A good general rule to follow in any deal, is don’t make a deal unless you know why the other guy wants it. This is especially true when the terms of the deal are of high value, and even more so true when the other guy is an alien about whose motivations you know absolutely nothing. Toss in the fact that the other party to the deal is deliberately keeping you in the dark about their motivations, and there’s no way I’d make any such deal.
Ethically, I don’t think one may toss away any human being for one’s own betterment.
It just doesn’t get clearer than that.
This came to my mind too.
I have to admit my decision was based on some assumptions that I didn’t mention in the OP, one was that the payment would certainly be made and that it was a sure thing that it would benefit the entire world. If either of those assumptions were in question (and I could see why they would be) then the bet would be off. The other is that there was some actual ambiguity to the fate of those taken. The question came from a short story (I only know about it by word of mouth so I couldn’t tell you title or author) and IIRC there was enough evidence that death was not the fate of the 12.9% that a fair amount of them voted in favor of it. If death / enslavement / torture / or anything of the sort were an assured fate I would be against it as well.
In the real world, or in a less contrived story, I do have trouble seeing the benefits actually going evenly to the whole world. The cures would somehow be patented and prices would be prohibitively high, or the cures would only work temporarily and the diseases would mutate and be as bad if not worse. So in a real life situation where uncertainties abound I could not say that I would be in favor of it.
With that in mind I notice that people seem to be stuck on the unlimited energy aspect, I was looking more at the cure for disease, every year after this event (in the slightly less than real world of the story) you could count on millions and millions of people being saved from AIDS, malaria, cancer, etc. and at that point I think it comes closer to the more interesting and specific question posed by ** Stranger On A Train**, sacrifice for survival. Which is closer to my question of is the good of the small group worth sacrificing for the good (or in this case survival) of the overall group.
I knew this sounded familiar.
See http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/bell23.htm.
Derrick Bell’s “The Space Traders’ Solution”.
Here’s how I’d handle it if I was the president (addressing the nation via a “fireside chat”):
"Dear beloved black people of America. As you know, alien beings from another world have landed and have made us a generous and reasonable offer. But please know that I, along with all of our fellow Americans, don’t want you to go.
And while it’s true that we’ve certainly had our share of misunderstandings over the course of history; when you get down to it, we’re really all one, big, happy family with a deep sense of love and respect for each other.
Therefore; I am going to let you (blacks) decide if you’d prefer to head off into space with our visitors from another galaxy, or if you’d prefer to continue living here with us loving and generous Caucasians in the good old US of A, so that our mutual love and affection might continue to grow."
And if you do decide that it’s time to part ways, then please know that’ll we’ll miss you something terribly. So good luck and good night; and make whatever choice you feel is best for you, we’ll understand."
There, you see, it would be decided by blacks in a national vote, with the majority deciding; thus all would be happy campers!
Re the OP, my answer is no, this wouldn’t be acceptable, and I don’t have to think about it for more than a second or two.
In fact, to me, the far more interesting question centers on speculating about what proportion of our population would think it’s a good idea, and why.
This is all you need to know to answer the question.
Only seconds before the “So now only blacks can vote?” screed.
Five. Four. Three…
This is why I favored the idea of a specific 12.9%, either by pre-named lottery or by group. It makes it altruistic suicide rather than extermination. There is a big difference there. Or even better getting volunteers, I would be curious as to how many volunteers could actually be found, as I said before I would gladly volunteer (a fact that skewed my original post I would imagine) but I have no idea about how many others would.
Wouldn’t even consider it.
Leaving the aliens and black people out of it: would it be acceptable to experiment on 13% of the population to cure all the diseases in the remainder? Would it be okay to confiscate the property and ownings of 13% of the population to make the rest more affluent? To take the food of almost 1/7 of America to give more to the rest?
You realize in this system, even if everyone who is eligible votes, you could end up sending away more unwilling people than willing? What about children and the mentally ill? They get sacrificed with no say?
I think even asking the question would be horrible (not to mention the implications of bigotry, which have already been discussed). It’d just be a passive-aggressive way of pressuring people to say yes when they shouldn’t.
I thought, you know, that the good of the many outweighs the good of the few…and all that. 
Myself, I wouldn’t sacrifice ONE person, of any color or creed for the ‘good of society’. ‘Society’ be damned if they require such a sacrifice. But then, you know, I’m not my brothers keeper, etc etc.
That Galt guy…who the hell is he anyway?
-XT
And if the vote was 19,000,499 to 19,000,501 (either way), would your president simply accept the vote? Or would immediately see a rush by supporters of both sides to go out and come up with another idiotic definition of who was black? One drop rule? One grandparent? Three grandparents?
I’m afraid that that sounds too much like a dodge to avoid the moral question by creating a situation in which this one group will be held accountable for whatever bad thing happens to them: hauled off to the barbecue? Their choice! Stay? They become “responsible” for every good thing that does not happen!
The moral choice when an outside force names a group to be sacrificed is to say “No.”
