I have no idea. I just hate Germans. 
But to answer your question a little more seriously, then if the Jews really had been a threat to Germany, such that the destruction of Judaism was neccesary for Germany to survive, then what Germany did would have been rational. Do you disagree?
More generally, the way I see it, in terms of my personal framework, “I’d rather neither you or I get killed, but if one of us has to, better you than me.”
Hmm. Is “condo-dwellers” one word?
Let’s examine the premise that no person is worth more than any other person.
The problem is, no one actually behaves this way, and it’s easy to see why. A parent who abandons their child to care for a random stranger isn’t likely to successfully reproduce. The human instincts that compell us to care for our children over all other humans on the planet are there because human beings that didn’t have those instincts wouldn’t perpetuate themselves.
No one expects parents to abandon their children to help strangers, correct? It isn’t shocking that parents expend a lot of energy to protect particular children, yet do absolutely nothing to help other children on the far side of the globe, right? Anyone shocked and horrified by this behavior? No one willing to claim to be shocked and horrified that parents in the US provide their children with food, clothing, shelter, affection, and so on, yet there are children dying in Darfur right now that need that food, clothing, shelter, affection, and so on more?
What’s the difference between strangling a child to death with your bare hands to save your child, and not sending a child in Darfur lifesaving medicine? Is there a difference? Of course there’s a difference. The difference is that the first action is the action of a sociopath, the other action is the action of a normal human being.
The people who claim that every human life is equal aren’t saving kids in Darfur, they’re typing on a message board. Why is that? Because our moral senses weren’t created by some deity, they were created by evolution. People who help their families and their friends were the ones who tended to prosper. And people who didn’t help their families and friends tended not to prosper, whether they were out helping strangers in Darfur, or helping only themselves.
And if we was, “what is a human life worth?”, the answer is clearly zero. Except to other human beings. And if human life is zero, then every death is just as meaningless as any other death, and thousands and millions of dead are just as meaningless as one death. So I can easily accept the idea that my life has zero value to you, but it has a high value for me. My children’s lives have zero value for you, but high value for me. I don’t expect you to value my children’s lives as highly as I value them, and empirical evidence shows that you don’t in fact value my children as highly as I value them, because I didn’t see you over at my house yesterday changing poopy diapers.
So anyone who claims to value my children’s lives as highly as I value them is simply lying. It’s not true. That doesn’t make you a monster, that you weren’t changing poopy diapers with me, that makes you a human being.
Now, what are the consequences of that? It means that I can easily imagine offering violence to anyone who threatened my children. I would argue that I have a moral right to kill anyone who was going to kill one of my children. But if every human life has equal worth I shouldn’t do that…after all, the murderer’s life is just as valuable as the child’s life, right? Except that’s not true. To the universe, both lives are worth zero. To me, my children’s lives are not worth zero, but the murderer’s life is, or maybe it has negative value, which means that it would be immoral NOT to kill him.
I don’t see why this is so hard to figure out.
I bolded the part that I felt was you are arguing by affirming the consequent. You’re essentially arguing that “if a person who would strangle a child to save his/her own child is a sociopath, and this person would strangle a child to save his/her own child, then this person is a sociopath” without actually proving or arguing in any real way that the first premise is true. You start out the argument assuming your argument’s premises to be true.
Meanwhile, you conveniently analyze the situation to have only one difference. That one is “the act of a sociopath” and that the other is “human.” You start out assuming also that most humans wouldn’t do such a thing as we are describing here, but no one has proved that, either. I think people would be surprised at the results of such a polling, and at how despite that our society continues to function.
To be frank, I don’t understand if this is actually supposed to be an argument against us or not. Because, besides the part I talked about above, the entire sum of your argument seems to support the idea that your children are more important to you than others. It’s a realization that objectively no life is worth more than any other, but that you subjectively value some lives more than others.
I think several people here are jumping to conclusions. Just because some of us would reluctantly take this path doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t experience revulsion. We’re saying that revulsion to doing something like this wouldn’t/shouldn’t stop us from making what we feel is the correct choice in this matter. It’s not even the “correct” choice in terms of society because that’s not the criterion we are using.
I’m tempted to make a new pit thread pitting people who wouldn’t be willing to go this far to save their own children. For me, a society that can’t find any kind of value in the needs of the individual is a society that doesn’t need individuals.
To turn some of these ridiculous hypotheticals around, I find many of you to be as monstrous as you may see me. You look, to me, like the other extreme. You’re willing to put society ahead of your children and your life. Your placidness and unwillingness to protect your children wouldn’t serve you well in the ancient past. And, in more recent times, I don’t think we’d have the same level of civil liberties and economic prosperity had we not been driven by the thought of our children needing a revolution. Whatever the revolution may have been.
