The ethical problem with Lord Farquad's line isn't that "some of you will die". It's where he says "but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make".
Tesla's self-driving beta is unethical because most of the participants in this "experiment" did not opt in. Most of the people killed by Tesla won't be their customers. It will be the cyclist or the pedestrian that gets killed because the driver thought "full self driving" meant the car was fully driving itself. They didn't even know they were part of an experiment that day, yet they were the sacrifice that Tesla was willing to make.
I'm sympathetic to that, but in the end don't trust people to make decisions that are in everyone's best interest. Americans especially have proven again and again that they are too blinded by the false ideals of rugged individualism to see what's right. What's unethical is allowing tens of thousands of people to die every year because some people have a (understandably)misguided view of right and wrong.
Can you clarify how those of us calling for the government to prevent Tesla from involuntarily enlisting drivers into their beta test are "blinded by the false ideals of rugged individualism"?
Just so we're talking about the same term:
> The belief that all individuals, or nearly all individuals, can succeed on their own and that government help for people should be minimal.
Typically, the rugged individualists are the ones who say that the government should stay out of all this and people can take care of themselves. Basically the opposite of what I'm saying.
Sometimes sacrifices need to be made so that we can all prosper. The American mythos is unfortunately allergic to this truism. The idea that society needs permission to better itself is misguided. Same reason America is lagging in vaccination rate even though we are the society with most access. I'd be extremely happy if people could come to the correct conclusion themselves. I don't want to allow their failure to harm the rest of us.
What you're arguing against, then, isn't "rugged individualism", it's "the sanctity of human life". The difference is that the one says "individual human freedom is paramount" while the other says "each individual human life is paramount".
Neither ethic would approve of systematically killing people for the greater good, but they're two very different ethics in most other respects. For example, I could arrive at "vaccination should be mandated" from a sanctity-of-life perspective, but I never could from a rugged individualism perspective.
Not quite. My thesis is "The idea that society needs permission to better itself is misguided." It's not limited to human life at all. It's about rejecting your thesis of "Tesla's self-driving beta is unethical because most of the participants in this "experiment" did not opt in." We don't need permission to save lives.
Tesla's self-driving beta is unethical because most of the participants in this "experiment" did not opt in. Most of the people killed by Tesla won't be their customers. It will be the cyclist or the pedestrian that gets killed because the driver thought "full self driving" meant the car was fully driving itself. They didn't even know they were part of an experiment that day, yet they were the sacrifice that Tesla was willing to make.