Suppose you had seven children.
All of them, having reached the age of maturity, were jobless and were encouraged to find a job.
Child one keeps applying for different jobs in the technology industry but nobody will accept them. However, they keep trying and trying. They are like Sisyphus. They also aren’t doing anything as they wait.
Child two makes themselves exclusive to doing odds and ends for a decent amount of money. While child one thinks jobs should be sought via the application process, child two is averse enough to this that the inconsistency of what they do day to day is intentional.
Child three applied an actual application for an “actual” job and found one. The catch? It’s an organized crime job. However, it’s not immoral even though it’s illegal. They’re the personal household assistant of the mob boss. They too get paid immensely.
Child four also applied an actual application for an “actual” job and found one. The catch? It’s not illegal but has ethical issues involved. They mastermind ways to monitor and deal with those considered national threats. They too get paid immensely.
Child five, too, applied an actual application for an “actual” job, but it’s something they’re utterly terrible at doing, skill-wise. They’re tasked with therapy but have so little skill it’s considered useless. Child five, despite this flaw, gets paid decently by the office building.
Child six applied for a job and was appointed into one that had the completely foreseeable result of causing many dozens of people to lose their own job. They maintain a scenery-modifying machine which caused and still threatens to cause many scenery workers to become like spare cogs wandering the streets in search of a purpose. Child six too gets paid well, despite also having a version of their job that undermines the importance of the profession itself.
Finally, child seven is a volunteer, one with no ethical or legal issues involved, no issues finding a job, and no limits whatsoever in what they can do for others, and they do it all for free. However, after a few months of doing it, they think “that’s enough for me” and they never do a deed again.
One day, you realize you are passing away and summon all seven children to your home. You have specific things, all of which only one child can inherit, and due to the nature of these things, it has to be the child whose deeds make them out to seem the worthiest, as it’s the only tiebreaker. Which child do you prioritize as being the best candidate for the one with the highest worth?
This hypothetical makes no sense to me. Why couldn’t they all be given something of value? If the dying person only has one valuable item then sell it and share the money equally. If the dying person doesn’t want the item to be sold then set up a sharing agreement where they each get to have it for equal amounts of time. Etc. But even in your version of it you say the dying person has several things of value to give away. I don’t understand the premise or point of this hypothetical.
Because the point of the hypothetical scenario wasn’t to be realistic, it was to ask about the worth of goodwill via a circumstantial comparison. It even says “hypothetical” in the title, which would presume it’s supposed to suspend one’s expectations of real processes.
I’ll be more blunt then. It’s a badly composed hypothetical.
You wouldn’t be wrong. I’m not necessarily good at those. Though I didn’t think a few quirks would cause such a post to become incapable of being discussed.
A hypothetical should be absolutely as barebones minimal as it can possibly be. The point of a hypothetical is to isolate the actual point you’re trying to ask about. In the one you wrote, i think what you’re trying to ask is “How should we value people’s ambition, success, and ethics?” So the setup should be something like this:
“You’re tasked with giving a million dollars to one of the following random people. All you know about them is these descriptions you were handed.”
And then after the descriptions of the people just say "Who would you choose to give the money to?
Most of the problem was the phrasing. But in my head it required expansion. I see now this was a mistake.
That’s how all us humans learn how to do things. You try something and see how it could be done better next time. Then you try again over and over until you’re good at it.
If that’s accurate advice, I wish it felt that way here.
Yeah, the whole kids and inheritance thing is a really big sticking point. I saw your other comment about this being based on a discussion your family has had. The thing is, that even if your family was discussing jobs on the surface, if the people they are picking from are other family members (or at least people they actually know), their decisions are weighed by all their other knowledge and feelings about those people.
I can see you’re trying to figure out how much value people put on each of these particular career cicurmastances in isolation but kids and inheritance is just a terrible framing for that for the above reasons. As a framing exercise, I think the question would have needed to be framed in a way that puts the reader in a much more distant position. This could be something like:
An eccentric billionaire gives you the following list of people and tells you to choose one person from the list for him to give a million dollars to. The billionaire says you must make your decision based solely on the list. Who do you choose and why did you make that choice?
Still maybe not a great framing, but it helps alleviate some of the rejection of the premise.