You represent to me the machine. The social Orwellian, utilitarian leviathan that squashes individualism as a trade off for an added sense of security and piousness. To me, you are not human. You – clearly – are the sociopath, because you can’t empathize with that human impulse.
Finally, I’m still miffed that no one has taken the time to go back and refute my argument in Post #253 . I honestly want to debate this with the other side. So, please, do respond. Unless the only argument that you can come up with against it is that it’s “just plain wrong,” I’d really appreciate some discussion as to the veracity of the argument provided.
I wasn’t talking about you:
It is not possible to strange a whole elementary school without a qualm if you are empathizing with the pain and terror the children feel as they die and the immeasurable pain their parents will feel when they learn what happened.
This statement is incorrect simply because the scenario given is practically impossible, and therefore cannot have had any effect at all on “serving you well.”
Keep in mind the scenario includes the assurance that you will never be caught and that your child will live healthily afterwards. Both impossible assurances in real life.
Even without those impossibilities, the scenario of murdering an innocent who is not threatening you somehow saving your child is vanishingly rare.
The crux of your argument is that by not murdering other innocent children to save your child, you are actually murdering your own child.
I can’t disagree more with your definition. By that standard, we are all constantly murdering. I cannot say your feelings are wrong, but I can say that your definition is flawed.
I will give you my reasons, but due to their personal nature I doubt they will be convincing.
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I strongly believe that it would be morally wrong. My own moral code is not based on what society thinks is right, and I would gladly break any law I disagree with. I strongly believe that strangling a school full of kids to death would be morally wrong, even if I knew it would extend the life of my own child.
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I also feel it would be wrong at the gut level. I would not hesitate to kill someone who threatens my family, nor would I hesitate on who to save if my child and a stranger were drowning. But the idea of strangling innocent children who have nothing to do with it disgusts me. My gut tells me it would be wrong.
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You can’t ignore the influence of religion. This could be the deciding factor for many people. If you think there is even a chance of an afterlife, you would think very hard before damning yourself to hell for eternity to extend your child’s life on earth a bit longer.
I am not telling you that I am right. The morals that I believe in, what I feel, and the influence of religion are not things I can say are “right.”
It is possible that the logical choice would be to strangle any number of innocent children to save your own child.
However, if that is the case, then it would also be logical to murder innocents for any number of other things that one values more than the life of a stranger.
You should murder for your child’s happiness, murder to prevent him from being disabled, murder to keep him out of jail, etc, if you value those more than the life of a stranger.
Thanks ErmesMarana. I was getting depressed that no one actually wanted to talk about this, despite 6 pages of “discussion.”
For the record, I’ve been avoiding talking about the escalation of the scenario to killing a grade school/Australia, etc. I apologize for assuming that you were referring to everyone on this side of the argument when you said that.
Personally, I do believe scale would be a weighty factor. So, because it complicates the original intent of the question, I think that kind of escalation ought to be avoided so we can talk about the real meat behind the original scenario.
Killing one other person, presumably innocent, for your child.
I think that you could do so while maintaining good empathy for the other human being. Even if it is only a temporary thing, or even if it were only self-inflicted deception. Just hope that the stranger is as empathetic as you are and can understand and empathize with the reason why you are trying to take his/her life.
As I said in my post #253, there are plenty of examples of supremely sympathetic characters in literature and film who fit this description. They are, without a doubt, designed to garner sympathy from the audience. They do, and they are effective as these kinds of devices for a reason.
Of course it’s rare. Life almost never gives us a guarantee like this, but that’s not a reason to not argue within the original scenario’s parameters. Not if you say you’re willing to argue inside those parameters in the first place. Otherwise, you’re starting a game of Monopoly and changing the rules of the game midway through.
I meant something a little different in the part that you quoted than you interpreted, though. When I said ancient past, I meant as an extrapolation of the principle to other scenarios. The principle I’ve been using is that it is quite understandable for an individual to harm other innocent individuals in order to keep his/her child safe from harm. As an example, the uneducated street thief who steals to feed her toddler. For all that I believe in the letter of the law, I cannot pit her for doing this.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t support her punishment should she be caught. In the case of a murder instead, of course she ought to be punished if caught. But I think there is reasonable grounds for leniency when it’s the preservation of her child that drove her motives.
I don’t see where I said that we’re constantly murdering. What I did say that in the context of this scenario, given the clear-cut and obvious results of either action you take, you would be responsible in this case of the murder of your own child. I’m granting your earlier point that such a well defined scenario would be outstandingly rare; however, that is our current battleground. It’s the terrain we’ve been given.
