Re:The Montreal Protocol was a landmark environmental success
by pjc50 on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @12:17PM
(#15340026)
> We don't care if the energy generation is CO2 producing or not.
Let's play "trolley problem".
There is a switch in your house, as there is in every house in the City Of Hypothesis. It has two settings. "Safe" and "Unsafe". Every day you have to put a dollar in the machine or it trips back to "Unsafe". Every day, if less than (say) 1% of the population put a dollar in the machine, a random person in the city falls down dead. Nobody is quite sure what would happen if we tried to do away with the switches, but everyone thinks it would be terrible.
Do you have a moral obligation to put a dollar in the machine? Sometimes? Ever?
Does it matter how big the percentage is? At 1% I suspect enough people would do it every day that it would never be a problem. What about 10%? 50%?
(People have suggested centrally monitoring the switches, but this has been rejected on grounds of privacy. You don't know who's setting the switch unless you look in their house.)
Let's play "trolley problem".
There is a switch in your house, as there is in every house in the City Of Hypothesis. It has two settings. "Safe" and "Unsafe". Every day you have to put a dollar in the machine or it trips back to "Unsafe". Every day, if less than (say) 1% of the population put a dollar in the machine, a random person in the city falls down dead. Nobody is quite sure what would happen if we tried to do away with the switches, but everyone thinks it would be terrible.
Do you have a moral obligation to put a dollar in the machine? Sometimes? Ever?
Does it matter how big the percentage is? At 1% I suspect enough people would do it every day that it would never be a problem. What about 10%? 50%?
(People have suggested centrally monitoring the switches, but this has been rejected on grounds of privacy. You don't know who's setting the switch unless you look in their house.)