Narwhal (narwhal)'s status on Wednesday, 28-Oct-15 17:14:55 UTC
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@metaltao Okay, lemme break it down for you. The concept of "fungibility" relates to the properties of units of commodities in a set. For something to be fungible, it needs to be mutually replaceable with another unit. The easiest example of this is money in an insular system. 1 American dollar can be substituted for another American dollar without any loss or gain in value, so an American dollar is fungible. "Moral fungibilty" is therefore the study of how our actions can or can't be justified based on their results, as well as how one life is valued against another. The real idea is we can't truly evaluate the fungibility of ethically delicate cases because things like our actions and human lives are non-fungible, so they'll never equal each other. It's kind of a counter-argument to Machiavellianism involving people- you can never justify the means with the ends because the values of the two are intrinsically incomparable.
