I’ve never really given lots of thought to the famous philosophical puzzlers, figuring that if much smarter people than me have argued themselves to a standstill, I probably won’t be able to contribute much. Nonetheless, I stumbled across this post, which puts a new spin on the Killing vs. Letting Die problem. The main contribution is noticing that our intuition (that killing is worse than letting die) is biased by the fact that people who kill intend harm, while people who let die are assumed not to desire the other person to die as strongly:
All other things being equal, it is worse to be the sort of person who intends to kill other people than it is to be the sort of person who does not intend to kill other people….It is amazing how many of the standard Ethics 101 problems evaporate when we consider that what we truly admire is character and not the actions which are sometimes the result of that character.
