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?
What an incredibly bizarre prompt.
Your assets can be divided up evenly when you die, making the whole thing moot.
Edit: Wait…OP are you describing your siblings or something? Lol.
Yes, roughly speaking. They’re representations. It’s a hypothetical scenario where I was hoping people would discuss the points of discussion, not technicalities.
Even accepting the premise that this inheritance is indivisible, their jobs are far from the most important factor.
But if you had to measure that aspect, which one would have the greatest measure?
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.
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.
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.
This reads like a school assignment.
Not really a school assignment, if anything it’s based on a common family discussion. The ending is dramatized though because I thought it would make it feel more like the kind of question it’s supposed to be, but based on people taking it literally, it seems not.
They all sound insufferablly stubborn.
I can only assume I am as well as their father, so I’m eating whatever it is before I go.
I wouldn’t have seven children.
Given the (very contrived) constraints, I suppose I’d try to maximize utility. The “things”, from what I can tell, are needed most by child 1 and 7 as all the others are capable of making a living themselves. Between the two, I’d opt for #7 as they are at least providing utility to others, even if it is just for a short time.
The question is a bit misleading but I understand the desired output is an ordering of the children based on the information provided and our own personal values.
I will start with some thoughts on each child:
- If they are not doing anything while waiting to be accepted, then they got to work on themselves. They could be starting personal projects, learning new things, exploring new hobbies, volunteering… whatever being frozen like that feels sad.
- They are true to themselves, and I applaud them for that.
- No problem with working for the mob, there are far worse things they could be doing.
- I would need to know their intent behind what they are doing, ethics are not black and white, maybe they see some merit to their endeavours and maybe they are right in the end. The specific example would send them to the very bottom of my list (ACAB).
- I am willing to bet there is a phobia for that, I would try to give them the support they need to find their calling.
- I am not against progress, it’s not their fault that people will lose their jobs. In the first place it wouldn’t have been an issue if people weren’t so dependent on our capitalistic overlords.
- They are taking a break, it makes sense to me, keep it up pall, in no time you would be finding new ways to create a better world for all of us.
Overall, I feel the descriptions are too judgy, people are doing the best they can, and you got to give them that.
If I had to choose a single child I would go with #7.
Overall my ordering is 6,7 > 2,3 > 1,5 > 4
Whichever one brings me the Golden Fleece.
If my only measure of worth was someone’s job and the circumstances they acquired it, I would say that it is entirely irresponsible to make any fair judgement.
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Sell all assets, setup trust to fund health care and education - up to state school tuition levels- for all genetic descendents.
The children will either find their way, or not. They are all adults, grandchildren need the safety net.
