I’d flip a coin.
-FrL-
what?
By any chance, are you going to be in the next Batman movie?
Okay, so it’s thirty five or forty years in the future. The United States has collapsed like the Soviet Union, the economy is an utter shambles, and the federal government has little or no control over large areas of the country. As in the Balkans, various militias have sprung up mostly along ethnic and/or racial lines to secure for themselves desperately needed resources.
To provide any sort of future at all for your children, you will have to support the local militia which is driving Hispanics and/or blacks out of your city or state, killing tens of thousands in the process.
Would you do it? Bear in mind, they’re trying to ethnically cleanse you and your kids as well.
Something I posted in the other thread about this in the pit:
Absolutely nothing makes my or mine’s life more special than yours. That’s the point. Neither is your life more special than my kid’s.
I really don’t see how people are justifying not doing everything humanly possible to keep their own children alive. It’s completely, utterly bizarre to me. Basically, you’re saying that you’ve been given a choice that will 100% save your kid, but you’re not going to take it. Why? Let’s review the reasons:
- You and the kid will be permanently emotionally scarred.
- Someone else’s life isn’t worth less than your own child’s.
- It’s immoral.
- Society frowns upon that.
- There might be vengeance takers.
Well, let’s see. #1 can be immediately cast aside as irrelevant. In my mind, being alive is usually quite preferable to being dead. That includes being alive and feeling a bit guilty. Since the scenario isn’t completely described, we can even speculate that the child doesn’t even have to know what you did to save them. They might not understand, if they are young. Alternately, both my kid and I might just oh, I don’t know, get over it.
#2 I addressed above, but I think this connects nicely with #3 as well. In essence, the naysayers are arguing that because killing someone else is immoral I should allow my child to be killed. Think about that for a moment. You are necessarily indirectly killing your own kid. Infanticide. That’s right. If you don’t kill that innocent stranger, you’re going to go to bed tonight with the weight of your child’s death on your shoulders. You could have saved them.
BUT, according to many on this board, you could be content with that. You could essentially be content with trading your own moral righteousness for your son or daughter’s life. That is sick.
As to #4, again, I don’t see how this is relevant. How society sees or remembers you shouldn’t really be coming into a life and death equation. And besides, I don’t think many of the people driveling on about this crap realize that the public might actually be sympathetic toward a person who made this decision.
Actually, we have plenty of movies, stories, books, etc. that depict very similar sympathetic characters. The once noble nuclear physicist forced to work in the labs of an arch villain who happens to have the physicist’s daughter locked in a nearby cell. Do you really want me to list examples of heroes and other positive, sympathetic characters in literature and film who displayed this exact kind of thinking?
No one said that we wouldn’t feel remorse afterward or during, after all.
As to #5, we can only cross that bridge when we get to it. If someone tries to kill you or your kid, you should defend yourself and your kid with all you have. For the “perfect stranger” in this scenario, if he/she could fight, I would expect them to do so. I’d have the utmost pity for them. I’d understand that they need to fight too. And if they won, I don’t think that I could blame them for the death of my child. I understand that they, too, are just trying to live.
EDIT: I also don’t understand this name-calling of “sociopath.” Sociopaths are devoid of empathy, but I’d be willing to bet that both scumpup and I are seen in our everyday lives as being quite empathetic. Hell, I cry at certain movies and get completely caught up in the lives of others on occasion. But I could still do this.
I just can’t fathom this moral posturing that many on this board seem devoted to at the expense of their theoretical child. Because we’re supposed to have “risen above” we should be obligated to sacrifice our own kid’s life? I hope that lofty moral pillow is a good cushion for your knees while you beg for forgiveness.
Seriously, enough already with the long and drawn out impossible hypothetical situations. What in the world does adding ethnic cleansing and complete government collapse actually ADD to this goofy discussion?
