>This sounds suspiciously like the "Your idea kills children" argument. I call strawman.
Eh? He was just bringing up one of the standard counterexamples to the kind of simplistic utilitarianism that Harris is advocating. I don't know what the "your idea kills children argument" is, but he certainly wasn't making any such argument.
>It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
That's the rub. It doesn't require any of those fancy methods to know that it would be wrong to kill the child. Hence the implausibility of full-on utilitarianism as a reasonable moral philosophy.
(Of course, one can reject full-on utilitarianism without denying that the consequences of our actions for human happiness play a very big role in determining whether they're right or wrong.)
Eh? He was just bringing up one of the standard counterexamples to the kind of simplistic utilitarianism that Harris is advocating. I don't know what the "your idea kills children argument" is, but he certainly wasn't making any such argument.
>It would require statistical modeling, and some notion of community-accepted confidence thresholds, to come to a conclusion in a full utilitarian framework.
That's the rub. It doesn't require any of those fancy methods to know that it would be wrong to kill the child. Hence the implausibility of full-on utilitarianism as a reasonable moral philosophy.
(Of course, one can reject full-on utilitarianism without denying that the consequences of our actions for human happiness play a very big role in determining whether they're right or wrong.)