warming is also questionable.

I have done some calculations and I reckon 10,000 tonnes of CO2e into the atmosphere kills 1 human from climate change. That is a rough estimate, it could be plausibly be 10 times better or worse. I can share my workings if you like.

Now if one life will be lost for every 10,000 tonnes emitted then we can easily calculate say 30,000 tonnes will kill 3 people. But when we emit 1 tonne we can then calculate we have killed 0.0001 people. But that is a nonsense - what does that mean?

One way to think about it is that one death is 30 years of life lost. 30 because I assume that the average person killed by climate change would have lived to 70, and their average age of death is 40. I´m assuming here that climate change kills people of all ages indiscriminately, but older people have slightly higher risk on average.

So now we have a figure of 10,000 tonnes = 30 years of life lost. From this we can calculate, due to climate change, how many minutes, hours or years of life you have likely taken away from someone with any activity, and I think this is a better, more robust way of thinking about it than getting tied up with thoughts like "Is contributing 1/1,000,000 to a deer's death the same moral equivalent as pinching the deer?".

Here are some calculations I did:

Eating a meat burger = 5 minutes of life lost
Driving 6 miles in a petrol car = 3 minutes of life lost
Eating a normal amount of meat for the rest of your life, and you live 40 years more = 2 months of life lost
Long haul flight = a few days of life lost
Delaying getting an electric car until 2026 rather than 2021 = 10 days of life lost
An entire lifetime´s emissions = 2 years of life lost
The difference between not making any effort whatsoever to reduce your carbon footprint for your whole life vs making a big effort to live sustainably = 1 year of life

So far as stated this considers only the effect on human life lost, not human suffering or animal death or suffering. Getting into even more speculative and uncertain territory, I´ll now try to come up with the total negative impact.

Usually famines, disasters,disease etc cause multiple injuries/illnesses for every one life lost. It seems reasonable to suggest that the overall negative effect of multiple serious injuries, emotional stress etc is similar to one death, so I think we can double the negative impact.

Climate change will likely cause a larger number of animals to suffer and die than humans, but we can also argue that 1 human life is worth more than 1 animal life, and that humans may be capable of more acute suffering than animals. If these two effects cancel out then we can say that animal suffering and human suffering are similar, and double the negative impact again.

The numbers only include climate change, but not pollution. Pollution causes a similar number of deaths to climate change (again I can share sources for this if needed) so that is another 2x for cars and meat (maybe not for planes - not sure pollution half way across the ocean matters as much).

We now have 8x the negative impact (because I doubled the negative impact three times) being the total estimated impact. (Maybe lower, perhaps 4x for planes.)

So for example I stated that driving 6 miles in a petrol car causes 3 minutes of (human) life lost. We can now think of the total impact as being about 8x that. Equivalent to perhaps 24 minutes of human life lost or passed in severe suffering.

And then remember the margin for error is that it could be 10 times higher or 10 times less. So the range is about 2 minutes to 4 hours of life taken away or made very unpleasant if you drive 6 miles in a petrol car.

Can you provide your sources please? And I think a lot of your evaluations on increasing the value of negative utility may be too arbitrary. And how did you get 10 times higher or 10 times less?

[Jamie in Chile]

This is the first of three posts today answering your request for sources and covering how I got to "10 times higher or 10 times less?". Although some of it is my own calculation using sources rather than I have taken the numbers directly from sources.

Sources for "10,000 tonnes of CO2e into the atmosphere kills 1 human from climate change"

First you have to work out the total carbon footprint of humanity per year, then the number of deaths per year, then you can divide one by the other to get tonnes of CO2 per death.

Total Carbon Footprint of Humanity
I have taken this from the book How Bad Are Bananas (2020) by Mike Berners Lee which has 56 billion t CO2e, citing the Global Carbon Project.

I cross checked this was roughly correct using the following other IPCC sources with similar values:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads ... UNEP-1.pdf 53.5 GtCO2e in 2017

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads ... ow_Res.pdf has about 40 t CO2 for 2020 but looks like only CO2, so 55 for CO2e perhaps.

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads ... 5_full.pdf has 49 t CO2e for 2010, so 2020 might be 55.

Number of Deaths Per Year from climate change
Firstly, the way it works is not that emissions in 2020 cause deaths in 2020. Some CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades, some for 100 years, some for centuries. A better way to think about it is that 2020´s emissions cause 1/100th of the deaths for each year for the next 100 years so you need to look at the average deaths rate annually over the coming decades. In 100 years, the CO2 will likely either have fallen out of the atmosphere or been sucked out. 2020´s emissions are likely to be about a hundredth of the total that humanity will ever emit.

According to the DARA intergovernmental body (in the report Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet), the number of people that died because of climate change was 400,000 in 2010, mostly from hunger and disease. Two other reports in the last few years (one was a UN report) came to very similar conclusions with deaths from climate change in the low to mid hundreds of thousands.

Now, given that climate change is strongly predicted to get worse over time, an extremely optimistic case would be that the death rate throughout the century stays at 400,000 per year. That assumes that we adapt with technology, rapidly cut emissions, and reality comes on the kinder end of the range of scientific predictions.

