Refusing to weigh lives against future threats can itself be a moral evasion.

Evidence

Later, both Sartre and Beauvoir moved away from this view, and would decide that one could and even must weigh and measure lives in a judicious way, and that the Alyosha position was an evasion of that duty. They came to feel that refusing to do the calculation — setting one baby now against millions of future babies — was merely selfish or squeamish. If this sounds like an antiquated argument advanced only by wild Communist dreamers, we might remind ourselves that apparently civilised countries have sought to justify tortures, imprisonments, killings and intrusive surveillance in the same way in our own time, citing unspecified future threats to an unspecified number of people. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 775

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: the uncomfortable genealogy connecting existentialist ‘we must calculate’ arguments to contemporary security-state justifications of torture and surveillance.
• XREF: connects to: Ethically clean answers to catastrophe may not exist as formulated. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 70; Refusing a genuine possibility of liberation is a moral fault. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 33; Refusing to confront rational murder threatens our humanity itself (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Refusing a genuine possibility of liberation is a moral fault. #expands (0.82) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 33
• Refusing to confront rational murder threatens our humanity itself #corroborates (0.78)
• The refusal to choose is itself a choice. #expands (0.74) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 26