Metsfanmax wrote:mrswdk wrote:That said, nothing I have said in this thread since GoranZ's weird jpeg has actually been true.
Well the situation you described of China actually is an interesting thought experiment in utilitarianism. Killing someone removes all future value they can add to society, while maiming them probably only makes it much smaller instead of removing it completely. As long as they make enough money over their lifetime to pay their medical bills. However if the medical cost they build up is higher than their lifetime wages (which is possible when insurance is involved I suppose) then killing them might be a net utility boost to society. If all you're interested in is economic output from the individual, anyway. Although I'd be suspicious of such a calculation because medical bills are widely acknowledged to not really reflect actual real economic costs (at least in the US).
If we were to properly examine all the implications of the various regulatory systems that might be used here then any calculation based solely upon immediate economic costs is missing a pretty large amount of the picture.
Besides the immediate economic trade offs - the driver vs the pedestrian, injury vs death etc. - what would be the wider impact of allowing such hit and runs to go unpunished? Does permitting richer or more powerful people to behave in such a way encourage more rich and powerful people to behave like that (leading to more deaths)? What are the costs of policing such behavior? Will running your society in such a calculated way scare mobile and talented people into making their way to other societies which they perceive to be 'nicer'? etc.
Even in the cases where an action's impact are not explicitly economic, it's possible to calculate and assign an economic value for the sake of assessing the costs and benefits of any given law or policy (see SROI assessments, for example). What is the cost/conflict created by the resentment of the poorer members of society who get the harsher deal under a system which explicitly labels them as being of little/no consequence? We can try to quantify the cost (or maybe there'd be a benefit) to society of designating a portion of society as being low quality citizens, then weigh that up against the cost of protecting them as equals under the law.
The social implications of policies are actually important utilitarian considerations, it's just that a lot of self-styled utilitarians ignore them because they can't be bothered to consider the issues that deeply.
