You're very alone in this line of thought.
If you save 100000 people _by murdering_ 5 people, it's unfortunate and a hard choice, but at least arguably good. Most people will be ok with this (this is pretty much how the world turns to some degree)
But if you save 100000 lives, then murder 5 victims. And those 5 victims were just murdered to murder tham, no one being saved was resting on it.
Most basically ethical people would consider that indefensible.
Maybe you're confusing this situation with the former, where lives are treated as fungible to save great numbers.
That can be tricky ethically, but at least the greater good is on your side. Here you're treating lives as fungible for the sake of it.
It's not really an admirable thing to lack the ability to see why that's wrong, so I implore you to dig a little deeper.
This isn't sacrificing people to help more people, it's helping people then sacrificing some people for fun.
If you talk someone down from a ledge do you now go around thinking you get to murder someone and it cancels out?
> If it was just marketing and looking cool that would be one thing. But it's also quite hard mentally to pay attention when everything is on auto. And it's a much nicer driving experience that's inherently dangerous no matter what the marketing says. So I don't think it's possible to have the convenience without the danger. You'd have to disable AP
This is literally what every comment in this entire thread by me has said. Maybe you finally get it.
Car without convenience features saves lives doesn't kill.
Car with them saves same lives and kills.
I basically agree with everything you said about saving some people and murdering others.
But "saving less people" is a totally different situation. If I donate some money to charity, and I'm asked to donate more money, it's okay for me to say no.
So the question is whether these features fall under "saving some people and killing others" or if they fall under "saving less people".
You believe it's the former, and I believe it's the latter.
Remember that even pure safety features are imperfect and they are subject to the butterfly effect. Anything you change about a car design will cause some shift in who dies while driving that car. You have to determine if there are really two separate risk groups, one sacrificed for the other, or if it's all really one risk group.
As a thought experiment, imagine we made a car that was all-around much safer, and then we let 14 year olds drive it. Well that actually happens, with mini-cars that have strict speed limits. (Usually they're legally not cars.) We could only allow normal licensed drivers to use them, and they'd be very safe! But then, purely for convenience, we let younger teenagers use them. Is that a moral abomination? Some of them are going to die. But I think it fits into the normal risk of driving, and as long as a 14 year old in one of those is safer than a normal driver in a normal car, I'm satisfied.
There are separate sets of features that you can't just glue together, they're not even offered together, you have to pay separately for the second set.
One set saves people, one set kills people. The set that kills people, doesn't save people.
You think it's ok to sell the set that kills people because they have a set thats save people.
I know it's not ok to sell features that kill people and don't save anyone. It'd be one thing if it could save people, but it doesn't. The other set does that.
This set just kills people. Doesn't save anyone.
Stop selling it.
Simple as that.
Only if all three of the following are true:
A) they both affect the same risk factor (Just because they're "separate" features and sold separately doesn't make this false. And the way the autopilot is so intertwined with the others, I don't think it's really fair to say they are truly separate features. They build upon each other.)
B) it's impossible to run the dangerous one without the safety one
C) running both is safer than running neither
If you want to make cars safer, then you should be insisting that all cars be safer. The car that kills people because it lacks any of these electronics is just as bad.
To elaborate on (A), with these particular features I don't see the car as causing distinct people to die compared to who it's saving. It's not trading between different groups of people in any meaningful way. It's just a single number of how many people die per mile. With other features you could get into that moral dilemma. With these features I don't think it does.
I don't see it that way.
It's a completely random set of people that die either way. And all the deaths basically boil down to "driving is dangerous". It's not one set of people being saved and a different one dying. It's all one group, so only the total number matters.
> It's not safer! Because that sentence is about the convenience features are not the safety features!
Your sentence was about that. My counterpoint was about more than that.
I'll reword my point without the word safer: If the risk reduction from the safety features is bigger than the risk increase from the convenience features, I think things are acceptable.
> The safety features save lives. The convenience features, by definition, cannot save lives that the safety ones didn't.
I wasn't trying to say the convenience features saved lives.
> No one is saying the active safety features should save more lives, they're saying the convenience features need to stop tricking people into driving distracted.
I'm the one saying that safety features need to save a certain number of lives. And that number is "enough to make up for the risk caused by the convenience features".
> Because those people sometimes die in accidents that wouldn't have happened if they didn't have them.
Eh, someone that's distracted could easily die in similar accident in a dumb car. To me it's all risk vs. risk. Nobody is getting murdered by the car as some kind of sick trade-off. It's not a trolley problem. It's just undoing some of the safety. But undoing the safety is acceptable, just like a car that had none of those safety features (and none of those convenience features) would also be acceptable.
> The safety features would still save the same number of people, just no one would die needless deaths in the name of marketing and looking cool.
If it was just marketing and looking cool that would be one thing. But it's also quite hard mentally to pay attention when everything is on auto. And it's a much nicer driving experience that's inherently dangerous no matter what the marketing says. So I don't think it's possible to have the convenience without the danger. You'd have to disable AP.