If curing cancer for the rest of humanity now and forever required knowingly experimenting on and absolutely killing a certain number of people now, how many people could you justify with an Effective-Altruism ethical framework?
Not meaning to be inflammatory but the same scenario exists in flipped terms: how many people would you let die of cancer rather than, idk, eat the downside of running riskier experiments.
There’s no privileged neutral really. Consequentialism just owns that. Now, that might be a separate question from whether society should act as if there’s a privileged neutral (ie be nonconsequentialist).
Isn’t the inverse more, there will never be a cure for cancer, so how many people can you justify killing to confirm that?
All I know is that when humanity faced the decision with respect to WWII medical experiments , the decision was made to not utilize the data, regardless of potential benefits.
Depends on your expected remaining lifetime of the human race? (since from that you might compute the expected cancer deaths over that time and then you can do a simple comparison)
