The year is 2050. Nuclear war has occurred. Government has ceased to exist. You live with a small group of family and friends that migrate around the former USA and live by scavenging materials and food. Your camp is surprised in the night by a group of raiders. Using an incapacitating gas and firearms several of your group are killed and the rest are placed under guard. The next day is spent by the raiders raping the women, men and children of your group and living off of your provisions and equipment. That night you’re able to organize a resistance and overcome the raiders through subterfuge. Several of the raiders die in the struggle along with one of your own group and now you have 5 captives. What do you do with them?
Well, these 5 captives serve no useful purpose for your group. Letting them live would allow them to plot (just as your group had done) and you would have to use your own provisions to sustain them. Letting them go allows them to get help and come and take the rest of your life-sustaining provisions (as they already know your inventory). My first and foremost goal is the survival of my family and friends. I would quickly end each one of their lives (perhaps a bullet to the head) perhaps even letting some of the surviving victims do the deed if they would like (to allow closure for the rapes and help their mental state as much as possible). I would then display the carcasses outside the camp as a warning (and scare tactic) to others.
1 1/2 quarts red wine
1/2 quart red wine vinegar
bunch fresh rosemary (small)
bunch fresh basil
6 cloves garlic – minced
1 piece fresh ginger root – to taste
3 tablespoons ground pepper
1 small jalapeno pepper – stem removed
Let marinade and meat set for a few days.
Fresh pepper, lemon and sea salt added on grill.
Do not undercook.
Kill 'em.
Eat 'em.
Use the bones for weapons.
Try and persuade them to join us and become good.
(And I’m not even a Christian!)
Kill them. It’s a matter of necessity.
Oh, I get it. This is a Death Penalty thread. Well, with all due respect, Beaker, it’s a piss-poor analogy. For one, DP debates are about the proper behaviour of a *civilized * society. For another, properly speaking, these people we’re killing are not criminals - they’re an invading army.
Sorry. It just doesn’t apply.
First impulse is to kill them, but they might be useful. I would sell them into slavery if possible (or some of them, if the 5 survivors are more than my group can keep restrained and under control, killing the rest). If that is not an option, I would torture them for information on where they obtained their weapons and gas and any other possible useful information. I imagine I would keep at least one alive no matter what, because you never know when a disposable human might be handy.
Just as you finish eating some of them, displaying the carcasses and selling the rest into slavery, Civilisation returns.
Are you embarrassed?
You execute them. Since bullets will be valuable you do it by cutting their throats or bashing their skulls in. Damn that was easy. Throw us a harder one.
Marc
Yes
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And then kill them for sport.
Looking at this ethically, you’re pretty much forced to kill them. No matter how you slice it, they present a mortal threat to you and your group, and in the situation you describe it is more or less impossible to imprison them.
How you apply ethics here depends on whether you consider them criminals or POWs, but either way killing them is clearly a matter of self-preservation. Even if there’s an aspect of revenge to it, this differs from the wholesale slaughter of POWs in World War II, or from modern capital punishment, in that their continued existence is a proximate threat to yours; that cannot be said of POWs in WWII or Timothy McVeigh, to use those as examples. The Germans didn’t HAVE to murder all those Russian POWs to keep themselves alive; the feds didn’t have to kill McVeigh to preserve anyone’s life.
The basis of killing someone with an ethical crutch is that you are doing so with a reasonable apprehension for the your own survival or someone else’s. That applies in your hypothetical case.
Nah. Desperate times, desperate measures - you know the drill.
Just as long as you didn’t display any unnecessary cruelty.
It would be a piss-poor analogy of the DP if that’s what it was meant to be. It’s not. I realize that my hypothetical can’t be compared to the DP in an “apples to apples” sense. Admittedly I did get the idea for my question by reading the various DP threads.
What makes them an invading army? Where does the distinction between criminals and invading soldiers come from? Basically, in an uncivilized society what is the ethical and practical thing to do? What if they hadn’t murdered or raped anyone but did consume half your food supply? What if they didn’t kill anyone but severed someones arm in the fighting? You’re the judge, jury and executioner now. What’s the appropriate punishment to fit the crime when you have to implement it personally without aid of societal institutions?
Think about it.
