The million-dollar question is interesting *because it forces her to really 
  decide* what kind of girl she is.

Going into a business negotiation thinking either you or them are deontologists is selfdeception that will hinder you in your negotiations.

Maybe. But in practice, it might be a simplifying assumption that either you or them are "deontologists" in the context of the negotiations because there is nothing you have to offer that has any chance of budging their position.

In other words, she may be that kind of girl for a million dollars, but you don't have a million dollars.

Why would anyone sell a company that's doubling every 6 months for a year's take? it seems quite irrational to me. But, like I said, it's normal for this industry. Now, knowing what I know now, my answer wouldn't change, I mean, the other party (and the market) obviously placed a dramatically lower value on my company than I did, but if I knew this was fair market value, I'd have said no to their initial feeler before hearing their offer. Of course, I'll sell, for a price... but my price is so far above the 'fair market value' of the company that for all practical purposes, you can think of me as being completely unwilling to sell.

I mean, like everyone, I have my price, but I really, really like my company; my price is a /whole lot/ higher than one year's take.

so, uh, yeah; I think a lot of times breaking off negotiations upon hearing an 'offensive' offer is the result not of a wounded pride but of a clear misunderstanding of the market value of the good at hand by one or both parties.

If I'm willing to sleep with you for a million bucks and no less, if you offer me $100, it's probably not worth my time to try to talk you up. In that case, assuming that you are unable or unwilling to pay me the million bucks, there is /no difference/ between me being willing to sleep with you for a million bucks, and me not being willing to sleep with you for any amount of money at all.

You say:

In reality, most people have made that choice long ago and we know that they have their consequentialist price.

And I agree; however I wonder how many people consciously know what their "price" decision they have made.

I once actually conducted this experiment with a group of [volunteer] fellow students (both male and female) with interesting results. I pitched the question exactly as outlined here (a girlfriend asked the male members). The aim was to force this self-realisation of their "price" and subsequently we "bartered" for the real price they would accept.

I realised a couple of things; firstly in realistic terms 1 million pounds is generally a lot lower than the "realistic price". When I followed up with the question "would you really sleep with me for a million" the answer was usually "no". The reason the girl says "maybe" in the initial instance is because she doesn't believe that I have a million pounds to offer.

When I substituted £100,000 for a million the response rate tipped much harder towards "unlikely". To further test this theory I asked one of my more well of friends (who looked stereotypically rich) to conduct a similar survey - but this time to show them a cheque made of for £1 Million at the same time. Again the responses tended towards "unlikely" (and there was, actually, a larger amount of disgust at the idea).

Once I got past this stage we bartered on what the "price" might be; invariably money was quickly removed from the table. Favours were preferred; for example attending as a date to a wedding was one price. When I forced conversations back to money the price went a lot higher. £10 Million was the minimum (this is possibly because 1 Million is not considered so much any more, I don't know). My well off friend had even more dramatic rises; one girl requested £5 Million a year for the next three years.

More sex was generally offered in return for more complex rewards; for example in the above example (£5,000,0000/yr for 3 yrs) it was hashed out that a number of sexual encounters and "weekend breaks" were on the cards.

For the men things were a lot simpler; they balked at any ides of being paid full stop. Almost to the man they refused payment and offered to sleep with the girl anyway. Out of interest I got a much plainer girl to ask the same question; there was still a general refusal to take money (although one or two "accepted" £100, preferring it to 1 Million) but also several outright refusals. With the plainer girl men offered to sleep with her (for no money), for my more attractive friend they offered to sleep with her and take her out to dinner.

In fact dinner featured a lot in negotiations; there was actually a general aversion amongst the men (particularly, for some interesting reason, among the "jock" types) to simply having sex, a big majority preferred to offer a more complete "package". I have a partial theory that some were sidestepping the issue of money by proposing that the girl paid for dinner (or whatever date was agreed).

This was conducted on a group of about 100 people I randomly grabbed outside our student union over a couple of afternoons :) there isn't a lot of structure to what we did, we just followed our noses. But I think there was some interesting stuff we discovered.

I'm 5 years out of college and I think my position has changed significantly since then. Until probably a year out of college I only thought very abstractly about questions like this and believed there was a large class of problems for which there is no price.

