A-Series-Of-Tubes wrote:("might be pregnant, therefore should be treated as pregnant" is actually less valid than "might be pregnant, but women usually aren't pregnant, therefore should be treated as Not Pregnant")
"Should" and "can" do not have anything like the same meaning. Stop using strawmen.
"can be pregnant, therefore must have an expected lives greater than 1"
Are you just rolling out a sophist argument, to try to get a win against the only one willing to contest your long-winded posts? Any woman comes ahead of any man, because of potential people, what is that but sophistry?
When people are using precise terms, don't ignore that precision. Nor should you ignore the purposes of arguments you are given. You continue to fail to find faults with the demonstration for the former reason and persist in ignoring that what has always been presented as a demonstration is a demonstration because of the latter. See, for example:
I think this will be my last post in the discussion. I do not appreciate having moral reasoning mocked with logic. If you get logic, but you don't get moral philosophy, that's your problem.
Not that I agree with this assessment of your contributions here. Your "moral objections" do not engage with the moral premises of the Captain and instead consist of unconvincing attempts to poke holes in the Captain's logic (as presented by me).
To be clear, the Captain's moral premises are (1) that utilitarianism is an appropriate moral framework and (2) that the "good" a utilitarian in this exercise should be maximising is expected lives. Nor do you bother to consider the philosophical/moral failure in equating "more lives are embodied in this vessel" with "this life is more valuable than that life", which is something you did.
Wrong. You need to think more, and type less.
No, not at all. Your unwillingness to type is precisely the problem. Not all words carry the same meaning. Multi-Life Combos aren't the same as "two lives". "We must act to ensure the growth of the human population" does not have the same meaning, nothing like the same meaning, as "we want to save as many lives as possible for as long as possible" (nor any of the ways I possibly corrupted that original sentiment myself in saying the way to measure that is with expected lives).
Do not act surprised when different moral values lead logically to different conclusions.
You are so confused. We're putting people in lifeboats. What might happen in the future is irrelevant. Wrong.
Yes, that is exactly my point. As I have said repeatedly including in the exact sentence you're quoting!
"What could happen in the future isn't relevant" = "What might happen in the future is irrelevant"
Please consider this. If you can't explain your thinking properly to me, what chance do you have of explaining it to a crowd of frightened people?
It requires no explanation whatsoever and I'm quite at a loss why people think it does. All that matters is the direction: "You, here!" Only the crew need to know what they're doing and they don't need to understand it themselves. You do not stop to explain why you collect people in a fire drill "here" rather than "there". You just tell them where to go and... they do it.
If you need to explain the situation... "we're maximising expected lives". That's a simple moral explanation. "Do you really want to argue about why this procedure is logically sound, or do you want to get as many people on the boats as fast as possible according to our training manual?"
You cannot do moral reasoning purely with logic.
As I have pointed out several times, it's you who is ignoring the moral reasoning present in favour of substituting whatever you'd rather talk about yourself.
Still not clear I'm afraid. You've given up that "possibility of getting pregnant in the future" stuff
That was never in there.
and you're back to the vanilla "chance of being pregnant right now" stuff?
I have not moved from it. For example:
The key ideas there are (1) probability, (2) given and (3) present. As I have pointed out several times, you insist on confusing:
Forsher wrote: we want to save as many lives as possible for as long as possible.
with
A-Series-Of-Tubes wrote:every female who might give birth some day, has infinitely more value than any male who might play his part in raising a child to breeding age.
These ideas do not look like the same thing, they do not reduce to the same thing and they certainly do not imply the same things. It is a strawman and it is something you inserted into this conversation, not me.
Nor is it the case that:
We're evaluating the probability that such a woman will carry two children to term, who both survive birth given that woman's present characteristics
as the same meaning as:
We're evaluating the probability that such a woman will carry two children to term, who both survive birth
These look similar but the absent "given that woman's present characteristics" in the second case radically shifts the meaning.
Conditional probability/reasoning is not easy. It trips a lot of people up. All you've got to remember, though, is that if you see a condition (as signposted by, say, "given") you cannot act like the condition does not exist. In some cases it might actually mean nothing in particular ("if you are alive, do not proceed down this tunnel" has functionally the same meaning as "do not proceed down this tunnel") but you've actually got to stop and reason it through to reach that conclusion. I would say in the vast majority of cases, ignoring conditions leads to egregiously false conclusions.
To go back to the soccer example... all we're doing is counting expected goals/lives now. What may or may not happen in the future doesn't matter because it involves considering variable values that are different to what we're talking about. In other words, we're considering what's called "the momentary period" in economics, where nothing has the capacity to change and everything is fixed. If we allow things to change, then we have to assess the impact of allowing the substitutions to have on the probabilities and thus we engage in a wholly different (and much more complex)( exercise.
See all my previous points. If the median expected number of pregnant women (discounting the known-pregnant women already placed on boats) is 10, then there should be 10 extra women placed on boats. Whether or not they are the pregnant ones. This is the fairest way when we lack the information to make a better choice.
This is irrelevant to what I'm saying. It's also inaccurate. It depends on your loss function whether you want the median, mean or, indeed, mode (and there are probably other loss functions too, but I'm only aware of them in this context of measuring central tendency/average). But, again, it has no relevance whatsoever to what we're implicitly calculating here (also again, because we know at the outset the inequality holds we don't need to do any calculations at all).
Note, also, that you're failing to consider individuals at all. In your set up here, all that matters is whether or not a woman is a woman. We need ten extra women because we predict ten women to be unknowingly pregnant and we reject the idea that we can make educated guesses about this. This is an abhorrent moral philosophy even if we really couldn't make educated guesses. And that's not the Captain speaking, that's what I think.
An expected value (in a discrete set up) cannot ignore the individual because it's based on the individual. As it happens, we know something about the expected value procedure that ensures a particular outcome (men can never not be 1, women of childbearing age must be greater than 1) that, in aggregate, has a particular effect... but at no point are we forced to ignore the individual (aside from the starting point that we reject the notion that one life can be more valuable than another in favour of simply saying one life is not more lives than another single life; which is an ignorance of the individual which is entirely proper and, indeed, less abhorrent than the reverse).