You’re poised waiting to scream “Racist!” or something of the sort. Since, in this thread and its Pit sister, I’ve already been called a sociopath, a monster, evil, and fucked up (among other things), I can’t imagine what your motivation is in adding this clumsily laid trap. Would it somehow be worse if I killed 40 million blacks and Puerto Ricans than if I just killed 40 million people who were a random cross section of society?
To me it’s two different questions (or maybe three).
- Would I kill to protect my children? Yes. I don’t have any myself yet, but even my niece I would kill to protect her from harm or death. But this assumes that anyone attacking or doing anything to her is not innocent.
- Would I kill in order to guarantee that my child lives? No. This would in my mind either fall into killing an innocent to harvest their organs or some such, in which case I would say no, or else killing innocents to guarantee my family’s life in some sort of imaginary ‘kill or be killed’ situation which I still think would be ‘no.’
The third semi-question is would I sacrifice myself for my children, to which the answer is of course yes.
This thread has included some of the most shocking opinions I’ve ever heard on any topic.
“well, my child is more important to me than the population of Australia”
Having money in my bank account matters to me more than whether some stranger has money in their account. So there we are: stealing justified.
What next? Rape? Sure – my sexual gratification matters to me more than the emotional well-being of a stranger (that is to say: people get raped every day and it doesn’t affect my life, but getting laid would), so I may as well just go out and rape women, right?
The only thing maintaining my faith in mankind is the suspicion that most or all of the “anything for my child” respondents would actually not be able to do the things in real life that they’ve claimed they would do.
To that end, we could ask: “What’s the worst thing that anyone here has actually done for their child?”. All the real-world stories mentioned so far were relatively trivial and were not directed against someone totally innocent.
Has anyone done anything that we’d ordinarily consider immoral, to an innocent party, for the sake of their child? How do you feel about it now?
I suspect that people are finding it scary for the same reason I am: several people I care about, (including me,) obviously fall into the category of people-who-can-be-murdered-to-save-“x.” It’s unsettling that someone would break into my house to murder me, steal my possessions, and use the money for their kids operation when I did nothing to them. It’s anti-social. Society is based on the idea that I will care somewhat about you so that you will care somewhat about me; that we will take mutually beneficial actions; or at the very least not take action against the group solely for your own benefit. (Saving yourself or your kid is solely for your own benefit, especially when you’re acting against society to do it.)
This is specifically the sort of behavior we banded together into societies to prevent. We banded together to minimize the chance that people were going to walk up behind us, whack us with a club, and take our stuff to feed THEIR families.
Like I said, decidedly anti-social. Which is why people have been bandying about the sociopath moniker.
You want to think your life, (read “life and family,”) is most important. I want to think my life is most important. Natural instinct. If I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder waiting for the time you think I can be sacrificed for you, I need to take you out right now… But wait, there is some benefit to all arising from living in groups, so we have to come to some agreement on how to live together. And it’s no longer every individual fending for himself, it’s the group deciding how the group survives. Group survival becomes more important than individual survival. (Why? Because individual survival is enhanced in the group; more survive in the group than would outside it, even if some are sacrificed for the group.) And the one thing the group doesn’t need is someone acting against it from inside.
Enough people think this and anyone could be the target for anyone else. The more people that are willing to kill innocents to save their own family, the more that will be willing to kill innocents to make life better for their family, the more that will be willing to kill to … get a nice pair of shoes. It’s a continuum, and most human activity can be charted on a Bell curve. If the mean societal attitude was to kill innocents to save their children, then almost half the society would do it for less. And some for MUCH less.
If we are going to be social animals, we have to have at least some social thoughts. Ok, so you lose a child because you won’t act against the group. At least you’re still part of the group, and that enhances your chances of surviving to raise another child. But if you acted against the group, the group is going to have to hunt you down and remove your ability to protect your current offspring, (and your ability to have more.)
