> MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical: you are hiking in the forest and you drop a bottle. It breaks into sharp glass shards. You expect a barefoot child to run down the trail and injure herself. Should you pick up the shards? What if it the trail is rarely used, and it would be a whole year before the expected injury? What if it is very rarely used, and it would be a millennium?
This is a really bad hypothetical! I've done a lot of barefoot running. The sharp edges of glass erode very quickly, and glass quickly becomes pretty much harmless to barefoot runners unless it has been recently broken (less than a week in most outdoor conditions). Even if it's still sharp, it's not a very serious threat (I've cut my foot fairly early in a run and had no trouble running many more miles with no lasting harm done). When you run barefoot you watch where you step and would simply not step on the glass. And trail running is extremely advanced for barefooters - rocks and branches are far more dangerous to a barefoot runner than glass, so any child who can comfortably run on a trail has experience and very tough feet, and would not be threatened by mere glass shards. This is a scenario imagined by someone who has clearly never ran even a mile unshod.
> MacAskill introduces long-termism with the Broken Bottle hypothetical: you are hiking in the forest and you drop a bottle. It breaks into sharp glass shards. You expect a barefoot child to run down the trail and injure herself. Should you pick up the shards? What if it the trail is rarely used, and it would be a whole year before the expected injury? What if it is very rarely used, and it would be a millennium?
This is a really bad hypothetical! I've done a lot of barefoot running. The sharp edges of glass erode very quickly, and glass quickly becomes pretty much harmless to barefoot runners unless it has been recently broken (less than a week in most outdoor conditions). Even if it's still sharp, it's not a very serious threat (I've cut my foot fairly early in a run and had no trouble running many more miles with no lasting harm done). When you run barefoot you watch where you step and would simply not step on the glass. And trail running is extremely advanced for barefooters - rocks and branches are far more dangerous to a barefoot runner than glass, so any child who can comfortably run on a trail has experience and very tough feet, and would not be threatened by mere glass shards. This is a scenario imagined by someone who has clearly never ran even a mile unshod.