re: #192 Obdicut (Now with 2% less brain)

If I presented people with that, they absolutely would choose, and you would have data that did not sit in the middle of the scale.

Is there some reason you don’t find the above examples of choosing between horrific things convincing? I’m really not understanding your argument at this point, unless your argument is solely confined to Hitler and Stalin—but I thought you were using them to illustrate a general point about not being able to say ‘better’ about two really terrible things.

First off, it would be interesting to know how many do choose the neutral option. It doesn’t have to be “most” people for such a choice to be “common enough”.

Anyway, I’m sort of iffy about using such formal tests to judge the issue under discussion. For me it’s not about “making the choice” itself (even if a choice on a test), but about “choosing words”/verbally framing on one’s own, outside the test constraints. Yes, I can always specify parameters by which horrible things can be judged to be better or worse, I will just usually refuse to even specify such parameters.

The choice between Stalin and Hitler (in WWII) is clear for most people. When confronted with a question of whom to support most people will make that choice. Whether they will also verbally formulate, outside the test constraints, their thoughts in the form of “Stalin was better than Hitler” (or this for any of those other things) is a different issue. I frankly doubt that.

People may say though that “a death from a bullet is better than a death from cancer” while refusing to say “Ted Bundy was better than Andrey Chikatilo”, unless you specifically nudge them in the direction of “better=less victims” metric, thus making the word “better” less vague and more amenable to a “choice”, even if this metric would only make sense within the test context.

In the case of deaths the metric seems intuitively obvious: long+painful v. quick. Plus it’s more or less a tradition to talk about “good death”, etc., so this counter-example is not so “pure”.