Until a year or so after I graduated, I think I believed that most people (hookers excluded) wouldn't offer sex at any cash price. I always thought those transactions generally HAD to occur masked as "I'll buy you some beers/some dinners/we'll date/any time or cash value exchange in return for sex"

My more recent experience with regards to your experiment is almost the exact opposite of your findings. I'm consistently shocked by how LOW a price people are willing accept for all manner of tasks, including sex.

Not to sound way too shady, but I've since found that the cash price point for sex for most women is not only "no price", but in fact far lower than I would have imagined. Or maybe I've just met way sluttier girls since graduating. The price for most men is basically zero.

I'll also say there's likely some sort of phase transition here where the answer to "what kind of girl she is" is dependent on some socioeconomic indicator. Hypothesis: Money and status buy people a LOT of self importance and stricter adherence to a moral code. People don't have to bend their espoused morals unless faced with tough questions.

Re your experiment: - saying and doing are different, especially since the question seems to have been explicitly phrased as an exchange of sex for money. there are all sorts of ways to phrase the question where sex is understood but without actually saying it. - £1MM is doesn't even feel like a real number to most students. hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

Like @Confusion, I now generally believe there's a price for everything. If it can be measured in dollars, thats an easy question to answer. The hard questions are those that are measured in things money can't buy.

I have a theory about this actually. Do you have any specific data r.e. what "prices" were accepted?

My theory is that below a certain margin (I never tested this you see) then it becomes a different matter. At , say, £10,000 you are trading your body, it is transaction. You are gaining the money.

At a certain lower bound it switches to being simply an incentive. "I'll buy you dinner if you'll sleep with me after". i.e. it sweetens the deal.

I very much doubt that anyone, if offered $100 right here right now would take you up on the offer (but, then, I've never tested it)

Well, he seems like a decent guy...

The price for most men is basically zero.

Oh, right.

We think about getting paid with money differently than we think about getting paid with gifts, for some reason.

I have the notes somewhere so I will try and dig them out and write something up (this was all done from memory plus a short type up I did at the time)

This is ridiculous. The question does make her uncomfortable, but not because of the question itself. She knows she'll sleep with a guy for a million dollars. She's thought about it. She may have even thought about her "price" for letting a man fuck her. The problem is she knows the limits on what she's supposed to say and how she's supposed to present herself, and here's this clueless jerk trying to force her beyond them. She's playing the game, navigating social rules, and he isn't even acknowledging the tight spot he's put her in. In fact, he's simultaneously relishing her discomfort and resenting her for feeling that way. What does she do? To get through the situation as easily and harmlessly as possible, she either denies the legitimacy of the argument or names absurdly large amounts of money.

To really get a woman's price, she'd have to be assured of discretion. And her price would, ultimately, be affected by her confidence in the assurances of discretion offered. Her price for prostituting herself openly would be much higher, though not as high as the price she's willing to admit to in the original joke or the experiment you describe. After all, in the experiment, she pays the price of advertising her willingness to have sex for money without actually getting the money. A million pounds buys a lot of honesty -- what were you offering? Even with the check, you haven't established a credible offer. The woman would have a lot of doubts that would be difficult to overcome. Is it a scam? Why me? Does this guy want to hurt me or humiliate me? Is this a mean-spirited prank organized by one of my exes? From her point of view, it's vanishingly unlikely to be a genuine offer. She's thinking, "If I even give this guy a chance to prove his bona fides, I'll probably be putting myself at risk." After all, even if he actually has a million pounds in his checking account, he's still more likely to be a killer than a guy who pays a million pounds for sex. Just sayin'. She's not stupid. And if the guy is serious, the onus is on him to prove that he understands her reservations and to think of some way to reassure her. Her initial response shouldn't deter him.

Anyway, to depart from your experiment and get back to the conversation in the joke as it's usually told -- no longer talking about your experiment -- it's a typical conversation for socially incompetent young geeks who are frustrated by all the social taboos, who suspect (partly correctly) that everyone around them is screwing like rabbits, and who are so painfully frustrated about not being able to talk about it that they make fools of themselves beating their heads against the wall of taboo with rational arguments instead doing something that might actually clear the way to frank conversation, such as cultivating trust and intimacy. (Gosh, I just might be speaking from experience here.)

