EPTAs for the anonymous person, I would still have to choose the same, but still, there is a huge grey area there to consider. Who is posing this challenge? Is that what the person wants? What are he motivations? In general, I would say know to killing anyone, but depending on circumstances, it might be justified.
An Ethics/Moral Question - Page 2
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TheAmazombie
United States3714 Posts
As for the anonymous person, I would still have to choose the same, but still, there is a huge grey area there to consider. Who is posing this challenge? Is that what the person wants? What are he motivations? In general, I would say know to killing anyone, but depending on circumstances, it might be justified. | ||
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xXFireandIceXx
Canada4296 Posts
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Jinsho
United Kingdom3101 Posts
The other people taking the village hostage can kill whomever they want if they want, I will not kill a single person. | ||
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Jerubaal
United States7684 Posts
They never represent actual situations do they. They also never allow you to pick what a truly good man would do- sacrifice himself. | ||
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phiinix
United States1169 Posts
On September 02 2011 11:38 CaptainPlatypus wrote: I'm hesitant to get into an ethics discussion on TL, but if anyone (OP?) is interested in learning more on this topic, I can recommend some literature. A tad. I'd be down for a good read. Hopefully deep, but not too dense? | ||
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Ack1027
United States7873 Posts
On September 02 2011 11:31 Geovu wrote: The question is IMO pointless to ponder considering that no one here will ever find themselves in such a situation in this lifetime. Those who cannot handle simple matters cannot be trusted to handle serious matters. In the frame of this hypothetical situation: 1. No 2. No | ||
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sOvrn
United States678 Posts
On September 02 2011 11:31 Geovu wrote: The question is IMO pointless to ponder considering that no one here will ever find themselves in such a situation in this lifetime. Sigh, the point of this brain teaser isn't so you can know what to do when the day you have to kill your best friend to save 100 villagers. You're supposed to pose the question to yourself and reason the morally / ethically correct answer for yourself and try to coherently explain your answer/reasoning. It's just a mental exercise; use your brain! Why even post a reply if you're just going to act like a moron? I answered No to both questions. The first question for me was a no brainer - I just wouldn't kill my best friend / loved ones to save 100 random ppl I don't know. An interesting side note is to consider is how a change in quantity in the question could possibly change my response. For example, if the question was instead: Kill your best friend to save 100,000 lives, 1M lives, 5B lives, my answer would change. Where is the line drawn? No one can really say. The second question was harder for me to answer, but I also put down No. My reasoning was I just can't ethically / morally kill some random person to save 100 unknown lives, because they are all innocent and I refuse to be the arbiter of the fates of these people since this scenario was presented to me involuntarily. They are all just random ass people, I can't say it would be better off to have +99 ppl than +1. For all I know that one person I have to kill is the future Einstein and I wouldn't kill him to save 100 random people. Then again, maybe the village is full of Einsteins and the random guy will contribute nothing to society, or worse yet make things worse for society. I can't remember the name of the article, but I read for a class something similar to the question posed here and they talked about some Russian mathematician who would've answered Yes to both these questions in a heart beat. He even said he would kill his son if he could save two random people's live, and in fact when he learned that he could save someone's life by donating his kidney, he immediately underwent an operation to give his kidney to some random person in need. Pretty wild eh? | ||
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sob3k
United States7572 Posts
On September 02 2011 11:49 Sultan.P wrote: They are all just random ass people, I can't say it would be better off to have +99 ppl than +1. For all I know that one person I have to kill is the future Einstein and I wouldn't kill him to save 100 random people. Then again, maybe the village is full of Einsteins and the random guy will contribute nothing to society, or worse yet make things worse for society. If all of these peoples characteristics are completely unknown, then the chances of any of them being a saint genius or future hitler are unknown to you and can't factor into your decision. Therefore it still comes down to if you value 100 lives more than one. | ||
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JingleHell
United States11308 Posts
As for one anonymous person to save 100, well, at that point, it's the greater benefit to save the 100. If it was a question of me dying to save the 100 anonymous, I like to think I'd be able to do that. But knowingly sacrificing my best friend to save people I've never met would haunt me forever. Maybe I'm a bit callous in this, but I think someone who would trust me with his life, and that of his wife and daughter, (and vice versa, I'd trust him with my wife and son) isn't someone I could knowingly sacrifice for the benefit of random people. | ||
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sob3k
United States7572 Posts
A more neutral problem would involve natural disasters or whatnot. | ||
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DarkOptik
452 Posts
What Sultan.P said is the exact dichotomy I had with my brother; he also refused to play God (as it were) and said that it is impossible for him to judge the worthiness of human life, while I was on the same side as the purported Russian and agreed with him: essentially, that the needs of the many outweigh the few. However, I've come to realize that simple numbers is an overly simplistic way to quantify something like human life, and that it simply does not do justice to something that is so heavy. An interesting thought that I thought about was in-line with the Russian's: if one healthy individual can save five lives by donating all his organs, then why do we not simply kill the healthy individual and take his organs? Theoretically speaking that seems to be the same issue: after all, in both scenarios we're exchanging the life of one normal person for that of many in peril. Putting things into perspective though, the situation I just mentioned many would consider morally evil (I do myself as well). Yet, that being said, if I had to make a choice in this scenario, no matter what, I inevitably gravitate to the killing of both my best friend and the anonymous individual. I'm actually startled by the difference in polling results. The difference between killing a best friend and killing an anonymous individual is simply the personal relation/attitude, and I was under the erroneous assumption that anyone who was willing to kill the anonymous individual would not let mere feelings interrupt with their judgment. And of course, I'm completely wrong. Still, I breathe a slight sigh of relief and I understand something else my brother was talking about: that there perhaps a significant part of humanity is not only the ability to act on empathy and sympathy, rather than cold callous reasoning, but also the choice to act irrationally (that is, act against simple logic). And perhaps that's a good thing after all. Or maybe I'm just writing a load of bullcrap. lol. Anyways, thanks guys. I feel a lot better after this. | ||
