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JollyJoker
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posted August 04, 2009 11:29 AM |
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Well, the thing with Hitler is that he had the societal "cancer" identified, if you want to, and acted accordingly.
The problem is the degree of certainty. If I would KNOW that there was one person responsible for whatever - of course I would act and kill that person: that's like seeing how someone is pointing a machine gun onto a bunch of people.
However, the REAL dilemma and the actual problem is not to kill someone, but that in reality you NEVER know (for sure). Think of it: "if you had word that someone would come". Will you kill on hearsay? On rumours? How certain is "certain"? Is there something like a direct relationship between the enormity of a threat and the likelihood on which you are acting?
Which means: the bigger the threat is, the more expendable a life is?
Ask this: you get word that a carrier of a disease will arrive. The desease has a mortality rate (percentage of dead of all infected):
0.1% (flu)
0.4% (pig flu)
1%
10&
25%
50%
there is a certain likelihood that the guy coming is a carrier, but it's not certain. Is the mortality rate a factor for decision? Are likelihood of rumor and mortality rate exchangable? What if the guy comes with flu, 50% probability. What if the guy comes with a 50% mortality plague, but is only 0.1 % likely to be a carrier? Both the same?
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Mytical
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posted August 04, 2009 12:54 PM |
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No, Hitler wanted scapegoats pure and simple. Now are you asking that if I knew that there was less chance of whatever working (ie .1%, .4%, etc) would I still be willing to kill for the off chance?
No. Unless I was absolutely certain, I am talking 100%, I would not kill somebody for any reason whatsoever. Only if I was 100% certain with NO margin of error would I even concider/contemplate such.
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JollyJoker
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posted August 04, 2009 01:20 PM |
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I'm sorry, but you are just plain and simply wrong with Hitler, and it's pretty obvious as well. If you are looking for scapegoats you are not killing them in secret by the millions.
But this is not about Hitler and his motives.
What you say, is giving things a whole new direction, because in reality you are NEVER EVER 100% sure about anything.
Which means, in reality you would kill no one.
Because in reality you are never 100% sure - but that's what the real moral dilemmata are all about:
You are at the helm of fighter command, and the only thing you know is that terrorists have hijacked a plane and want to crash it into Empire State Building. The plane is still over open water, and if you shoot it down now at most the 300 passengers will die. If you shoot it down later, over land, chances are the crashing plane will kill more people. Lastly, if the terrorists will do what they announced and manage to crash the plane into Empire State, probably thousands will die. The pilot may still crash the plane deliberately, or the passengers may overwhelm the terrorists - you don't know anything about the situation in the plane: for all you know the terrorists may already have killed them - or they may just plan an attack on them.
Now what?
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Fauch
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posted August 04, 2009 06:18 PM |
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I find another job 
so mytical, which city would you sacrifice to cure cancer?
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TheDeath
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posted August 04, 2009 06:26 PM |
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Edited by TheDeath at 18:26, 04 Aug 2009.
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Quote:
you mean before or after they do hurt someone in order to secure there lifes.?
harm is not the same as pain/hurt. Pain isn't always negative: you get pain when someone tries to save your life most times if you are hurt badly. But that doesn't mean he harms you.
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mvassilev
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posted August 04, 2009 06:43 PM |
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TheDeath
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posted August 04, 2009 06:56 PM |
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Edited by TheDeath at 19:00, 04 Aug 2009.
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Quote:
No. Unless I was absolutely certain, I am talking 100%, I would not kill somebody for any reason whatsoever. Only if I was 100% certain with NO margin of error would I even concider/contemplate such.
You know this is how wars get started always. People think they're doing it "for the best", and of course, don't expect your target(s) to not fight back. Who's "right"? You for thinking this is a good thing, or your target(s) for caring for their lives?
Who are you to decide that curing cancer is a good thing compared to the target's life, if he doesn't think so? You know, let's go stalinism all the way. I think that oppressing people is good, they don't know what they're doing. 
Quote:
You are at the helm of fighter command, and the only thing you know is that terrorists have hijacked a plane and want to crash it into Empire State Building. The plane is still over open water, and if you shoot it down now at most the 300 passengers will die. If you shoot it down later, over land, chances are the crashing plane will kill more people. Lastly, if the terrorists will do what they announced and manage to crash the plane into Empire State, probably thousands will die. The pilot may still crash the plane deliberately, or the passengers may overwhelm the terrorists - you don't know anything about the situation in the plane: for all you know the terrorists may already have killed them - or they may just plan an attack on them.
I don't see any alternative to it. What do you mean the pilot may "crash" the airplane, wouldn't that be the same as shooting it down?
Of course I would wait until the last moment possible. If the passengers take over, they should make sure to do so in time and tell me somehow.
However if I was the leader of the country (or something in high position to make that decision), then I would put a few guards on every plane. Also I think there are other solutions that just destroying the plane, aren't there? Like just making it crash in the ocean but not destroyed.