So the whole thing resolves to a guy making a girl uncomfortable and taking her refusal to be outré for stupidity. That's pretty dickish. Especially when the point is to make yourself look smart in comparison. I have NO idea why Feynman liked this joke, except that maybe he used it as a racy line-crossing move when chatting up women, in which case the logic itself is kind of beside the point. I supposed he knew the right moment to push it. Or maybe he just knew his audience. But that would make him a bit of a misogynist, since he would know -- admit it -- that the chief delight of this story for most people is not whipping it out Feynman-style at just the right moment when a woman is ready to let down her barriers. The chief appeal for most is getting the last laugh on a woman who wouldn't let you past her facade of propriety. Why would he stoop to that kind of pandering?

Anyway, the original word game breaks down if you examine it just a little. If I'd bake a loaf of bread for a million dollars, am I a baker?

If I'd do your taxes for a million dollars, am I a tax accountant?

If I'd write a book for a million dollars, am I a writer?

If I'd change your oil for a million dollars, am I an auto mechanic?

If I'd teach a yoga class for a million dollars, am I a yoga instructor?

So is she a prostitute? Clearly not. Is she a whore? Well, yeah, quite often she is, in the sense that the word "whore" in any language usually means a woman whose sexual activity makes the speaker feel bad in some way.

But don't worry about this line of reasoning, or any other, being used against you when you whip this gem out at a party, because the response will divide between a couple of straight-up misogynists enthusiastically backing you up and a majority who just distance themselves from you, possibly by scoring points off you in some irrational way that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to the point you're trying to make, because people are STUPID and more interested in playing STUPID SOCIAL GAMES than actually THINKING. So your point is unchallenged! Unrefuted! Whoohoo! (Sarcasm aimed at the original joke and at my teenage self, not personally at you.)

A reasonable point; except you've asserted that and I'm not sure it's true. Do you have any data to back up the theory? Because one of the things that became clear to me was people hadn't really and truly considered it; there was a lot of thinking going on.

I realise the experiment was flawed; and we tested too few people to really make any definite observations.

However the aim was not to present it as a serious offer; but as a thought exercise. Once over the "wtf is this guy asking me" moment at the start we spent quite a while with each person (in private) discussing his/her thoughts. This made it a little more solid.

I agree with the idea that the joke is idiotic; clearly it is just misogynist crap (or, very occasionally just a racy joke - I've pulled it out maybe once to rescue a date :)).

The question a woman's brain is really engaged with in these scenarios is, "What's the safest way to deal with this situation?" That applies even if she actually knows you and is a modern liberal woman, because she's got to walk a line between seeming prudish or dishonest and triggering the insecurity thats lurk in every male breast.

[Edit: sorry for all the unacknowledged edits; since HN has no "preview" button I just post and edit.]

Of course you can; that is pretty easy to do. (also you might note we tried a lot more credible monetary amounts as well).

Can you describe a situation that you could actually set up in which a woman would think she was more likely to get a million pounds than to get dragged into a basement, tortured, raped, and murdered?

This is something of a strawman... because clearly it all depends on the individual and how they perceive a situation. But it seems reasonable to suppose you can ask the person (as I did) to visualise a situation where they were receiving a serious offer (a lot of phsyc testing uses this premise).

"What's the safest way to deal with this situation?"

When I said bartering I should point out it wasn't actively bartering over the idea of sex; it was a discussion about the ideas and this concept of a "price". Or in opther words it was explained what the point was. Most said it was an interesting thought experiment.

So where your seeing this as the individuals thinking "oh crap, this crazy person is saying really weird/scary things" that was not the situation. We used the opening line as a gambit to provoke this idea of a "price".

I'm actually most interested in your currently undefended assertion that people have thought about their "price". It's the most interesting part of this for me.

EDIT: it's worth pointing out this is less about establishing what cash amount people want for having sex with you than about getting people to discuss a social idea that is almost certainly frowned upon, but which could make them rich via minimum effort/skill. We could have tried something like.. would you kill for £1 Million - but there were strong reasons against that (sex itself is not frowned on (just paid-for), where murder is. Sex is more interesting because there is a divide between how men and women react to it).

