Winston Churchill was presented with a tough call in World War II. He had cracked a top secret German code that enabled him to know private details about German movements. He found out that a section of (London?) was going to be bombed heavily one particular night. He had 2 options:
Inform the citizens of the impending crisis and evacuate them immediately.
Do not tell the citizens, because if the Germans realised that they had been evacuated, they would know that the English had cracked their code.
Churchill chose the latter, and many died in the bombing, but his decision turned out to be correct in terms of the importance of information he was able to obtain from the Germans in later years.
I present a scenario (hypothetical and impractical, I know, but here it is).
You are in a room with 1 million boys in the early 1900s. You know that one of these boys will grow up to be Adolf Hitler. You have the option to kill all of them or none of them. What do you do?
Considering that you know Hitler will grow up and be responsible for many millions of deaths.
Which option here is the lesser of 2 evils? Do you take that option?
I’m unsure if your Churchhill information is confirmed history or speculation.
The Hitler scenario that you present was brought up in the novel The Boys From Brazil.
Regarding the general question, I would say that it would depend alot on whether you were killing the people directly, or whether you were taking indirect action. In the latter example, it is impossible to avoid. E.g. the FDA withholds aproval from a drug pending a study of the dangers, knowing that some lives will likely be lost as a result, and other such policy matters.
Unless evil is your goal, of course. Now to return to your room with a million boys in it. Foregoing the temptation to off the lot of them, just to stop the noise, you can’t know that you don’t have Young Master Churchill, YM Patton, YM Eisenhower, YM Roosevelt…in there with YM Hitler. So I would not off the lot of them, I’d just get out as quickly as possible.
You also don’t know if YM Hitler, given the chance to grow up all over again, would follow the same course. Likewise you don’t know if he would have avoided some Tommie’s bayonet in WWI.
The problem is not whether or not the correct option is always the lesser of two evils (it is) but identifying which of the evils it is. Part of getting along with this corporeality stuff is identifying the best option of those available, then committing to it absolutely, while remaining available to change your mind as circumstances change.
actually i have never heard of adolf hitler killing anyone himself. maybe he killed someone as a soldier in WWI, but i haven’t run across it mentioned. people are so eager to put all the blame for WWII, european theater on him. are you saying if someone takes stupid orders they bear no responsibility? by the way, it appears that henry ford donated to the nazi party in the 20’s. does that mean we should have offed young ford and hitler never would have risen to power. when someone invents a time machine we’re going to be in real trouble.
Dal, I don’t want you to think that I didn’t respond because I agreed with you. Rather, I’d prefer for you to know I’m ignoring the (for lack of a better word) points you raise, for two reasons:
they really are too stupid for me to waste my time upon
I could not honestly express my feelings for them without this thread moving to The Pit.
Person A: B, I order you to kill this baby we have in front of us.
Person B: C, you heard the man, hand me the gun.
Person C: [handing gun over] D, better give him the clip or he’ll have to club the baby to death!
Person D: [handing the clip over] Here ya go B, shoot him once for me too!
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Now, I think most everyone can agree that all involved above were responsible for the death, from A on down to D, despite the fact that B actually pulled the trigger.