The worse case scenario is 50 million deaths per year which would be 5 billion over a 100 year period. It can´t be much worse than that, because after 5 billion die, there won´t be many left to die. In this scenario, we don´t cut emissions, feedback loops cut in and we end up with 4C within this century. Tropical countries become inhabitable and in large parts of the Earth it is not possible to grow food. Civilization collapses, meaning the Earth can´t support its current population.

So the range is 400,000 - 50 million dead per year.

Now clearly both numbers are extreme estimates, and obviously the most likely number lies towards the middle. Climate change response is non-linear, and it makes sense to use logarithmic mid points when the margin for error is in the orders of magnitude, so we can take 5 million as the most likely. And a range of 10x higher or 10x lower.

So we have 5 million deaths per 56 billion tonnes CO2e - that´s about 1 deaths per 10,000 tonnes CO2e.

[Jamie in Chile]

This is the second of three posts today answering your request for sources.

I have stated above that our annual emissions will eventually cause between 400,000 and 50 million human deaths per year

I also stated that “Pollution causes a similar number of deaths to climate change”

Sources for pollution deaths being similar to above estimates:

The World Health Organization estimates that 4.6 million people die each year from causes directly attributable to air pollution. Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/air_pollution.htm

The Global Burden of Disease study estimates that 3.4 million premature deaths were attributed to outdoor air pollution in 2017.1 Source: https://ourworldindata.org/outdoor-air-pollution

United Nations says air pollution kills 7 million people annually. Source: https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/sgsm19607.doc.htm

[Jamie in Chile]

This is the last of three posts today answering your request for sources.

Regarding the comment about my judgements being "arbitrary" the question here is whether we want to have a rough, subjective estimate or none at all, since precise estimates aren´t possible.

When I say that "driving 6 miles in a petrol car causes 3 minutes of (human) life lost. We can now think of the total impact as being about 8x that. Equivalent to perhaps 24 minutes of human life lost or passed in severe suffering" it should hopefully be clear that this is a very, very rough estimate.

The idea is to understand that the amount of life lost or suffering caused by driving a petrol car 6 miles is likely in the minutes, but could be in the seconds or hours. And then consider this before we use the car. It´s meant to make us think and reflect about those activities. Whatever subjective, or even "arbitrary" judgments you make, whatever values you insert in the calculation, you are never going to come up with a value as low as 1 second or as high as 1 week´s suffering/life lost from driving 6 miles in a petrol car. So at least you have a very, very rough sense as to how bad it is.

You can use the conversion factor 10,000 tonnes = 1 death as mentioned above = 30 years of life lost. That works out to a certain number of tonnes lost per year, month etc as shown below. I then calculate the tonnes of CO2e for each activity and from there the human life loss for each one.

Years Lost Per t CO2e 0.003
Months Lost per t C02e 0.03
Weeks Lost per t CO2e 0.14
Days Lost per t CO2e 0.98
Hours Lost per t CO2e 23
Minutes Lost per t CO2e 1409

For the specific activities:

Activity, then footprint in tonnes below, then source below that in brackets
4-ounce cheeseburger
0.0032
(Source: the book How Bad Are Bananas by Mike Berners Lee)

Drive to the local shop
0.002
(You can use https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx to calculate the amount of climate change caused by using fuel for a given distance and given miles per gallon)

Eating Meat Rest of Life
60
(1.5 tonnes per year x 40 years (here the assumption being the average person has lived half their life and has 40 years left to live), meat being 1.5 tonnes per year is average of many sources I´ve seen over the years easy to google articles on this)

Fly Long Haul (Chile-UK)
4
(I use atmosfair as my main source to calculate flights as well as carbonfootprint.com, climate care, How Bad Are Bananas) Note: The actual CO2 on a UK-Chile flight is only about 1-2 tonnes. The other 2-3 tonnes is the equivalent global warming impact from all the many other climate-change causing effects of aviation, of which the largest is contrails. I usually take the CO2 from atmosfair, and then use a 2.5x multiplier for total global warming impact. The 2.5x is an average of various sources I´ve seen such as the ones above.

Not Getting Electric Car Until 2026
10
(assumes 2 tonnes per year saved for each of 5 years if you get an electric car in 2021, the calculation of 2 tonnes per year saved by getting an electric car would be a separate post in its own right, so I´ll exclude that as this is getting long)

A Lifetime's Emissions
630
(I assumed 7 tonnes per year for 90 years (life expectancy seems a bit optimistic now I think about it!), 7 tonnes is the current average for a person on this planet according to World Bank per capita statistics, you can also work this out by dividing the total emissions I mentioned above of 56 billion tonnes CO2 per year by the world´s population)

[NickNack]

@Jamie in Chile
Ok, even though its a rough estimate its the best we can do to our knowledge and at the end of the day that's all we can do. And when we add starvation and disease into the mix, and its not looking very justifiable for us to contribute to climate change. And you have not even began to cover how many animals die, that would be a big mess. What about using a computer or electronic device? Do you have anything on how much that contributes to climate change? Like charging a phone or computer.