I'm actually most interested in your currently undefended assertion that people have thought about their "price". It's the most interesting part of this for me.

As a kid I had multiple conversations in different groups of guys where the question of having sex with another guy for money came up, so I think I can vouch for guys. Even in groups of guys who weren't particularly intimate and didn't trust each other, you'd get exchanges like, "Dude, you are so in love with that guy you would suck his duck." "Fuck you, I'm not sucking anybody's dick." "So you wouldn't even for a million dollars?" "You saying you wouldn't? What are you trying to hide?"

As for girls, girlfriends have told me about giggly conversations they had with their friends when they were thirteen. The question naturally arises from the question of whether you would marry a gross old guy who had billions of dollars -- and that's something that all young girls talk about. It's an irresistible mixture of horror and fantasy. Start altering that story and you're only two or three steps from outright prostitution. (Amusingly, in the one story I remember pretty well, the question posed was, "Would you have sex with a guy for a million dollars, even if you didn't love him?" I guess to thirteen-year-old girls, love is the factor that makes everything okay or not okay, even prostitution.)

Another reason is how people reacted to the movie Indecent Proposal with Robert Redford, Demi Moore, and Woody Harrelson. It wasn't an alien idea for most people. Anytime people talked about it, they seemed to be picking up the threads of conversations from a long time ago. Of course, people are a lot less likely to talk about it with people they don't trust, especially when the intent seems to be hostile or transgressive.

Have you, as an adult, considered your price? My suggestion is few people have.

You're right social constraints are going to modify each condition; many people sleep with others in sympathy, for example.

If I imagined she was better-off, $500 would be plenty for ninety minutes of work (including drive time, chit-chat, etc.)

That's an interesting figure; because it is roughly how much a prostitute would be paid (I use that example only because it is the most readily available price for sex we have). So, possibly, there is an inherent social value for non-free sex we subscribe too.

My "ideal" price is zero; I sleep with people for free all the time

This syncs almost exactly with the response most men gave in our survey

How did you change?

Second, I always knew there was something wrong with me socially, and I had the vague intention of improving at least as early as junior high. At first my ideas were pretty vague, and my progress depended on a trickle of new ideas from the pop science reading I did. Evolutionary psychology helped me see social relationships through ideas I already understood. It was always popularized hand-in-hand with a really bleak and brutal view of life (the perception that EP was just the paranoia of sexually insecure men, dressed up in scientific language, was probably created by some of the books I read) so it may have hurt more than it helped. Still, I started to get some insight into my limitations in high school. Then the book Emotional Intelligence came out around the time I graduated, and I read it cover to cover several times. It was just a self-help book, but it instantly clicked with me and gave coherence to a lot of half-formed ideas I had. It gave me an agenda of concrete items I could improve on. I remember there was a little section about how savvy kindergarten-age kids approached other children that actually helped me make friends in college.

Third, when I went to college I got a frame of reference for how normal, well-adjusted people who were informed and liberal would act. Back in high school I really couldn't parse out which differences between myself and everybody else were due to me being better-informed, more critical, and more liberal and which differences were due to me being socially retarded. Not only did I not really like the people around me, which made my social problems a lot more understandable than I realized at the time, I was literally afraid to emulate anybody around me because I might pick up customs that would make me look stupid when I finally broke out into the "real" wold. College released me from that. It's amazing how much more natural it is to emulate and learn from people you actually like, and whom you would like to be like.

Fourth, I realized that I had some emotional issues that were interfering with the proper functioning of my social skills. I.e., I'm a lot more socially competent when I feel good about myself. Trying to be social while you hate yourself is like trying to boot a computer with an inadequate power supply. Taking care of your emotions makes everything else easier.

Would you still recommend Emotional Intelligence? In regards to #4, well, would you feel comfortable describing this in more detail? For example, in which ways is it easier or more difficult to be socially competent when you hate or don't hate yourself, and how have you managed to feel more confident about yourself? Finally, if you could recall the anecdote about the kindergarten kids, that'd be useful.

The reason I ask these questions is because, like you said, it's amazing how much more natural it is to emulate and learn from people you actually like and whom you would like to be like. Granted, I barely know you, but in terms of people on the internet that respond intelligently to questions, you rank pretty high.

