If I eliminated Australia out of animosity, whether I saved my child wouldn’t matter, Australia would be gone regardless. I’ve already stated animosity has no bearing on this question, whether we are talking one person or a nation.
So far, those who disagree with me are very unconvincing. Your arguments boil down to either “it’s just plain wrong” or a bizarre idea that I should allow my child to die for some kind of rainbows-and-unicorns socialist utopia.
Just so.
And you’re still not seeing the distinction that we know it’s immoral. We’re not arguing that it’s moral. I, at least, understand that it is immoral, but people are often caught between two paths that are both immoral.
That study points out exactly what everyone has been saying on both sides. What I’m trying to figure out is why that’s hard for some other people to figure out.
And that somehow makes it less monstrous? If you asked a Serb militiaman why he engaged in ethnic cleansing, he would tell you he was protecting his family and his people, reasons that sound very much like yours. I don’t see how what you propose to do is somehow not as bad as what that Serb militiaman has done.
Well, certainly we haven’t convinced you.
Who’s talking about Utopia here? We’re contemplating the question as to whether or not you’d kill strangers who have done no wrong to save your own child. You’re quite right to defy those who would allow your child to perish for the sake of some crackpot social scheme, but what are you not willing to do to preserve the life of your child? Sailors adrift at sea sometimes resorted to cannibalism; but first, they drew lots. They didn’t merely kill and eat the weakest. Even in so extreme a situation as that, they still recognized human rights.
If my child were dying, and the only way to save her was to steal an extremely expensive medicine, I’d do it. It would be against my moral code, but I’d still do it. But what I wouldn’t do, is kill the pharmacist to get the medicine.
What wouldn’t you do?
People are talking past each other because everyone is thinking of wildly different scenarios.
The specific scenario makes all the difference.
Switching the track of an out of control train to hit another innocent child instead of your own.
Following the orders of a terrorist to assassinate an innocent person so they will release your child.
Murdering an innocent child so that their organs can be transplanted into your own child.
Strangling an elementary school and bottling their dying tears to create an elixir to extend the life of your child.
I suspect most people would switch the track in the first scenario, even if they believed it was the wrong choice.
In the second scenario, many people would abstain, but would still be sympathetic towards those who went through with it. The terrorists take partial responsibility for the murder.
Few would go through with the last scenario, and people would not be sympathetic. There is something seriously wrong with anyone who would go through with this one, but that is covered in the other thread.
The third scenario, in which you murder one innocent child to take their organs for your own child, is the one there would be more of a split on.
The crux of the argument for those who are saying they would do this, is that not doing so would be murdering your own child.
This is the reason your argument falls apart.
We can come up with a word to describe “Refraining from murdering and extracting the organs of an innocent child to give the organs to your dying child”, but murder is not the right word. Not by the standard definition, and not by any sensible extrapolation of the standard definition.
Maybe for others, but I’ve never made any such claim. As I’ve said since the beginning of this thread, it’s all about me valuing my daughter’s life more than that of strangers. Let’s try using arithmatic to clarify. For the sake of ease, I’ll assign my daughter’s life a value to me of 1. The life of a stranger I’ve never met and I’m never going to meet has a value of 0. Now, you do the math. How many times 0 equals 1? That’s right. No matter what number by which you multiply 0, it will never equal 1.
True, that response did not apply to you. Only to those who try to create a false equivalence between murdering a child for her organs or refraining from murdering a child for her organs.
Your argument does not have a flaw, and I cannot say you are wrong.
The truth is, if our short lives on earth are all we have, then it might be logical to be committing murders regularly if we knew we could get away with it.
The same argument would justify murdering for anything one values more than the life of a stranger. In my case, I have a long list of things I care about more than the life of a stranger. For example, I value my own happiness or the happiness of any member of my family more than the life of a stranger. Since you assign a value of zero to the life of a stranger, your list would be even longer.
In other words, your same logic would justify almost any murder ever committed. People murder because they value what they gain more than they value the lives of those they kill. However, this is precisely the criteria you are using to determine if the murder is justified.
Good, this is what I’ve been waiting for someone to say.
So if you accept that it’s immoral, surely you accept that it’s an action that you should avoid doing, whatever your instincts are telling you.
Just as because I think sexual assualt is immoral, I ignore my instinct to reach out and grope a hot woman.
I suspect you might say “letting your child die is more immoral” but the whole point of my last post is that actually, no, most people do not seem to think that way. And you claimed to agree with my last post.
Incidentally, the scenario is not as hypothetical as some here have suggested: it’s believed that some suicide bombings have been committed this way.
The terrorists target an employee of some high-security facility, who will not be scrutinized as carefully as a stranger would be. They kidnap the employee’s family, and tell him that if he doesn’t go to the facility and detonate a bomb, they will kill the entire family.
Assuming this has in fact happened, it appears that some of those saying they would murder innocent people to save their child’s life aren’t just flappin’ their gums.
And those who have carried out such bombings are doing so despite the distinct possibility that the terrorists won’t actually release their family after the bombing – i.e., they’re killing innocent people in the hope that it will save their children.