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Fauch
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posted August 04, 2009 10:27 PM |
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if you make it crash in the ocean there will be a lots of deaths anyway.
I would tell the terrorists I would let them live if they abandon.
what? it wouldn't work?
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TheDeath
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posted August 04, 2009 10:57 PM |
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Quote:
I would tell the terrorists I would let them live if they abandon.
they want to crash into the Empire State Building. How can this possibly work?
Besides even if they didn't, they are not stupid you know.
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JollyJoker
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posted August 05, 2009 08:22 AM |
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Well, I took this as an example only to demonstrate that the difficulties come from not knowing anything for sure and no matter how you decide you won't see what would have happened if another decision would have been made.
That's the problem. Things are never certain, and you always decide things on a CHANCE.
So if you review the questions that Mytical gave, with a hypothetical certainty they are not much of a problem - if you would KNOW for certain that killing any one person would make cancer vanish, I'd do it.
But that's completely unreal, because there is no way you would KNOW that for certain. You might have some evidence it could work, so in reality you'd have to ask, whether you'd do it, if there was a halfway reasonable CHANCE. Moreover, there are cases, when there is a certain chance that things may work out indeed - but if they succeed the result may not be what was wished for. For example, the cure against cancer may have unwished for side effects: heart failure; the pharma corp may earn so much money with it that it monopolizes the pharma industry; too many people may become too old too fast, so that there is an economic problem and a general poverty, and so on.
Or think about the popular lifeboat examples - no matter what you do, whether you kill people to make sure the lifeboat doesn't sink, to get away, to have food - you never have a guarantee that this will be enough for actual survival - you might still not be saved.
Now, I don't want to spoil the thread or something, but, in a nutshell, that's the problem with moral questions: uncertainty, in the result as well as in the problem.
Note, for example, that this is a strong point against the death penalty - once the sentenced is executed there is no way back, if it was an error. I think most people are not generally against the death penalty, but only against death penalty in cases where the guilt of the perpetrator is not 100% certain.
Another example are all kinds of preventive measures, whether it's war or killing someone who may want to kill you. If you would KNOW FOR SURE that a country will assault yours or a person would assault you, preventive measures were of course in order, at least for me. The problem is, though, that you do not know it for sure.
You may have evidence, information, inklings - a certain chance that this might indeed happen; but no certainty. Reacting with lethal factuality on assumptions, guesses and chances - starting a war, killing another person in "preventive self-defense" - is, what creates the problem.
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Mytical
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posted August 05, 2009 08:52 AM |
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Edited by Mytical at 09:03, 05 Aug 2009.
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Actually Jolly, there is where you are mistaken. Feel free to ask the questions in another way if you like, but the scenario was 'if absolutely certain'. While the dilema is different if not certain, it still leads to the main question. What would somebody sacrifice to cure cancer/etc. Problem is I am just too tired to debate this with you, ad nausium. Just do not put words in my mouth, and make sure that you indicate that it is YOUR version of the question, and not mine. Please do not add to the question when answering it, but feel free to add YOUR version after answering it. IE my question had nothing to do with hearing the information from a demon or WHATEVER, so when you post "WHat you got that from a demon?" or such please specify that YOU are adding that to the scenario and that my question had NOTHING to do with that. Please and thank you.
That way people can answer my question as it is, and then if they choose, answer what YOU added to it.
Moral questions, even hypothetical ones, have a use. They help us confront ourselves. While when under stress in a given situation our actions will probably be different, this can help us somewhat prepair for emergencies. True, said situations may NEVER arrise, but the better prepaired one is for IF they arise the better.
Let us take the scenario of a burning building. A person may never encounter such a thing in their life. So we should not do fire drills, or such to prepair? So while you find this useless (and why are you bothering if you do), some of us however find the philosophical questions enlightening. We like to ponder things, and to learn about people in whatever way we can.
Some people are so certain of themselves that they don't want to consider these things. They hide behind "I would NEVER kill another person, regardless" but that is easy to SAY. Just as easy to say "I'd never steal under any circumstance" or such. However, I say that is bunk. Yes BUNK.
I would rather somebody take my life then have to kill or steal, but there are circumstances where I KNOW if I was faced with I would do either IF I COULD.
Let me show you what it feels like. You ask if there was a plane that was hijacked if I'd shoot it down rather then let it crash into a building.
What..did I get this information from Satan? How am I sure there is such a plane? Maybe some terrorist just wants me to shoot it down and claims this. The people on the plane could be in cohoots, don't see the dilema. What you would be cruel and let the people in the city/building die, including the children that came there for 'bring your kid to work day', because you'd sit on your hands? MONSTER.
Instead I will answer the question AS IS, and then state "I am adding the above MYSELF."