That example got my attention because it was counterintuitive. It sounded like a really passive and loserish way to fit in, the kind of approach that would guarantee you would be looked down on and pushed around. I had heard that kind of advice before, but to me it always sounded like, "Look, you're a loser. Here's the easiest way to get along as a loser in society." I wasn't interested in that at all; I wanted to be respected. But according to Goleman the compliant approach was the approach taken by the most socially successful kids. The kids who took less harmonious approaches encountered rejection and exclusion, turning many of them into wallflowers or bullies. Well, being humble and compliant was a much more productive (and less stressful) approach for me, and I could rest assured that I was establishing myself the way a respectable somebody ought to, and my demeanor would not automatically classify me as a pathetic nobody. Wielding power in a group is a different skill, but it turns out to be founded on sensitive to the group just like cooking is founded on the skill of tasting food.

As for #4, Emotional Intelligence drilled into me that empathy was the basis of social understanding, and that we use ourselves as a model of how other people think and feel. We project our own assumptions and feelings onto other people. I got pretty good at using that method to see my own shortcomings through other people's eyes. What I didn't immediately appreciate is that if your view of yourself is warped in any way, including in a negative way, you will misunderstand your social interactions with other people. For example, if you don't like yourself, you'll never really understand that other people like you. Hating yourself is a cognitive handicap, and what's worse, it selectively makes you blind to the best things in life. You're blind to the value you have to other people, blind to the respect other people have for you, and blind to romantic opportunities. That actually offends people who don't know you (who take your obliviousness as rejection) and frustrates your friends, who do understand. I thought devaluing myself would give me a safety margin against accidental antisocial behavior, but it actually made my antisocial behavior worse.

I was a little late figuring out how I irritated other people with my lack of sensitivity, but I was REALLY late -- I mean decades late -- figuring out that other people like and appreciate me. I'm still working on it. Thanks for your contribution ;-)

Of course you should be moral, but most business questions aren't a question of morality, but of direction and the most appropriate path to achieve your objectives.

Companies are amoral (not to be confused with immoral) entities that will not necessarily act in the people's best behavior. If companies act in a morally acceptable way, it is because of the individual employees that together make morally acceptable choices. Every business question is a question of morality, because you can always choose to commit fraud, cheat someone or act in an otherwise immoral fashion. Sometimes you won't do that for fear of customer or supplier retribution. Often you won't do that for fear of the law. But sometimes, you just shouldn't do it, because it has possible consequences you should never risk.

No one at BP is individually responsible for the current calamity. The more responsibility is spread over multiple layers of decision making, the less responsible individuals feel and the less moral their behavior will be. Not because they are immoral, but because the pressure to act as is best for the company is strong enough to suppress moral qualms. No 'evil' individual made the immoral decision that lead to the accident. It was a large number of people that each made slightly immoral decisions, the cumulative result of which is now the largest ecological disaster in US history.

This is the essence of the problem of libertarianism and complete free market capitalism. This is why we need a government to regulate capitalism.

Accidents happen, maybe because we veered too far towards profit, maybe because we encountered a black swan, but we learn from them and do our best to mitigate them, then we go back to treading the fine line of cost and safety.

That being said, the US Gov should have learned from disasters like Piper Alpha and separated it's own safety and cost structures in respect of the oil industry long ago. Not having done so before now is, to me, inexcusable.

Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle, EU commission-funded technical research projects need to follow strict ethical and social governance programs, and the commission is directly funding more research into how to more effectively govern these sorts of endeavours (rather than simply relying on "ethical codes" or "ethics checklists"). It's only a few steps up from that to regulating more widely across Europe (but obviously they need a playground to test in first! and the billion+ euro research Framework Programmes are a pretty good one for that).

I can't really see the US going for this sort of thing though, to be honest, even though it'd most likely prevent things like the BP catastrophe :(

The precautionary principle can't be satisfied. Also, its application is extremely political. For example, it should applied to folks who might become parents.

Note that the precautionary principle is typically invoked by folks who don't don't have much skin in the game and don't understand what their costs and benefits are.

Note that regulation is the best example of systemic risk not to mention the inevitable corruption.

This is not to say that "ethics codes" are good and effective.

There is no silver bullet.

