Directly killing someone versus indirectly killing someone

[NickNack]

Is there a moral difference between killing someone by stabbing them versus killing someone through climate change? Are we no better then a murderer when we drive our cars or use technology that contributes to global warming?

[Jebus]

These are the five factors that need to be considered before determining any particular action. The first four may help answer your question whereas the fifth was added simply for personal insight.

What is the benefit of the action in question (i.e. driving to work is usually a necessity while driving to the pub is not)?
What is the approximate number of animals killed or hurt by the action?
What is the approximate sentience of the animals killed?
How likely or unlikely is my action to encourage or discourage others to do the same?

How selfish of a person do I want to be (selfishness is not an either-or concept - it runs along a continuum.

[NickNack]

@Jebus
I guess its not as bad as being a murderer since I'm not killing one being alone through my contribution to global warming but, is it bad to contribute to a fraction of someones death? How morally wrong is it to contribute to 1/100 of somethings death? Global warming kills some creatures that are pretty high on the sentience chain, so we are contributing to a fraction of a death of lives that are still very important. Is contributing 1/1,000,000 to a deer's death the same moral equivalent as pinching the deer? I would say not because 1,000,000 pinches is not nearly as bad as losing ones life. Once 1,000,000 people contribute to this beings death, the being dies, so are we not morally responsible as a group to stop this? Is all of our convenience and pleasure derived from technology really worth more then a group contribution towards ending someones life that is high in sentience value?

[thebestofenergy]

I guess its not as bad as being a murderer since I'm not killing one being alone through my contribution

Yes, it's not as bad, it would make no sense otherwise. You can easily do a reductio ad absurdum:

P1. Killing 1 person is X bad.
P2. Taking a 10% chance to kill 1 person is also X bad.
C1. Taking a 10% chance to kill 1 person and killing 1 person are equally as bad.
C2. Actions with different probabilities of the same outcome are equally as bad.
C3. Probability of outcome doesn't matter with how bad an action is.
C4. Probability doesn't matter morally.
C5. Taking any % chance to kill a person (from >0% to 100%) is morally equal to taking any and all other % chances to kill a person.

According to the premises, it would make sense that C5. would be true, even though there's a different likelihood of harmful consequences happening (0.0000000001% = 100%).

is it bad to contribute to a fraction of someones death?

Yes, it's as bad as the probability of doing it.

i.e. taking a 10% chance to kill a person is as bad as killing 1/10 of a person, or taking a 10% chance to kill 10 people is as bad as killing 1 person.

People often do not rely on statistics, and because of that it can be very deceiving how harmful certain practices are, such as drinking and driving.
If every time you drink and drive you have a 10% chance to kill 10 people in a crash (hypothetical numbers to simplify the example), then you should be held responsible for having murdered someone - you just got lucky if it didn't happen, but statistically you killed someone.
In the case of drinking and driving, the numbers may not be as bad, but they're not too far off either.

Everything is based on probability, there's never a certainty that anything happens for sure. Not taking into account probability would mean not taking into account anything to begin with.

[NickNack]

is it bad to contribute to a fraction of someones death?

Yes, it's as bad as the probability of doing it.

i.e. taking a 10% chance to kill a person is as bad as killing 1/10 of a person, or taking a 10% chance to kill 10 people is as bad as killing 1 person.

That makes a lot more sense now lol. And doesn't contributing to global warming make natural disasters worse resulting in more beings being more likely to be killed? Or am I tripping? And sorry, I really don't know how to use these commands to make the boxes right.

[Jamie in Chile]

Is there a moral difference between killing someone by stabbing them versus killing someone through climate change? Are we no better then a murderer when we drive our cars or use technology that contributes to global warming?

I think there is a moral difference because in the case of stabbing there is a clearer knowledge about what you are doing and a more direct cause and effect. So in my view a person that kills someone through stabbing has usually committed a morally worse action.

However, killing someone through global warming is also questionable.

I have done some calculations and I reckon 10,000 tonnes of CO2e into the atmosphere kills 1 human from climate change. That is a rough estimate, it could be plausibly be 10 times better or worse. I can share my workings if you like.

Now if one life will be lost for every 10,000 tonnes emitted then we can easily calculate say 30,000 tonnes will kill 3 people. But when we emit 1 tonne we can then calculate we have killed 0.0001 people. But that is a nonsense - what does that mean?

One way to think about it is that one death is 30 years of life lost. 30 because I assume that the average person killed by climate change would have lived to 70, and their average age of death is 40. I´m assuming here that climate change kills people of all ages indiscriminately, but older people have slightly higher risk on average.