This is an interesting question. I think that there is a difference between the ethical or moral response and what I would probably do.
In the situation you describe, the captives have proven themselves to be ruthless and dangerous. I am assuming (since you don’t say) that we have captured or killed all of the raiders, though under many conditions, such an assumption may be unfounded and this would enter into any decisions I make.
First, I will assure that they are under control. If it is impossible to be relatively certain that they cannot escape, I will kill them right away, cheaply and efficiently, perhaps by crushing their heads with a large stone.
If they are secured, I will interrogate them one by one to try to determine if there are more of them and if so where they are. If torture is necessary, I will do it and try to hide my discomfort with the proceedings so I appear as ruthless as they have proven themselves to be.
Once I have obtained such information, I will kill them.
In the situation you describe, there are serious problems with any solution that leaves these people alive. They cannot be assumed into the group, having done the deeds they have done. They cannot be set free- it will be interpreted as a sign of weakness and then there will be marauders wandering around that know our numbers, equipment, location, and resources. They cannot be continually held captive because they will hamper the group’s movement and productivity and drain resources.
I suppose they could be abandoned somewhere, but in order to assure that they don’t follow the group, they would have to be restrained, which would in itself be a death sentence- a long, slow, lingering one.
The biggest concern for me would be to maintain order. I think I would compose an ad-hoc “jury” to declare the death sentence and have several people execute it. It would be necessary to have the whole group do the work and make the decision, since the whole group suffers the consequences (morally and otherwise) of the act.
I don’t know- I may feel differently in an hour or so. This is what I think know, having honestly considered the question.
How exactly do 5 captives without weapons constitute an immediate threat to our survival? I’m assuming that our group is at least 2-3 times as big, possibly more.
So far the treatment of the raiders has been :
Attacking but not killing most of us. (I’m honestly confused by the sentence “Using an incapacitating gas and firearms several of your group …” – you appear to be referring to the raiders. Or does this mean, “the raiders killed the people on our side who were shooting at them and knocked out the rest”?)
Raping the women.
Stealing our provisions.
Now, it’s possible that their only intention in keeping us alive was merely sadistic torture before they would kill us. But maybe we can’t assume that.
Consider that killing the captives would be, by most standards, a worse crime than any of the above (if you rule out the torture as a prelude to murder, which did not occur).
Anyway, I see no problem with giving them 30 seconds to run, maybe wounding a few to keep them from being able to fight effectively, and then moving on.
What about the slavery option? Historically, warring human bands have used captives as slaves themselves, besides killing them or selling them. Maybe 5 is more than the group needs, I’ll admit.
What about knowledge? Maybe one of the captives can brew beer, make gunpowder or that incapacitating gas, play the bagpipes, or tell tales in the long winter nights.
If I lead the group, I’d have to be willing to carry out the sentences myself. But I’d need a lot more detail about their actions during and after the initial attack.
My choices would boil down to either killing them all, killing a few and keeping the rest, or keeping all of them with me. I’m not letting any of them go - they “know too much.”
I would probably kill them all horribly.
Then I would smile: 
— G. Raven
p.s.
I am anti-dp 
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They don’t. But they represent a possible threat to you and to others if they are free. But none of this really matters.
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But they killed some of us during their initial attack.
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A pretty bad crime in and of itself.
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An act that could very well lead to some of us starving to death.
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It doesn’t matter. I’ll base my actions on what I’ve seen them do so far.
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Let’s see on their side you’ve got murder, rape, and the theft of our provisions. On our side we’ve got killing them for doing those things. I don’t think killing them would be a worse crime and I still think we’d have the moral high ground.
I do. Keep in mind that wounding them will probably result in a slow death anyway.
Marc
And then hunting them?
Let me add another hypothetical:
What if it turns out the 5 captive raiders are the former members of N*Synch? Does that change the situation at all?
I think I’d have to kill them. There’s no way around it. If I left them alive they could possibly plot against us, and even if they couldn’t completely escape, they’d might be able to kill a few of our group.
Furthermore, as we moved around looking for food, they’d be a burden. We probably couldn’t afford to feed them, and if any of them became ill, we wouldn’t be able to help them out. We’d be killing them anyway, it would just be a much longer, slower process.