Jonathan Ichikawa weighs in on the immortal driver question, but it appears to me that he didn't really stop to think about Tyler Cowen's example of why just looking at single risks (or risks over time-slices, which Jonathan suggests is the natural utilitarian way of looking at it) also leads to problems: the involuntary Russian Roulette example.
I.e. Suppose you took a gun rigged so that its chance of firing was exactly the same as your chance of hitting a pedestrian while driving* and you amused yourself by pointing at random pedestrians and pulling the trigger. If driving the car isn't wrong, why would this game of Russian Roulette be wrong? The answer can't just be in the expected consequence, since that's the same, but neither can it be in the utility derived, unless you would ban driving if it was also for a frivolous purpose (e.g. down to the video store, or just for fun).
* to really be equivalent you probably have to specify that it's the chance of hitting a pedestrian over time t and that the gun is further rigged so that you can't pull the trigger again until time t has elapsed
If the only reason anyone ever had to drive a car was frivolity, then I do think that the cases are pretty much the same. But of course there are utilitarian reasons to outlaw the gun game and not automobilies. The fact is, there are plenty of good reasons people might want to use cars, and there really aren't good reasons why people might want to aim guns at strangers and pull triggers.
Posted by: Jonathan Ichikawa at January 15, 2004 05:51 PMWhere does a blanket ban on automobiles come into it? The question is whether the individual act of driving a car for a frivolous purpose is morally wrong, not whether it's possible to use cars for acts that are morally permissible.
Posted by: Joshua at January 15, 2004 08:37 PMI assumed that you were dealing with the same question Tyler was -- if you have a different question in mind, then my comments might not be germane. But Tyler's question was definitely about legal prohibitions, not about individual acts' morality.
From his post:
Should I then be prohibited from driving? When we make a prohibition decision, should we measure the risk of a single act of driving, or the risk of driving throughout a lifetime? Measuring the bundled risk appears to imply absurd consequences, such as banning driving for people with sufficiently long lives.