I’m simply saying that the problem is almost exactly equivalent to the trolley problem.
Would you steer the trolley to the track with one man on it? If yes, and you believe you could save more than one person with $1 million, then you would also press the button!
> And what you're doing is neither novel nor surprising. This is the exact rationalization most of every person we now view in history as awful also used. They acknowledge they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalize it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in.
This is also true for the trolley problem! He who pulls the lever does an awful thing (kills one man) in the pursuit of some benefit to society (saving five others).
(The ethics of the trolley problem itself have been discussed at length, so I don’t think we need to repeat those arguments here.)
And again, many religious wars have been and are fought! Religious leaders haven’t theoretically killed people in the pursuit of utopia, they have literally, actually done that!
After all: that’s the subject of our discussion: not whether people are moral, but whether religious people are more moral than the baseline.
I'm not saying you don't believe what you're saying. On the contrary that is again probably the worst part of rationalization. We genuinely believe what we convince ourselves of, while imagining ourselves to be objectively and plainly correct. As for morality and religion, it's well accepted (at least academically) that there is a significant correlation between religiosity and reduced asocial behavior at the individual level. This [1] study is a meta-study of some 109 other studies and offers a broad overview.
Keep in mind that the obvious exceptions like South America = high religiosity + high criminality or Scandiland = low religiosity + low criminality, are group/macro level issues and not individual. Very small numbers of highly sociopathic individuals or groups can have an extreme effect on overall stats. For example the homicide rate for St. Louis is higher than for any country in the world, yet obviously the percent of people of homicidal tendency in St. Louis is negligible. Macro level stats and individual level tendencies are very different things.
Would you steer the trolley to the track with one man on it? If yes, and you believe you could save more than one person with $1 million, then you would also press the button!
> And what you're doing is neither novel nor surprising. This is the exact rationalization most of every person we now view in history as awful also used. They acknowledge they're doing some awful things in the present, but rationalize it by imagining the utopia that it will bring in.
This is also true for the trolley problem! He who pulls the lever does an awful thing (kills one man) in the pursuit of some benefit to society (saving five others).
(The ethics of the trolley problem itself have been discussed at length, so I don’t think we need to repeat those arguments here.)
And again, many religious wars have been and are fought! Religious leaders haven’t theoretically killed people in the pursuit of utopia, they have literally, actually done that!
After all: that’s the subject of our discussion: not whether people are moral, but whether religious people are more moral than the baseline.