Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35711173-20180804233042/@comment-2007196-20180808204050

As with any endeavour, I believe we should carefully consider how our actions might influence others in writing and therefore ethics does play a role. Whether or not the choice to publish a work that may be potentially used for harm depends on a number of factors. First of all, think about the ethical theory you're using (or subscribe to, if you're the type of person who uses only one). We tend to assume a utilitarian stance by default but you should really ask yourself if that's right in this case. Which matters more, the intention or the consequences? (or for that matter, something else entirely. For example, Kant would say that the Categorical Imperative imparts a duty to cultivate one's talents)

If you can't decide on which, try weighing them against each other. It's a bit like comparing apples and oranges except that you're juggling them and the oranges have spikes and the apples are on fire. Does the story have a moral? Does the inherent value of expressing that moral (even if few or no people listen to it...) outweigh the potential harm it could do? This same idea is frequently expressed in the scientific community; the moral value of truth has to be weighed against the consequences of revealing that truth (think of the nuclear bomb, or, for a more recent transpiring, the CRISPr gene editing tool). Usually, in science, the truth comes out anyway, but safeguards against its use are put into place (effectiveness of these safeguards has been-more-or-less limited, though)

If you've decided to view it from a consequence-only perspective, consider how many people might be helped by this story, then consider how many people might be harmed. Consider the type of injury or aid the story might provide. If your story provides a few shits-n-giggles and murders 12 people, maybe better not to post it. If it saves 2 lives and murders 1, then you're morally obligated to do so (if you're only considering consequences in numbers). But how do we know if these scenarios will happen?

We can use some (very) rough calculations to determine this. A common metric in risk-analysis is to get the average number of deaths; multiply the people killed by the chances of it happening. In other words, if you have a 10% chance of killing 100 people, then your average deaths are 10 people. (Or 1.666microhitlers ) Using this metric, we can get an idea of how bad your story is.

If we assume that every one of the17250 murders in 2016 represent a "unique murder" i.e. a murder where the killer is not a repeat offender, and the victim is not killed by multiple murderers, then we get [100*(17250 murders/300 million people)] = 0.0000575 U.S. murderers per person (I could not find a reliable worldwide stat, so this analysis will focus on the U.S.). We'll assume that this is the number of potential murderers today. Now, wikia has 17 million unique views as of 2011, but I can't find a reliable way to determine how many unique views per day. Alexa rank says that less than 2% come from this wiki. Wikia says that the whole of wikia gets 260k edits per day, so even if we assume that all edits come from unique viewers, we get [260k views/day*2%] = 5200 views/day. Now, this wiki has over 11000 pages, which means the chance of reading your story is around 1/11000 unless you get PotM. So the chances of one of thos 5200 people reading it is (5200views/day)/11000 = 0.47 views/day.

If a potential murderer who reads your pasta immediately murders after reading it, then the chance of your pasta causing a potential murderer to become an actual one is [(0.0000575 murderers/person)*(0.47 views/day)] = 0.000003 murderer views per person per day, then divide out views per person. Luckily, we made the assumption that this is 1 earlier when we said each view was always unique, so we get 0.000003 murderers per day. If murderers always kill 46 people, then we get 0.000138 murders/day. Meaning that in a year, your pasta causes [0.000138 murders/day*365 days] = roughly 1/2 a murder per year, or 0.833 nanohitlers. For perspective, this means that sneezing on your coworker when you're sick is more unethical than writing this, since flu kills 60k people a year (100 microhitlers).

Of course, this calculation relies on a lot of estimations, and (probably) flawed assumptions. If you believe in divine retribution, use it at your own risk. It also assumes a utilitarian framework, which you may or may not philosophically align with. It also relies on my mathematical skill, which means that there's certainly a grave mistake there, either in the math itself or the units. So I wouldn't hand it over to the Foundation's Ethics Commitee just yet. :)