I don’t think morality is binary. There are usually multiple options. Not just in this extreme situation, but in the majority of moral situations. You and your wife aren’t getting along. What should you do? There are a range of options from repairing the marriage to killing your wife. Getting divorced is in between. Acquiring a mistress and living with the situation is in between.
I don’t condemn Giamanco, but neither do I aspire to being like him. His actions were in between. He killed a young man in moderately cold blood. (Carefully aimed…) Was it better than letting the young man continue killing innocents? Absolutely.
I would, on the other hand, be happy to have the skills to amputate a gangrenous arm safely from a person who chose that treatment. Consensual medical aid is not the same as taking a life.
Usually not. But when there are other victims who can’t run away, it is less bad than running away.
And again, i recognize I’m probably an outlier here. But it makes me uncomfortable with this story.
I don’t understand what having multiple actions has to do with whether any of them are moral or not. In the case of my wife and I, going to a marriage counselor sounds like a moral choice but then divorce is a moral choice as well. Acquiring a mistress seems like an immoral choice even if it’s not as immoral as say murdering her.
You said it’s never moral to kill someone which means Giamanco was morally wrong. That sure sounds like a condemantion to me. If he was justified in shooting the attacker then his actions can’t be morally wrong.
It is moral to take what appears to be the least bad choice when all the choices are bad. (So yes, sometimes it’s moral to use violence to defend oneself or others.) That doesn’t turn any of those bad options into good options.
I think a lot of people are having trouble with the concept that it’s sometimes morally correct to do something that’s wrong. But sometimes it is.
That child was not a gangrenous limb. He may have been even more dangerous; it may have been necessary to kill him; and even if it wasn’t the person who did so may well have seen no better choice in the heat of the moment. But he was a human being, not a mindless piece of flesh.
If there’s really only one choice, then morality doesn’t even come into it. But there’s almost always more than one choice. (Doing nothing is also a choice.)
Suppose that you hate Diet Pepsi, and on top of that you think that Pepsi’s a terrible company that does a lot of harm. On your way to protest Pepsi’s behavior, you get lost and have to walk a long way in hot weather; you get seriously dehydrated. Somebody offers you a Diet Pepsi. There’s nothing else to drink, and you’re in serious danger from dehydration. You choke it down.
Does that mean that you must now like Diet Pepsi and think well of the company? Or can you continue to think that they’re both terrible?
Not sure that I follow. The least bad thing can still be pretty awful.
If the least bad thing isn’t bad at all, that’s ideal. But for that to happen it has to be something that’s actually not bad. Suppose this whole thing could have been avoided by someone hugging the teenager at the right moment (not that I think the solution would have been that easy.) Then the least bad thing would have been a good thing. But the argument in this case is that shooting him was the least bad thing. Again, that doesn’t make it a good thing.
For me, it’s possible that the right choice is immoral. There were no moral choices available, and the least bad choice is correct, but that doesn’t make it a positive.
A wise man once told me I had to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em. I’m just going to have to accept that we’re so far apart on this that there’s no place we’ll meet. That’s okay. It happens.
About the response, not the weapon: the shotgun seems to have been pump-action, meaning that the shooter could not fire as fast as he could pull the trigger, like you’d find with a semi-automatic.
Does that change anyone’s thoughts on the responses of tackling and shooting the killer?
For me, not really. We don’t know (and importantly, neither the teacher nor the father knew) whether there was a shell in the chamber. And even if there weren’t, if the shooter regained control of the weapon for less than a second, it could be pumped and reloaded.
It does indeed. And I think you may be in the majority on this one; though there are some in this thread who appear to agree with me. And I hope some others can at least see what we’re saying; because I think it matters. However, I also doubt that any further discussion will help.
I wouldn’t know how to tell a pump action from a semi automatic by looking at it. And even if both the people intervening could, did they have a good enough view and time to do so? I also don’t see how it changes anything. Even if they knew he had to pause firing for a moment, whether to pump or to reload, it was still a courageous thing to do.
I have spun off a post and reply that were again, a very clear debate on the safety and decision making of civilian shooters in this and similar scenarios. I do this with great reluctance, because as I asked earlier, I’d have preferred one of your fine posters to do so. As the alternate was another warning, or closing this thread with an offer to re-open in the Pit, I found it, in the words of this thread “a necessary evil”.
Take all such discussions to the new thread, if we continue to get more here, then closing the thread is a very likely next step.
To all that have avoided the siren call of the sub-topic, a heartfelt thank you.
I think that using the terms “good” and “bad” here is not the best choice. Because talking about killing a 16 year old as being “good” can bring on cognitive dissonance.
I think “optimal” works better than "good " in this situation. Was the adult discharging his weapon and killing the young shooter the optimal choice?
Would it matter if it wasn’t the optimal choice? Both the teacher who attacked the young shooter and the man who killed him, Giamanco, were faced with the immediacy of a very stressful situation and were unlikely to have the presence of mind to reflect upon what might be the optimal choice.
I didn’t phrase my previous post well. I didn’t mean the last sentence - “Was the adult discharging his weapon and killing the young shooter the optimal choice?” as a literal question, I meant that should be the phrasing of the thought.
Really screwy writing on my part. Sorry.*
I am only talking about the terms people are using afterward when discussing the incident. I think too many people get tripped up thinking of the killing of a teenager as being a good thing. It doesn’t feel quite right to many folks. As I said: cognitive dissonance.
I think “optimal” is better than “good” for describing the decision to shoot the kid.
How about thinking of it in terms of “opportunity cost”
Yes, its horrible, it sucks that its needed, its a disgusting situation to find yourself in…
But if he didnt act the way he did.. what is the next worst thing forgone?
Do we accept that it would gave been more dead kids?
If we accept that it was Gianmincos shooting, and ONLY his shooting that prevented this, he was right.
If we think there could have been other actions taken, even if they were only likely, but not guaranteed, to work then the answer is no.
The real question is what value of “likely” do we need to be willing to accept? And how well do we expect someone to be able to evaluate that in the heat of the moment?
Id hope that for myself, likely should run at about 70-80% if it means taking a life
Given that there was no school resource officer on-site, there were almost certainly no tasers, no pepper balls, no 40mm baton rounds available. There were apparently only two people willing to confront the shooter. To my mind, that puts the likelihood of them successfully stopping the shooter by any other means somewhere around 50% at best.
The age of the shooter doesn’t really matter to me. Whether he’s 16 or 76 or 6, the goal is to save the lives of the innocent. 100% is the optimal number there.
I’m not sure I agree. Imagine you say that you think I made a good choice, and I smugly reply that I made the optimal choice — and then I demand that you tell me whether I’m a good man, and you sputter that you think I am. “No,” I say, “I’m the OPTIMAL man!”
