If my kids were starving I would steal food for them, if I couldn’t get it any other way.
I imagine the deep emotional value of being able to keep one’s own child would be somewhat diminished by the vast hordes of people with deceased relatives out for your blood.
I don’t have kids, so I don’t know which way i’d go (and judging by reactions so far, having kids doesn’t automatically mean you go one way). I would assume that I would value my kid’s lives above all else. And I might/probably/possibly would kill all those people - but I think i’d be wrong to do so. Selfishness is ok sometimes, but on such a large scale? I’m not just valuing the life of my child over the lives of many people, i’m saying that the love I have for my hypothetical children in this hypothetical situation* is worth much more than the love between all those people I kill. To me, personally, emotionally? Sure. People die all the time that I don’t know and I remain unaffected. It seems that emotions are prized above many things as a reason to do bad things; give someone vast riches to kill a shitload of people? Why, they’re bastards of the highest order. But for the emotional reward (or lack of) of keeping your kids? Other than getting hypothetical points for adding another hypothetical situation, I don’t see why huge emotional benefit is enough to make something right to do. As an excuse for having done it? Yes. As a means to make things right? No more than me paying you a shitload of cash would make you a bastion of righteousness.
I sympathise. I might even do the same thing (parents can now mock me for even questioning it one way or the other). But I wouldn’t be right to.
*What we need is a hypothetical poster to make an argument and then we’re set.
Perhaps children are the reason why people go to war. People worry that another group is going to hurt their precious little babies and that’s enough for them to throw bombs at one another.
Love. It’s a killer.
Man, what a morbid fucking question to be pondering. “Here, ponder this ethical dilemma you are highly unlikely to ever face, but no matter what you do, A CHILD DIES!!!”
Why are we thinking so hard about dead children hmmm?
It’s sort of about the children, but in a much more abstract way. Ultimately it’s about creating space for your tribe to expand into. Generally people go to war based upon ecological pressure. It is rare that people who have all that they need go to war against their neighbors. That’s why religious wars are so disturbing, they are sometimes divorced from biological necessity.
Everyone alive today is descended from people willing to kill to protect their children; otherwise, they wouldn’t be alive today.
Anyway…
Thank you, Tamerlane, for a measured, reasonable response. For everyone else, as the quote goes, what we have here is failure to communicate. I don’t like it any more than you do.
I’d like to stress something which I feel I haven’t stressed enough: all those radical hypothetical acts I suggested, and which (to my honest surprise) seemed to clash so much with people’s sensabilities, only apply to the most extreme of situations. Survival situations, in fact - not the survival of individuals, as I’d like to believe myself capable of sacrificing my life for a stranger, but the survival of groups. You’ll probably just see this as evidence of my obvious insanity (cue the “Reply” button!), but I see myself as a highly moral individual, and I believe in an objective morality. It’s just that I don’t believe that on any scale beyond the personal, a purely moral life is ever possible. That’s because morality is not the only force motivating human behaviour. There’s necessity, and there’s also obligation, which is also known as duty or responsiblity. Not just obligation towards all of mankind - which, actually, is just another word for morality - but obligation towards other individuals, towards groups, towards nations; all the bonds we humans bear and will continue to be forced to bear until all mankind can drop its differences and live together in harmony. Which means probably never.
Do these bonds of obligation trump conventional morality? Sometimes they do. In fact, the I believe that the more extreme the stuation, the greater their importance. Does that make me a monster? I suppose plenty of you will press their “Reply” buttons to type a resounding YES, but if I am, then you’re all just a bunch of naive dilettantes with no understanding of your own history and no understanding of the world outside your own, who live comfortably on the spoils of your ancestors’ crimes while treating life as if it had simple answers, and forgetting the motto upon which your country was founded: United We Stand. So there.
Still, I’m sorry I brought up my example re: Germany. My advice to you is, never let an Israeli, no matter how liberal or enlightened, start talking about Germans.
Please don’t try and excuse your obvious sociopathy by passing it off as existentialist.
I tend to believe the opposite: that the more extreme the situation, the more conventional morality should prevail. I once told my best friend that if I knew he was robbing banks (which he would never do) I would turn him in to the police.
I might support trade policies that would benefit my country’s economy at the expense of others. But I would never support the interests of “my own” if it meant the mass slaughter of others. In such an extreme situation, I think the bonds of obligation must break.
As for history, I really don’t care what my ancestors did to protect their own. We do not owe any debt to the dead.
It’s a nasty, shitty world out there, true. A world that your children are going to grow up in. Are you going to teach them that they should be nasty, shitty people to survive in it? Take what you can get and fuck everyone else? People thinking that way is the reason WHY it’s a nasty, shitty world out there. A Catch 22 which humans will never break out of unless enough of us are prepared to aspire for better.