Which makes NO sense from a genetic survival point of view, since after one generation: you’re dead, you’re son is dead and humanity is dead. No grandchildren, no future relatives of you. You doomed all of humanity to make one individual intensely miserable and hopeless. Not a good trade in my book. You’ld have to at least give him a single mate. (and after all, isn’t genetic survival exactly what the protect your offspring instinct is all about?)
Well, I know that I’d join or support a militia under such circumstances–and bear in mind I consider it likely that exactly such a scenario will eventually play out in America some time in the next century if we don’t get immigration under control and quit mismanaging our economy. It’s just that there seems to be a lot of macho swaggering on this thread.
I find it interesting, though, that you apparently don’t mind telling people you’re willing to commit mass murder on a Hitlerian or Stalinesque scale but the thought of appearing racist disturbs you.
Like Mijin, I suspect most of the more extreme posters here would not actually be able to carry through with it if they were faced with such a choice in real life. I know that it would be next to impossible for me to kill in cold blood, no matter what was at stake.
Well said. I really think human behavior comes down to just these sort of subconsious calculations based on the value we put on things.
You want that new pair of Nikes. You put a certain value on that. You put a certain value on not being caught stealing. Do the math, Nikes comes out ahead. You’re getting those Nikes. So, what do you do?
Oh look, you have the money. You just buy them.
You don’t have the money. You steal them.
Does having the money and buying them make you moral? Or do you have a problem with the value you put on them in the first place? (Ok, maybe YOU don’t have a problem with it, but does society?)
So, does society try to make sure everyone has enough money to buy the things they put that much value on? Or does it try to promote more value to socially acceptable things?
No, I think it goes beyond mere cynical estimates of self-interest, however sub-conscious. I think humans are social animals who have a need to belong to a group, to have respect and acceptance from others, and I think we suffer when we are denied a way of satisfying that need. Of course, obviously cynical self-interest is still often a critical factor in human behavior.
Because I’m not racist and though I’d be willing to murder whole nations for reasons I’ve already given, racism isn’t part of the equation. Would I kill the people of Nigeria to save my child? Yes. Would I kill them because they are (mostly) black? No.
Just to clarify: I was condemning the reasoning being employed by the “anything for my child” brigade. Their reasoning can be used to defend any immoral action.
w.r.t. your point
We can say that human behaviour is driven by values of things – that we try to achieve what we consider to be the greater good. Personally I’d prefer not to think this way because it gives a misleading impression of how our minds work and how we choose actions. It’s describing decisions in this simple way that causes some people to make the error of concluding “there’s no such thing as a selfless act”.
Certainly with your examples of Nike trainers versus the risk of being caught stealing – you’re describing every human being as being opportunistic. Well, I for one, don’t steal because I see it as morally wrong and destructive to society. If you want to use value-based language, I guess I place a high value on an orderly, safe, society.
And morally it’s somehow not as terrible to kill millions of people for selfish reasons as it is to kill them for racial reasons? 
Whose set of moral standards are you using? Your own, I guess. I see the two acts as different, and while I would do one without hesitation, I would never do the other.
I find it extremely telling that in both of the threads on this subject no one has sought to address any of my points I bring up in my earlier post.
If you’re going to take the view that the social good is greater than the individual good, at least be so kind as to do as ch4rl3s did and admit that it’s your own equally selfish reasons that prompt you to do so.
Admit that it’s your fear of yours being threatened. Admit that it’s an equally cold calculus of broken social contracts, and of making sacrifice of an individual to feed the whole. Admit that it’s the survival of yours and yourself that you’re ultimately kowtowing to in your supposedly morally superior argument.
Because otherwise, the naysayers here don’t seem to have much of an argument at all. Other than it’s “plain wrong,” of course 
And I’m still waiting for responses to my earlier rebuttal.
But how are they supposed to be different? Morally, what’s the difference?
Why we do something is as important as what we do.
Best child / murder debate to ever come down the pike: Would you shoot…and kill your child in this situation?