Yours would likely be family or close relatives.
I think you’d take money to do something untoward if that was the alternative. Almost everybody would. And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that.
Aside from the problems of this statement being a completely vague and unspecific and extreme hypothetical, isn’t there a problem with switching from talking about incentives to talking about threats? Being threatened with death isn’t the same as being offered money, and this ground has been well covered by philosophers who point out that there are things wrong with “admitting that” as you call it. Calling it a price tag seems misleading at best. There’s further a massive problem with suggesting a person’s ethics might be based on what someone threatening them with death wants them to do, no? If the action isn’t something you are choosing to do, and isn’t something you would do if not threatened, for any amount of money, then why would you consider it your actions or part of your ethics?
It helps to frame it this way, because once you accept that you’d do that, you’re more likely to accept you would do something unethical for a billion dollars if it had no consequences to you. And from there, it’s a binary search to determine exactly what your price is.
Would you be able to say you wouldn’t lie to your wife if it meant you’d walk away with a billion dollars? Certainly this is contrived, but all examples in this territory are contrived.
Compare “kill this person to save your son’s life” with “kill this person to earn $1 million.” They’re not equivalent, even if both might be metaphorically referred to as a price.
The illusion that they feel different is extremely powerful. It’s worth resisting. It helps uncover all kinds of ways that we contribute to unethical behavior, if only through inaction.
The concept of having a price attached to your ethics is essential. Without it, people fool themselves into believing they’re above temptation. In my experience those same people tend to be the most vulnerable to it.
OP branched here: "it's not as if the choices were 'commit crime / get bounty'."
Any example relevant to OP's branch cannot end with the subject in a river. The very fact that you are discussing it proves we've jumped to the other branch of the conditional-- the one where the choice is exclusively between `commit crime / get bounty` (by threat of death in your example)
tldr; goto considered harmful on HN