It’s no coincidence that there are places in the world where life isn’t quite so apalling. Where we don’t worry about neighbouring tribes, local warlords and other fuckheads turning up and massacreing everybody. It’s the work of thousands of years of individuals who aspired to make the world LESS nasty and shitty. Plato, Aesop, Jesus, Buddha, Voltaire, Swift, Ghandi, Mandela… All people who dared to imagine that it doesn’t have to be dog-eat-dog all the time. It’s because of them and people like them that we have what we have. Accountability and scrutiny of those in power, equality of opportunity, equality before the law… these concepts didn’t just spring up like mushrooms. Our (barely!) civilised societies are built on the ideas of philosophers and humanitarians and dreamers over centuries. And the whole time it’s been a constant, grinding battle against people like you and Shagnasty.
I’m not saying that you’re always wrong to think in that way. In some kind of post-Apocalyptic scenario where there’s 5 times as many survivors as the land can support without mechanised agriculture, you can bet I’m going to tool up, loot, hoard, and hunker down with my loved ones behind a barricade. That’s understandable, reasonable even, because that’s the playing field we’d all be facing, my poor benighted fellow survivors and their own loved ones in the same situation. Same with the “who get’s the parachutes” question. But you stated that you’d invade a home and kill the family for the money in their safe. Presumably, in the context of the OP, to pay for your daughter’s life-saving operation. Or you’d strangle a whole elementary school. That’s not dog-eat-dog, that’s an empathy so atrophied as to be a survival disadvantage. How can you ever trust anyone? How can anyone ever trust you?
You’re talking about “thought experiments” and I don’t think they are useless, even if you define circumstances that are impossible in real life. Einstein used them to reason his way through his understanding of time and space, which has revolutionized the scientific world.
Now, this particular thought experiment… it’s interesting in a kind of abstract way to see who on these boards declares themselves to be sociopaths, whether or not they are willing to apply the term. I basically agree with the OP --if you’re willing to kill innocent strangers in order to save innocent family members, you are fucked up. We can hope these people were making some intellectual point, that they would never follow through on IRL, but have painted themselves into a corner here because they are not willing to admit it. But maybe not. Maybe Australie shoulf be afraid, very afraid.
For those of us who have German ancestry, or Dopers posting from Germany, as a matter of fact, you are.
Why is it okay to commit genocide to save another group from genocide?
Why is it OK to kill someone in self defense?
(And don’t say that killing someone in self defense isn’t the same as killing aninnocent - self defense laws say nothing about the guilt of the attacker, only about the danger to the defender. I can easily imagine a case where someone can be forced to legitimately kill an innocent person in self defense.)
Furthermore, why should a nation willing to commit genocide against another bation for no good reason - and other than self-defense, there is no good reason to commit genocide - be allowed to do so? Why must evil win?
Yes, I know, by commiting self-defensive genocide I will also be evil (admit it - you were about to say that yourselves). I accept that. However, I will not be as evil as someone committing genocide for any other reason, and I’ll also have the added bonus of not being dead.
On a personal level, maybe I’d prefer to die for my beliefs. But on a national level I’d rather my people be morally compromised and alive than noble and dead.
A good many of you responding to this thread missed or are ignoring the if-then nature of the controversial posts to the orginal thread. IF it would save my child, THEN I would kill a stranger/whole nation. Nobody said anything about killing them for fun or wantonly. If-then. Please keep that in mind when replying. Think twice, screech once.
Would I steal? If it was necessary, yes. Why wouldn’t I? The key, once again, is if-then. IF it was necessary.
Thankfully, it’s never yet been necessary to do any of these things. Yesterday at my daughter’s birthday party, one little bastard tried to get the last slice of cake with an icing flower on it when my daughter wanted it. I was about to strangle him with a Barbie® jump rope when he relented and let the birthday girl have it, so that was lucky.
George Carlin:
Very few are missing the point. You said you would kill a whole schoolful of innocent children if you knew that doing so would save your child. Regardless of how that scenario would happen, or what the odds against it are, that is fucked up. Period.
And if your daughter needed a new heart, and you somehow knew a child down the street was compatible, and you went and killed that one child for a replacement organ, THAT is fucked up. Period.
Also, it’s a wonderful lesson to teach your child, that she/he is the most important person in the world, and that it doesn’t matter who and/or how many dies, as long as she/he’s life is preserved. A child taught that from birth will contribute great things to society, you betcha.
Yeah. You’re a complete crazy, and the moment you get it in your head that I’m somehow threatening your child, you’re going to kill me. That’s a threat in my book.
Are you saying that the concept of people threatening other people exists only in my imagination?
Is that what is proposed here? I thought the OP involved killing innocents to protect your child. If someone is directly threatening your child, she/he is no longer innocent.
You’re begging the question - it’s not OK to kill someone in self defence.