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DarkOptik
452 Posts
On September 02 2011 12:02 sob3k wrote: OP, you are also mucking up the problem by saying these people are held hostage, this bring the people who are holding them hostage's responsibility into the picture as well as uncertainty over the outcome (people don't trust terrorists). A more neutral problem would involve natural disasters or whatnot. That's true, although I think the vast majority of people know what I meant by this thought experiment. I'll keep that in mind, however. | ||
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Bippzy
United States1466 Posts
In the meantime, yes and yes. But the fact of the matter is that its too hard to achieve this vacuum, so i dont even use the answers to these questions as a moral indicator. | ||
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LlamaNamedOsama
United States1900 Posts
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Hidden_MotiveS
Canada2562 Posts
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Navillus
United States1188 Posts
Edit: Also to your problem with doing it the whole "playing god" thing I think that comes to what's called the act-omission distinction, basically do you believe that an omission, not acting, has the same moral weight as any other action. I firmly believe that yes refusing to act is just another action in which case in your second scenario assuming that all you have to do is make the choice, going through no effort on your own, then in my eyes you are killing 99 anonymous people. | ||
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Meepman
Canada610 Posts
I don't see myself being able to take the life of my best friend, even if he asked me to, with all the laughs we've had and such. It'd be such a waste because he's an amazing person, but if the town was filled with all really good people..... I'd have to be in the situation. As for number 2, Is this person I'm killing a good person? Is he/she still young, or is he/she an older person? Although if he asked me i'd probably have no problem with it. Probably. | ||
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CaptainPlatypus
United States852 Posts
On September 02 2011 11:44 phiinix wrote: A tad. I'd be down for a good read. Hopefully deep, but not too dense? Well I'm a philosophy major and a total nerd, so I'm not sure I have the most....realistic...grasp of what is and isn't dense.  Basically, this is similar to the question of utilitarian (or in more modern times, consequentialist) ethics versus deontological ethics. Those are very long and complicated words for a very simple idea. Consequentialism holds that you should consider the consequences, above all else, when making ethical decisions. Deontology holds the opposite - that you should consider your actions above all else when making ethical decisions. So a deontologist would say something incredibly word that meant "killing is bad, so if you kill someone, that's bad, even if it saves 100 other people", and a consequentialist would say "since life is good, and more people are alive if you kill the one guy, you should kill the one guy". The question as to whether it's your best friend or not is less directly ethical and more a question of your priorities (though it assumes a consequentialist viewpoint - like I mentioned, a deontologist would reflexively say "no" to both options given because killing is wrong so fuck you). I can't think off the top of my head of any famous/authority-figure-type philosophers who would argue that saving your best friend is more important than saving 100 other people, or I'd provide a relevant link. Really it's more a personal choice than anything else, and the important part is that in ethics, there's more than one right answer. That isn't to say there are no wrong answers, you could say 'i ride in on an elephant and trample all 101 while eating an ice cream sundae' and that would be a wrong answer, but every answer available in the poll is "right". Anyway, in case that wasn't tl;DR for everyone ALREADY, here's the consequentialist viewpoint: http://www.philosophy.uncc.edu/mleldrid/cmt/mmp.html The deontological viewpoint is harder to find a single brief more-or-less-summary of, especially from famous figures in its history, because it's just older like that. Kant is considered the father of deontology, and here's his book on the subject: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1460377 But that's been translated from German and I'm not the biggest fan of that particular translation, so have this discussion of Kant and Hume (Hume was a brilliant philosopher but his work is considered somewhat out of date these days, unjustly IMHO) from a Stanford professor: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-hume-morality/ Also super long (though not an entire book, so it's got one up on the above link), but really really good. In fact the SEP is like a philosophy degree, but as a webpage. Highly recommended. TL;DR: I don't know what kind of dumbass would TL;DR a reading recommendation, it seems counter productive, but go read Kant, Anscombe, Bentham, and every single person mentioned on the Wikipedia 'ethics' page and, since no one is going to read any of these anyway, I may as well recommend Augustine as well because fuck yeah ancient Christian philosophy that makes no sense. Oh, and one final note: Knowing my best friend, I'd get called a fag if I picked his life over 100 others. | ||
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Chairman Ray
United States11903 Posts
Personally, I'd just let the 100 people die since killing someone directly would affect me much more. I'm a selfish person who wouldn't even donate a nickel to feed an African child for a day. Let those 100 people die, I ain't doing shit about it. | ||
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DoctorHelvetica
United States15034 Posts
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