Headaches

Tyler asks, following philosopher Alastair Norcross, whether it could ever satisfy a cost-benefit test for one person to die a terrible and tortured death in order to alleviate the headaches of billions of others by one second.  Tyler begs off with "a mushy mish-mash of philosophic pluralism, quasi-lexical values" and moral conceit.  I will have none of this.  The answer, is yes.

The clearest reason to think that we should trade a terrible and tortured death of one in order to alleviate the headaches of billions is that we do this everyday.   Coal miners, for example, risk their lives to heat our homes and to generate the electricity that drives this blog.  We know that some of them will die horrible deaths but few of us think that we are morally required to give up electricity.

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