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02 March 2025
On a walk, I saw up ahead a house with three unleashed dogs in the yard and two owners, who seemed to want to get the dogs to get in the owners' car. Two dogs complied, and one paused to smell a plant for a while. I was approaching during this time.
I approached cautiously, not knowing these dogs. They didn't seem aggressive, but you never know. They might have become aware of me and wanted to drive me away from their territory. I was on the opposite side of the street. Once having approached me, they might have gotten distracted by their new physical location and started to run away from the owners' house.
I passed, and nothing came of it.
Why were these dogs unleashed? Presumably because the owners thought that the 15 or 20 feet from their front door to their car wasn't that far. Too much trouble, leashing their three dogs.
From the owners' perspective, what were their benefits and risks of their unleashed dogs? Benefits: their dogs' canine affections. The benefit of not bothering to leash a dog -- a small act in itself, but perhaps they were tired of dealing with details. Risks: a dog running away, a dog intimidating a person, a dog biting a human -- that dog perhaps needing to be put down.
I can understand what the owners did from their perspective. I myself have to balance risk and benefit, a task for which there doesn't seem to always be a manual, and to the extent that there is, it's tiring to read it.
From my perspective, what were the benefits and risks of their unleashed dog? Benefits: not much, maybe none. Risks: being intimidated by a dog, being bit by a dog, having to manage my approach so that the dogs wouldn't approach me and maybe run away.
Maybe they didn't think of people like me when they decided not to leash their dogs.
From a practical-minded perspective, we could say that if you are having trouble weighing risks and benefits, consider if there are third parties who might have to take on externalities of your risk-benefit decision. If it's unclear how to balance risk and benefit from your own perspective, consider their perspective. Maybe for them they only get risks, (or even, only get benefits), clarifying your decision.
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I like this basic principle, but I'm ambivalent about the example given. On the one hand, I think it's good to be on the side of not harming humans and dogs. On the other hand, there can be worse things than dog bites, or dogs having to be put down, or getting hit by a car while wandering away from home, or any other kind of temporal harm. If we think doing the right thing means "being responsible so that people (or animals) don't suffer in this life", then we could eliminate parts of life that help people avoid suffering after this life, things that help them live forever. The temporal harm is concrete, and we'll be held accountable for it by other people. But the eternal harm, or risk, may not be as palpable to us. (Not as true if we train our intuitions on the belief that eternal harm is possible, and that things like an anti-ethical orientation, a lack of moral excellence, etc. lead to that.)
So I would say that the example above may be misleading for being too temporal. Not that temporal harm doesn't matter, instrumentally and inherently, but because it's not the most important problem in the end, inherently.
Ultimately, determining what is right and wrong, specifically, involves looking at the whole of a situation and relying on our intuition to trade off risks, given the unknown. This applies when all we consider is temporal harm, and perhaps even more so when considering eternal harm. A lot of times, we're wrapped up in protecting ourselves so that we can live our lives (true both of temporal and eternal altruists). That's the risk-benefit calculation we perform by default. But we might clarify that decision by considering other people's well-being, both from a temporal and an eternal perspective.