Imagine that an all-knowing genie manifests in your bedroom.
The genie tells you that sometime in the next ten years, you will have a chance to save a total stranger from dying by performing CPR.
But you don’t know when it will happen, and there’s no guarantee you’ll succeed when the time comes.
How would you respond? How would your life change, from that moment?
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My last two posts for Applied Sentience are up:
http://appliedsentience.com/2015/05/29/moral-heroism-pt-1-empathys-faults-heroism-to-the-rescue/
Within, I discuss some thoughts I’ve had recently on the problems with empathy, and how we need another layer of moral feeling on top of empathy — for which I borrow the term “heroic responsibility” from Eliezer Yudkowsky — if we want to do good in difficult situations.
The posts total about 2500 words, but this post provides a brief summary.