Go down the list and stop once your answer is “no”.
- I would want to do something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
- I would want to devote a month of my life completely to something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
- I would want to devote a year of my life completely to something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
- I would want to devote twenty years of my life completely to something that would then save mankind from total destruction.
- I would want to do something that save mankind from total destruction but as I save mankind, I would need to die.
- I would want to die saving mankind even if people didn’t find out I did it until a hundred years later.
- I would want to die saving mankind even if there was a 50% chance that nobody would ever know I did it.
- I would want to die saving mankind even if nobody ever found out I did it.
- I would want to die saving mankind even if nobody ever knew mankind was in peril.
- I would want to die saving mankind even if everybody was convinced that a person Y did it.
- I would want to die saving mankind even if everybody was convinced that instead of saving mankind, I was the one that put it in peril.
- I would want to die saving mankind in all circumstances.
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Thanks for the post Lukasz– provoked a good discussion with my teammates. One was a #4 and another a #11. In thinking about their responses and reflecting on my own, I decided on the following:
If this list is meant to convey a sense of progression in “degree of personal sacrifice”, I would invert the choices in which I die without guarantee of glory (#6-#11) with #1-#4. Given my current belief in complete unconsciousness (or at least, extremely altered consciousness) after death, my postmortem legacy in the world I leave behind is of no concern to me in my new state of existence / nonexistence. This means that after the death threshold (#5) has been crossed, #6-#11 are equivalent options for me. In #1-#4, since I have to devote myself completely to whatever pursuit will save mankind for the entirety of that time period, the intrinsic value I derive from those pursuits, plus whatever value I derive from knowing I saved mankind, has to exceed the value I could derive from doing something else with a “non-appropriated” life. If that threshold is not scaled, any time commandeered to the cause of human salvation is costly, and is therefore a greater personal sacrifice than the specter of being remembered as a villain or being altogether forgotten after death. As for #5, if I understand the choices correctly, I’m dying no matter what – either through active death to save mankind or through the total destruction of mankind, from which I also perish. In that case, the choice to die “actively” in order to save mankind is not a sacrifice – it’s a pittance of convenience that happens to also net significant impact for other humans. Of course, here, I’m assuming that there is no time lag between when I have to die and when mankind will destruct (e.g. I die now or mankind destructs now). If the choice is “I die now in order to prevent mankind from destruction 40 years from now”, I have potentially given up a maximum of 40 years of my life, in which case I now have to compare the relative merit of 40 years of non-life with 40 years of servitude life.
Hi Szoa,
Great, thoughtful response, thank you.
First, I would love to meet the #11.
I’m assuming that for the purposes of this exercise you didn’t consider legacy you might be leaving (family etc.) after your death.
There is actually an interesting dimension that I didn’t explore here, where time passes after your death and the event you’re saving mankind from. In such a case, the choice is not between dying and dying anyway.
Perhaps I’ll come up with a two-dimensional version of this quiz.