Difference between revisions of "De Minimis Moral Wrongs"

Latest revision as of 18:28, 25 May 2021

The belief that there are de minimus moral wrongs that don't deserve consideration is complicated, because any wrong no matter how small can be multiplied by frequency of occurrence to become larger than those that would be considered which can result in an inconsistency.

Only if you believe there's an acceptable level of moral risk. The problem there is that the risk to benefit ratio does not bear this out except at very small levels which represent unintentional consumption or consumption in rare emergency situations where the level of benefit changes.

Every few years you end up stranded somewhere, out of gas, snowed in somewhere, and there are only non-vegan products available to eat -- the benefit of not suffering uncertain amounts of hunger may outweigh the small risk of doing this several times in your life. A planned consumption pattern (like a monthly burger) doesn't provide that kind of disproportionate benefit because you could have eaten something else and were not at risk of hunger. A consumption pattern based on special occasions, like a yearly thanksgiving with family, more conceivably might because the benefits are larger than that monthly burger schedule and the risks are smaller. There's no reason to believe it would cross a threshold into good, but the action itself on net may be less wrong so actually different from the weekly burger. Moral action has to do with that cost vs. benefit analysis, and you can't just proportionately decrease both and claim it's OK, because as long as they're in the same proportion it remains the same kind of wrong, just a little less of it. Committing less murder is less wrong in magnitude than committing more murder, but at no point does it become right unless the cost to benefit ratio changes.

It's likely you aren't understanding any of that, so I'll try to state it more plainly:

To be consistent in moral reasoning, you could set a threshold of moral wrongness you would accept, but that threshold would be based not simply on the net amount of harm from any single proposition, but on the harm to benefit ratio that typifies the propositions you find acceptable.

E.g. anything that is a wash is fine, and you'll accept anything with a harm of no greater than 1% higher than the benefit. You could claim that difference is de minimis. But you'd need to be consistent in that.

A proposition that would save 99 lives but kill 100 people would be acceptable to you. Likewise, a proposition that would save 99 million lives but kill 100 million people would be acceptable to you. The RATIO remains the same. If this is the heuristic you're using, that's how you make it consistent.

You can't dismiss the smaller and object to the latter.