Mental Models of Purpose of College
2 years ago
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
Tradeoffs
Is it that tradeoffs are ok as long as there is a greater good coming out of doing the trade off? And I don’t quite understand what High-Threshold Thesis is, it has something to do will millions or billions of people dyeing and may cause me to have fear but I guess I don’t understand what it is.
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My understanding of the high threshold idea is that we cannot infringe the claims of one person just because doing so would cause a bit of good for person B, person C, and person D put together, (or how ever many other people you want to imagine, the idea is that it would cause good for all of these people in individual increments, which, when put together, would cause a great amount of good for all these people as a collective group). In other words, just because many other people would benefit, as a whole, if we infringe the rights of one person, that is not sufficient reason for us to infringe the rights of that one person, but we should rather compare people's claims one to one. She says, "In short, where claims are concerned, the sum of goods across people does not count" (166).
ReplyDeleteSo think of it, like, in our class, if kicking me out of class would make the class environment better for everybody else in the class collectively, that still does not mean you should infringe my claim of being in the class. The high threshold thesis would say that you should not kick me out of class just because it would cause increments of good for each of you and would, in turn, cause a great amount of good for all of you put together. I don't know if that helps, but it's how I understand the thesis.