< An Ethical Concept I Can't Grasp

~ns

I've never studied ethics or morals or philosophy or anything like that, so maybe I'm missing something. But it seems easy to me. Just add up the long term net damage.

Save 10 people or 10,000? Well that's easy, 10 is less than 10,000.

Have one person experience the greatest conceivable pain or everybody else stub their toe? Well, I certainly don't remember every time I've stubbed my toe, and it's definitely not traumatic. The "damage evaluation" of that is practically 0, and our sacrifice to the toe-stubbing gods is experiencing something greater than 0.

Of course, there's a limit to how well we can calculate long-term damage. Would you rather give a dollar to a homeless person or save a baby from a burning building? Surprise: the baby grows up to lead the biggest genocide in history. _Those_ sort of ethical quandaries never particularly interested me, we can't know the future that far ahead.

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