So now we have a figure of 10,000 tonnes = 30 years of life lost. From this we can calculate, due to climate change, how many minutes, hours or years of life you have likely taken away from someone with any activity, and I think this is a better, more robust way of thinking about it than getting tied up with thoughts like "Is contributing 1/1,000,000 to a deer's death the same moral equivalent as pinching the deer?".

Here are some calculations I did:

Eating a meat burger = 5 minutes of life lost
Driving 6 miles in a petrol car = 3 minutes of life lost
Eating a normal amount of meat for the rest of your life, and you live 40 years more = 2 months of life lost
Long haul flight = a few days of life lost
Delaying getting an electric car until 2026 rather than 2021 = 10 days of life lost
An entire lifetime´s emissions = 2 years of life lost
The difference between not making any effort whatsoever to reduce your carbon footprint for your whole life vs making a big effort to live sustainably = 1 year of life

So far as stated this considers only the effect on human life lost, not human suffering or animal death or suffering. Getting into even more speculative and uncertain territory, I´ll now try to come up with the total negative impact.

Usually famines, disasters,disease etc cause multiple injuries/illnesses for every one life lost. It seems reasonable to suggest that the overall negative effect of multiple serious injuries, emotional stress etc is similar to one death, so I think we can double the negative impact.

Climate change will likely cause a larger number of animals to suffer and die than humans, but we can also argue that 1 human life is worth more than 1 animal life, and that humans may be capable of more acute suffering than animals. If these two effects cancel out then we can say that animal suffering and human suffering are similar, and double the negative impact again.

The numbers only include climate change, but not pollution. Pollution causes a similar number of deaths to climate change (again I can share sources for this if needed) so that is another 2x for cars and meat (maybe not for planes - not sure pollution half way across the ocean matters as much).

We now have 8x the negative impact (because I doubled the negative impact three times) being the total estimated impact. (Maybe lower, perhaps 4x for planes.)

So for example I stated that driving 6 miles in a petrol car causes 3 minutes of (human) life lost. We can now think of the total impact as being about 8x that. Equivalent to perhaps 24 minutes of human life lost or passed in severe suffering.

And then remember the margin for error is that it could be 10 times higher or 10 times less. So the range is about 2 minutes to 4 hours of life taken away or made very unpleasant if you drive 6 miles in a petrol car.

I suggest you use this way of thinking about things for decision making. If the total negative impact you would cause is greater than or similar to the positive benefit to yourself, do not do it.

Remember that the positive benefit to yourself of an activity is not the absolute enjoyment of the activity but the relative additional enjoyment vs whatever else you will do instead.

For instance the benefit from a long haul flight, is not the absolute enjoyment you would get by having a foreign holiday but any additional enjoyment you would get from a foreign holiday relative to having a holiday near your home. After accounting for the mild unpleasantness of jet lag, planes and airports the overall benefit is probably close to zero. And therefore in most cases, taking a long haul flight for a holiday is probably not morally justified for example.

[brimstoneSalad]

Excellent breakdown @Jamie in Chile
@thebestofenergy Might be worth adding this and some aspects of your response to wiki/index.php/Individual_Responsibility

[Jebus]

@Jamie in Chile I don't want to confuse things but wouldn't the loss of human life time in turn cause less loss (and quality) of non-human animal time? Hence, loss of human life time, if it were somehow isolated from total animal life time, would be a good thing.

Having written that, I agree that presenting consequences in human life time (rather than in non-human life time) is a better way of motivating people to reduce their footprint

Delaying getting an electric car until 2026 rather than 2021 = 10 days of life lost

I think I disagree with this one since it might give someone the impression that changing to electric car, regardless of the condition of the current car, is always a good thing. I've read that the best thing one can do for the environment (if one has to drive a car) is to keep driving one's current car for as many years as possible. Then, when that car is done, buying an electric rather than a petrol/diesel car would be the morally superior choice.

[NickNack]

@Jamie in Chile
I would agree that knowing the outcome for more certainty of someones death makes the action more immoral but I don't buy that direct is more immoral then indirect for the sake of directness. If an action was more indirect but had a greater chance of killing then a more direct action, then I would say the indirect action is more immoral.

And do you believe its not morally justified to drive cars since driving 6 miles causing 2 minutes-4 hours of intense suffering for someone?

[NickNack]

@Jebus
Yikes, I've thought about that myself. If people die, that stops animals from being harmed since those people that are dead can no longer contribute to the harm of other animals. But that gets into very shaky ground. Should we be killing other humans on purpose to save animals? Isn't that kind of where your logic leads to?