Who is trying to cause panic?
If I tell you not to enter the reaction chamber of a nuclear power plant, am I fearmongering or am I warning you of a real danger and urging you to take precautions?
People who do not understand the danger and scoff at it are the most dangerous people around. They're like the guy in Mexico who found a pretty blue powder in a vial and took it home, only to end up exposing many members of his family (including himself, IIRC) to lethal doses of radiation.
Your inability to take a dangerous situation seriously does not make it safe.
I provide information because I am trying to empower people to keep themselves safe.
[Who is trying to cause panic?
If I tell you not to enter the reaction chamber of a nuclear power plant, am I fearmongering or am I warning you of a real danger and urging you to take precautions?
People who do not understand the danger and scoff at it are the most dangerous people around. They’re like the guy in Mexico who found a pretty blue powder in a vial and took it home, only to end up exposing many members of his family (including himself, IIRC) to lethal doses of radiation.
Your inability to take a dangerous situation seriously does not make it safe.
I provide information because I am trying to empower people to keep themselves safe. ]
There’s also a kind of self-serving utilitarianism involved. Send the elderly out on those ice floes so I can keep myself in the style to which I have become accustomed.
In the twentieth century, some of the major advocates of utilitarianism were Communists. While a soft-hearted, soft-headed bourgeois Kantian moralist might think torture or mass murder were just wrong, a sophisticated dialectical thinker would realize that they’re OK as long as they’re carried out by a revolutionary vanguard to hasten the advent of utopia for hundreds of millions. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
The history of Communism shows one of the big problems with utilitarianism. Even if you think it’s OK in principle to sacrifice the few for the many, you have to be leery of the fact that somehow it was the guys doing the utilitarian calculus who seemed to wind up with the omelet, such as it was, and other people’s eggs that got broken.
Robert Wright correctly emphasizes how much our moral judgements are likely to be skewed by self-serving self-deception. The commandment to maximize total happiness — subject to no side constraints on avoiding harm, leaving well-enough alone, and minding one’s own business — may allow an especially wide scope for screwing people over in the name of Doing Good.