(It's a lot more complicated than that, but it is most certainly not a "normal accident" like the BP one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster .)

But that was an emotional decision, and he made the wrong one.

Still not a moral question, imho.

Who can say what would be left of Yahoo if MSFT sprinkled their unique webfail all over it? I'd expect that they would have destroyed most of it.

Consulting is especially like this, if you want to build the best damn thing you can, consulting is usually at odds with that core value. Consulting is as much about placating the client's ego as anything else.

Violating your core values for money will lead to a death-spin of post hoc justification and misery, so it's rarely worth it.

That said, I don't think sleeping with someone for money is a moral question, and the example is indeed misogynistic.

In the articles terms, you could be moral according to the category of your actions, or according to the consequences of your actions. The first one ignores reality ('whatever happens, don't lie'), and the second one negates judgement ('the right action depends on the consequences, and the consequences of the consequences, and the consequences of... ad infinitum' an endless, useless subjectivism). They can be sidestepped by applying judgement according to reality and a measurable standard of value, eg. self-interest. You could call this contextual or objective morality.

To put that more simply: past a certain point, the idea of marginal value in a cost/benefit analysis breaks down, because the benefit "changes the game." (That is, creates a discontinuity in the valuation curve.) A million dollars "changes the game" of your life. $100 doesn't.

Yes, there are always creative ways to avoid really answering the question (such as doing a brain upload, as suggested), but these answers do nothing to answer the underlying question, which is what the thought experiment is really trying to get at.

The problem with that, of course, is that even within our species, we have many different (and mutually-exclusive!) utility functions; sociopaths, for example, calculate theirs noticeably differently. So, it still ends up turned into a problem of cultural meta-ethics. That is, it's no longer a matter of "who do we shun and revile?" but "how do we get along?" or perhaps "do we want to get along?" (Which brings me to this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/)

To be a little more clear, your answer (yes or no) is of little value to me. What I really want to know is why you answer yes or no--is it because of some general principle you're applying, because of a gut instinct, because someone told you to say that, or something else?

EDIT: Based on the reply below, I'm not being clear. There are lots of reasons I'd like to know your reasoning process, beyond trying to generalize it to people in general. Among other things, I'd like to know whether I should be worried about going to dinner with you (particularly if your answer is "Sure, I'd kill for even just a dollar").

Instead, the question of what an individual cares about will be solved by coming up with a technique to look at a person's brain and tell them, definitively, what values they care about at that moment in time. Anything said about individual ethical belief until then is just sophistry.

We may be able to model some sort of "objectively-good" cooperative-evolutionary game-players using mathematics, but those models would not necessarily represent us; there's nothing that says we're even evolutionarily stable as a species over the long term ;)

Just to counterpoint the frenzy of moral nihilism and relativism I suspect will appear, I respectfully disagree, I'm a moral universalist, i.e. morals do exist, moral judgements can be true or false.

But I also realize that this is a question of philosophical faith, and arguing about that is usually pretty futile. :)

1. Given the laws of physics, could you derive your morality? 2. If we didn't exist, and in our place were an alien species that, say, ate their babies[1], would that make the universe contain less utility as a whole?

[1] The same story I linked to above: http://lesswrong.com/lw/y4/three_worlds_collide_08/. Who is in the right? Do we have the "moral imperative" to destroy the baby-eaters? Do the third species have a moral imperative to destroy us?

2) You're asking me to sum up and compare the values of two complete civilizations? That's a pretty tall order. Also, in one of the alternatives I wouldn't exist, that's a lot less utility right there.

What I said above was that "morals or utility" are subjective to an individual—which agrees with your point. I said "and thus don't really exist" because the definitions for epistemic morality or universal utilitarianism require them to be universal—and they're not, so they don't exist as defined. (And a system that accepts subjective morality is usually just called "ethics", by the way.)

Humans are not inherently expected utility maximizers, they're bounded agents with little capacity for reflection. Utility functions are great and all, but in the words of Zack M. Davis, "Humans don't have utility functions."

Is this function computable?

SUVs: maybe, but I would say our continued reliance on oil in general rather than SUVs in particular.

Bullying: could be.

Parasites on the welfare system: not convinced. The fact we have a welfare system will be judged favourably I expect.