As to your points, I respect where you’re coming from, but I cannot relate to them as arguments. Gut levels, religious mandates, and an arbitrary moral fabric don’t by themselves convince me of their being ethical or “correct.”
I also believe it’s incorrect to extrapolate the principle here beyond the scope of the original scenario. Just because it’s “worth it” in this special case doesn’t mean that it’s a worthwhile or reasonable choice in ALL considerations. Don’t set me up with a straw man here.
Why? Once the hypothetical became ridiculous (i.e. a microsecond after it was written), there’s no reason to limit your response. Who would you kill to save your child? Another child? A family? A city? A continent? Unless somebody can present me with a plausible scenario where even one murder will save my child, why not go for ten, or a hundred, or a million, or a hundred million? Why not describe committing torture and rape and arson and blindings and acid-dunkings and mass castrations and disemboweling?
I don’t think Scumpup’s a sociopath, myself. I think he lacks imagination for merely saying he would destroy Australia. Compared to what he could’ve claimed (and conveniently never have to prove), he’s a piker.
You’re all pikers.
Because then you’re essentially turning the argument’s focus away from the individuals involved to this weird, broad, social terrain that you seem more comfortable with. I’m not comfortable with that, and I DO see a difference.
If the original intent of the scenario was as you described, the OP might as well have asked whether it was ok to sacrifice 1,000,000 people to save 5,000,000 people.
This argument was never focused. It can only ever be focused if someone can provide a realistic scenario where:
[ul][li]The subject’s child will certainly die unless action is taken[/li][li]The subject’s child will certainly live if the subject kills someone[/li][li]No other options exist[/ul][/li]
No, the OP may as well have asked who believed in God, or some other unprovable. It’s a test that can never be taken, let alone evaluated.
Sure, I’d kill 500,000,000 to save one. And I don’t even have to like the one that much. The one could be a real jerk. I might even hate the one. I might kill the 500,000,000 and then pick up a shotgun and make it 500,000,001. Why would I do this? For the hell of it, of course. Any answer anyone can give is meaningless, as well as any assessment one can give of another’s answer, so why not admit it?
Make it 5,000,000,000, why not? Heck, add the ability to reach through time, past and future, and make it 50,000,000,000.
Puppies, too.
Look at the title of this thread. Read the first post.
Does it apply to you?
If not, why are you arguing?
Killing one person to save one other person is very different from strangling an elementary school to save one person, and I would not claim you were a sociopath or evil for the former.
I also think that the specifics of the scenario matter. I have sympathy for a parent whose child is kept as a hostage by terrorists. This is the type of situation you would see in movies. The terrorists are largely responsible for what happens.
I have very little sympathy for someone who strangles an elementary school to magically save their child. Or for that matter, someone who kidnaps an innocent child and cuts out their heart to transplant into their own child.
I am arguing within the parameters of the hypothetical.
But if you try to apply it to real life, I can point out that in real life it is impossible to have the knowledge that you will never be caught and that your child will live healthily afterward. It isn’t just rare, it is downright impossible.
You were the one who went outside the parameters by applying it to real life.
If I claimed that you would murder in real life based on your answer here, I would be just as wrong.
You extrapolated “strangling an innocent child to death” to “stealing some food”?
There is no way to extrapolate the situation to any other situation that does not involve the murder of an innocent. The entire point of the scenario is the murder of the innocent. Anyone would steal food.
Luckily, strangling innocent children to death does not confer an advantage in real life. On the contrary, since in real life you do not have the magical ability to never be caught, stranglers probably did not fare as well as non-stranglers, as a whole.
Again, your definition of murder is creative, but makes little sense and has little resemblance to the standard definition.
There is no single word for “refraining from murdering an innocent child to extend the life of your own child.”
Probably because the situation does not occur often enough to require its own word.
It isn’t an arbitrary moral fabric, it is a very specific one. The one I believe in.
I believe that strangling innocent children to death is worse than not strangling them to death even knowing that my child will die if I don’t.
I can’t explain how I came to have these beliefs about morality, I just do.
And you are misunderstanding the religious aspect. It has nothing to do with a religious mandate.
It has to do with the fact that if an afterlife exists, then a short extension of life on earth is hardly worth an eternity of damnation. If an afterlife exists, I can be with my child there. I personally do not know if an afterlife exists, but this can be a very persuasive reason to anyone who believes there is a good chance it does.
And just because it is wrong to kill in this special case, do not extrapolate that to mean that it would be wrong to kill to protect your child in ALL cases.