Why have you changed the scenario mid-stream and abandoned the qualifying “innocent” from your initial question?
Personally, I didn’t agree to killing 10 innocent strangers.
And, BTW, why did you ask others to participate in your thread by giving their opinions based on a selection of options, if there was only one correct answer (yours) to the query? Is this a discussion or an exam…Professor?
From the OP:
Humans are fallible, limited & we never do better than “kinda-sorta-good”.
If the 10 must die to save a million of 20–then they die.
Both scenarios.
You’re arguing against the premise. The question says the killing ten people will cure all cancer. So the terms are clear. If you want to debate a different situation, start your own thread.
The terrorist situation you describe would be like the OP asking if people would be willing to kill ten random people as a sacrifice to Baal in the hopes that Baal would cure all cancer by a miracle. I doubt anyone who commit murder on those terms. In both cases you’re being asked to make a definite sacrifice in exchange for an improbable benefit.
No, it is not about fate; or at least fate in the sense that I know it. Fate implies lack of control of outcomes; in this scenario the outcomes are 100% within your control. The only part fate has is allowing the limited options.
I completely disagree.
The two situations are analogous - people making willing to kill others for their idea of “the greater good.”
In this scenario they are not killing for the “idea” of anything. They are killing for the actual benefit of far less net suffering.
Says you.
What will happen to the world when suddenly there are billions of more geriatric people alive?
Most of the big disasters in history have been caused by good intentions.
Ugh; do I have to post in every post the thing I posted upthread about the assuming no negative outcomes? I’ll do it if I have to. This thread could start looking like a credit card statement though. . . .
Also, from the OP, as it IS the title OF the thread:
“You can cure all cancer globally but 10 innocent people must die”
Why are you deliberately omitting that part of the equation, when some of us selected the “wrong” answer (i.e., not the one YOU would choose) when responding to the query, which was asking us for ** our** opinions?
Curing cancer would only add about 3 years to life expectancy. It would be 82 instead of 79.
Sorry, but that’s too much of a stretch.
The OP didn’t put any such restrictions on the hypothetical, and if you are going to debate such an outlandish proposition in the first place, you might as well look at the implications of what you are doing.
Uh huh.
So, that’s 21 Billion people-years you are adding.
Seems like a whole lot to me.
I don’t see where the term outlandish is applicable. I did not say the OP put restrictions on the hypothetical - I said that upthread I covered the idea of negative consequences.
I think the general point of the OP does not naturally take things in that direction anyway; I think the idea is would you do something horrible to prevent something even worse from happening.
If you want to say that there are negative consequences that’s fine - but it seems a little silly. It would be like asking would you kill 10 people to make the rest of the world suffer more.
I don’t think the question is being asked in order to contemplate the technicalities of curing cancer - I think for the purposes of this thought exercise cancer was chosen for the reason that it is considered almost universally as something unquestionably horrible and that human suffering would be decreased tremendously by its elimination.
However, YMMV
Millions of people would die so you wouldn’t have to feel guilty? How could you not feel more guilty about millions than ten?
How many here have no idea that there were two polio vaccines available, and the one the US chose to use resulted in the deaths of 2 or 3 people a year for at least a generation?
It is a live virus vaccine, and baby poops polio virus. If the people handling baby’s poop are not immune to polio, they will contract it.
This is the reality of drugs.
You “all live is sacred” types do not want to hear the realities of drug testing - at the very least, some tests will allow people to die even though they could be saved.
And the development of new surgeries is not without casualties.
10 deaths for a universal, permanent “cure” for “all” “cancers”?
Dirt cheap at 1000 times the price.
Trial and error falls in line with how the natural order of the universe is supposed to work.
There is no malice involved in this process.
Doing the Devils bidding and murdering 10 innocent people so you can have a magical cure for cancer is morally wrong. (And that’s basically what this is. Because as far as I know, there is no scientific method that I know of that involves murdering ten, random, innocent people to make a cure all drug.)
Again, I ask: Would you strangle a baby with your bare hands to save the lives of three random people?
So you’d rather murder millions upon millions of people in order to feel less morally conflicted?
Yes. I would have to, morally, because in that scenario I’d be saving a net of two lives. I’d have to suffer the consequences, but a lot of males in my genetic heritage have had to suffer similar consequences for outcomes which were much less clear.
I choose B though that choice don’t sound good too.
Thirty strangers die every minute, so it’s not even a blip. I’ll never know whose deaths I caused, and yet I save millions of people’s lives as a consequence. No-brainer. Option B.