Eric Blair is introducing a new nutational mode to the Earth’s rotation from his tomb in response to this statement. :rolleyes:
Asking someone to sacrifice themselves for your pleasure is no less reprehensible than commanding them to do so; beyond the claim that such service is strictly voluntary is the implication that the group that you have segregated by your request is somehow obligated to demonstrate the requisite altruism to suit the pleasure of the rest, and those who fail to do so would no doubt be viewed with some measure of contempt or resentment by some portion of the rest of the population who would have benefited had they done so. This would be like taking a class full of second graders, insisting that they all pool their lunch money to buy ice cream cones, and then distributing the cones to only a select few. Those to be left out would understandibly balk at contributing funds to the pool, save for those so cowed that they believe that they deserve to be slighted. I realize the tenets of the OP allow for an uncertainty regarding the fate of the people to be taken but given the lack of forthrightness regarding that issue a prudent leader would assume that it is not benevolent.
No, the appropriate answer by a principled leader would be “Thanks for the offer, but our nation stands in unity for the protection and benefit of all of our citizens, regardless of ethnicity, skin color, creed, occupation, body mass index, taste in movies, et cetera, and we therefore have to respectively decline your generous but conditional offer owing to the unacceptible requistes therein. Please give our regards to your hideous, bug-eyed, rubbery-skinned Emperor, and let us know if your conditions change.”
Indeed, it occurs to me that a wise and benevolent race of aliens might be conducting this test simply to check our unity, fearing that if we were willing to accept these conditions that we’d merely use the proffered technology to further subjugate some groups of our population and more effectively wage war on other nations, and thus, in demonstrating our lack of principles to permit us to handle the technology in a peaceful and prudent manner we’d be denied the benefits.
When you give up your principles–or ask others to do so–in pursuit of your own comfort and benefit, you lose any ability to distinguish between what is ethical and what is not. First you give up the neighbors, then you sell the children into slavery, then you start pimping the wife…pretty soon, you might as well shoot the dog, too.
Stranger
Two. One.
ping
“Say, Bob, did you hear something just now?”
“I think that was a pin dropping, Fred.”
Stranger
Except those black voters who, y’know, didn’t want to be sent away.
Yeah I’m with the people who say it wouldn’t be right to even sacrifice one person. Even without the alien gifts, our standard of living would go up if 12% of the population (of any race) was vaporized, but that doesn’t make that okay. And why would a human being side with an unknown alien against a member of his own race (in the species sense)? I really don’t think I’d trust someone who forced such a choice on someone else; I’d suspect foul play.
An interesting corollary: say the government, without even taking it to a vote, rejected this offer. What would be the implications for black people? Would they be under even greater prejudice for “denying” new technology to the rest of America? Would some white Americans be compelled to make blacks “prove their worth” by demanding more from them?
That is an interesting corollary indeed (and more likely than any alternative). I would imagine that it would just increase an already existant gap. People who had a particular dislike of blacks to begin with would simply dislike them even more, blaming them for not being taken away for the good of others, while those who have no dislike of them would not begrudge them in the least. I can’t see how any truely non-racist person could possibly hold it against the entire group.
Yeah, and the advice Bill Bennett would give matches this fellow Doper’s-
Diogenes the Cynic
… It’s not morally acceptable to sacrifice even one innocent person for personal gain.
Btw, did the OP remind anyone of “V”?
I think it’s relatively easy for any one nation to refuse the offer, so long as they were the only nation involved. But all bets are off if the aliens make a similar offer to *all the nations of the world * (be the minority an ethnic one, a religious one, or even the country’s population of convicted criminals/felons/sex offenders), and if the peoples of the world also knew that the offer was a universal one. In such a scenario, the most progressive and principled nations would suffer a post-alien competitive disadvantage to the others…
And if it were up to me, and if the sacrificed subset were, say, convicted sex offenders, and the bait included cures to all known diseases, I’d pounce on the offer. Sure, it’d be a human rights travesty and all that, and we’d erect a fancy, expensive monument commemorating the sacrifice made by our dear departed sex offenders to the greater good, but we’d also revel in the saving of decent fellow citizens otherwise lost to disease and mental illness. That’s an extremely rigged hypothetical, but one which the moral absolutist stance (of refusing to sacrifice even one person, no matter the potential gain) would also have to reject to remain philosophically consistent. But that’s a moral high ground that I’m too pragmatic to espouse unconditionally.
The way the original question is asked, I think you’d have to be pretty damned pessimistic about the state of the country in order to vote yes. Yeah, we have our problems, the debt is bad and energy consumption is worse, but all told we’re doing pretty well, thank you, and we can muddle through just fine without sacrificing a seventh of our population. Later on the OP changed the emphasis to the world-wide benefits of having all disease cured…which really does give someone more pause for thought. I still don’t think I could bring myself to vote for it, but instead of having Americans vote for it, lets move the analogy to a country like, say, Congo. You’re living in a country where something like half of the adults of a working age are dropping dead of AIDS, a lot of the rest are plagued by other diseases long since eradicated in other parts of the world, there is chronic crime and unrest, you’re country has been mired in various wars for as long as you can remember. Aliens come along and promise to cure you of all of these problems (and, for the sake of the analogy, you have no doubt that they’ll follow through on it), but you have to sacrifice 13 percent of your population to, most likely, death. That certainly makes things a bit tougher, and I don’t know how I’d vote in that situation. If half the people around you are in their death throes anyways, how could you not vote to sacrifice a minority for the majority good?
Of course, a good sci-fi writer might be able to come up with a clever way in which getting all we wish for – cures for disease, peace, etc. – could end up as a nightmare. Can’t see yet how that could happen, but you never know.