On 15 Apr 2005, JDG wrote
A given project is calculated to cost $5 and provide $10 of benefits.
Why wouldn't you engage in such a project?
Consider abortion.
Many argue that over a sufficiently long time period, the world
population would be better off lowered -- if only to reduce
environmental impacts and to enable those humans who are left to use
currently available and not-to-expensive energy sources, rather than
fossil fuel sources or sources that require technological advances,
such as hydrogen-boron fusion.
Since some people, such as those who have sworn to abstain from sex
before marriage, nontheless engage in sex before marriage and do so
with fewer preventions than others, some kind of post-sex population
control is economically valuable.
(For the sex, I am remembering reports of some recent research that
looks truthful to me based on my knowledge of humans. Over
multi-generational time periods, you can slow rates of population
growth by delaying marriage, using infanticide, and the like (more
modern techniques are often nicer).
(But only when a society stops thinking of its biological future, or
when it is wiped out by illness or war, does its population growth
halt entirely. Thus, to halt population growth, as will happen in any
finite universe, if you do not want the halt controlled by war,
famine, pestilence, or despair, some kind of post-sex population
control is economically valuable.)
But if you believe that abortion is intrinsically evil, then even
though it provides an economic benefit, it should not be permitted.
That is to say, with such a belief, the categorical concept of
`intrinsic evil' trumps the ratio-based concept of a cost-benefit.
--
Robert J. Chassell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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