Predatory banking practices: pass, not sure.

It's hard to imagine what things it will be--their values may be very different from ours. I'd say oil reliance, over population, the gulf between the rich and the impoverished, but these things are all too obvious. I suspect we'd be surprised by what we're judged badly for.

If this is your understanding of philosophy, I'd say you're misusing philosophy for dealing with personal problems.

On a philosophical level though, a lot of people would probably disagree with your proposed actions. For me, personally, I wouldn't want to "influence" (vaguely kill, but also any of these "duplication" scenarios) someone else's mortality for any amount of money.

So you're a Spock, not a Kirk.

That's what I mean by "discontinuity": you can't give a cost-benefit analysis to something like a trillion dollars, because one trillion-dollar investment can completely alter the course of civilization with its knock-on effects.

But it was mostly a quibble :) I agree with your central argument.

There are a ton of similar questions.

The problem with speculative fiction is that it needs a technological conflict. Worthwhile utopias don't do that.

If your morals are based on principle, then no matter who the person was, your decision would remain the same.

I believe/hope that I am the type of person who would not take anothers' life no matter what the circumstances because I want to be a person of principle. If there were some situation where I did take a life, then I am not the principled person I think I am.

Take the example of Google and their motto,'Don't be Evil'. It was a nice bit of marketing, but when the value of doing business with a repressive government was high enough, they and other company's apparently had no problems working with said governments to continue the repression of it's citizens.

Now, you may say, Google has left that country. But, it was not due to the moral repugnance they felt about repressing the citizens, but the fact they were under attack by agents/citizens of said government and felt it was no longer in their interest 'financially' to stay.

In the case of google, they came to China but actually provided a less censored service than baidu (by writing in the search pages that some results were left out because of censoring thus attracting attention to it)... So in what way was their behavior evil?

Additionnaly, they never started any blogging service in China that would have put them in a situation where they had to give information to the government about political activists (unlike yahoo who gave such information)...

So, I don't think Google did anything evil in that case...

Of course not... The only thing they could do and did is give another reliable search engine that censored less than their competitors...

As for what kind of effect they could have: Google is an internationally recognized brand that is most certainly known in China (even without being the dominant search engine). Refusing to do business with China would be hard for the state-run media to explain away.

Of course, I think a lot of people really, really want to believe that Google is different from every single other multinational organization that has ever existed. It's not.

I think the difference between your point of view and my point of view is that I don't see things as completely black...

China is a repressive government and freedom of speech is not allowed there but it's certainly better than it was during the cultural revolution and I think it'll get better...

Now, as someone who lived in China before Google decided to move in the chinese market I can tell you that it was a great news to see them move... Before they were intermitently blocked by the Chinese firewall, a lot of queries were blocked so access to good search engines was not very good...

After Google moved to China, well they had to censor some of the results out but then they would point it out, and connection and access to google was much better...

So for me, it was a net benefit to see google move in China, and I hope that them moving out won't result in their being blocked again...

I guess my point is that they aren't even in the same stratosphere. Twitter and Facebook may be international recognized (and clearly I should have differentiated here), but they aren't in any way equivalent to a behemoth like Google.

Apart from that, Google's revenue doesn't give them any leverage on the Chinese government, mostly because they wouldn't ever back down on censoring as it would mean losing face...

Oh, I think the CCP cares very deeply about freedom of speech. Just maybe not in the way that you'd like ; )

http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/what...

It seems rather hard to pin down the original source!

The example may be misogynistic, but the idea that the example is an example of is not.

Also, suppose that the genders were removed:

    X: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
    Y: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
    X: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
    Y: (outraged) “What kind of person do you think I am?”
    X: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”

If you think karma is the least bit important, I suggest you close your browser for a few weeks.

It just kind of pissed me off to see the vandalism of presumably one person downvoting everything on the page, because only people with quite a lot of karma can downvote.

I suspect that's also why I got voted up to 7 and then back down to 1 - because people are looking at the votes now see no issue.

Not saying thats the right thing to do, but thats my guess.

He said: "... I find it helpful, before I consider a dilemma, to at least debate whether I’m in that girl’s situation, and what kind of girl I’m going to be for this particular question..."

This shows that he is the "Consequentialist" girl.