I would shoot down the plane, because a few hundred dying is better then a few thousand dying. I would do so while it was in 'open water' and before it got over land. I would not hesitate to do so.
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JollyJoker
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posted August 05, 2009 10:11 AM |
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Quote:
Let us take the scenario of a burning building. A person may never encounter such a thing in their life. So we should not do fire drills, or such to prepair? So while you find this useless (and why are you bothering if you do), some of us however find the philosophical questions enlightening. We like to ponder things, and to learn about people in whatever way we can.
I don't know whether that's the typical misunderstanding that seems to result whenever we talk about something, but that example isn't an example for your point. While a person may never encounter a fire in their life, there is a realistical chance at least, so preparation makes sense.
However, there doesn't seem to be a chance for absolute certainty about something. No chance whatsoever.
I mean, with absolute certainty you are taking the god position. You can ask, for example: If you were absolutely certain - you'd KNOW FOR SURE - that in 20 years time 99.9% of all humans would die from a mutated pig's flu virus, but you could reduce that mortality to something like 1% by releasing it now, on a worldwide scale, killing about 30 million people worldwide, but making sure that 10 billions survive in 20 years time because they would develop an immunity with that.
Ignoring for the moment that TheDeath would do nothing (this is supposed to be a joke), how could you NOT sacrifice the millions to save the billions, especially when their deaths are randomly determined? I don't see any moral difficulty here at all, except that you maybe don't like playing god and leave things their course, but that's generally not what humans do.
Now, you wouldn't ever know something like that for 100%, which makes this rather pointless - hypothetical isn't hypothetical, so-to-speak.
Still hypothetical, but much more critical would be something like, you are a scientist, working with that virus to find a cure, and there has been an accident with a mutated form that was supposed to do the trick, but while quarantine measures worked, the mutated form killed all of a dozen lab technicians within 3 days and later experiments with rats showed a lethality of 99.9%. More experiments showed that the lethality drops to 1%, if the victims have been sick with normal pigs flu before that, but a weaker form with less lethality then the current 0.4% won't work.
This is something of a difficult situation now: you have to work with that extremely lethal virus, because if you don't you give up on the chance to find a less lethal cure. IF you work on, however, chances are it will get free and there will be a devastating plague. On the other hand you may destroy the virus as completely as it is possible within the lab, but of course you can't be certain that it will be destroyed completely and it may mutate to that form by itself, naturally. You can of course release mormal pigs flu worldwide, killing a lot in the course, but making the survivors immune.
See the difference? The situation is still hypothetical, but not impossible. You have information, but no knowledge, not to mention wisdom.  . Whatever you do or not do, the result isn't GUARANTEED (which is, what YOU want).
I'll try to make this a little clearer, still, to pinpoint the snag. Question is: if you could go back in time and kill Hitler in 1935, would you do it? This is a hypothetical question that LOOKS impossible, but it may be possible to do that some time in the future. I'd answer, no, because there was no way to know what the resulting changes in history would bring; how the resulting world would look now - things might get worse.
You could ask now: if you could go back in time and kill Hitler in 1935, provided you would KNOW that the world would simply have developed a lot more peaceful than it actually did, the answer becomes yes - what's the problem?
To make a long post short, I don't intend to discuss this any further - it's your thread and all. The only thing I want to do is rectifying the misunderstanding: I THOUGHT (wrongly, it seems), that you were interested in offering hypothetical, but still possible scenarios, that's why I complained with the questions.
If we generally disagree about whether questions that involves sure knowledge about the consequences of a person's decision makes sense or not (you say, yes, makes sense, I say, no, it doesn't), then I'm simply wrong in this thread.
Your last post seems to indicate that I'm wrong in this thread, since we seem to indeed generally disagree here, so I'll stop participating, and sorry for the misunderstanding.
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Mytical
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posted August 05, 2009 10:16 AM |
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Edited by Mytical at 10:47, 05 Aug 2009.
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While possible difficult questions are indeed the focus of this thread..I still sometimes like to use other types of questions as well. For instance your Hitler Scenario while not possible, is interesting. Personally I would rather not risk changing the past, but there are those who MIGHT. I would be interested in learning about that.
I have no problem with you participating and/or giving your alternate scenarios. I would rather you answer my scenario first, then give your OWN scenario after instead of just adding to my scenario and then answering. That is all.
The problem is not you answering, but the fact that when I put a scenario you nitpick it to death instead of getting ahold of me personally and asking for clarification, or just answering the question as is and then clarifying it and reasking it your way.
As for the initial question it is not as off the wall as you might think as Mvass stated. Since human DNA is different from any other species (even if only 2% as claimed by some) and since it is feasible that an element might become unusuable after death, it is not unreasonable to consider that only from a 'still' living human organ would a certain element be possible to get. While something like evil would be hard to define and isolate, such an element as I proposed would NOT because tests can be done on a living being (without harm) to indeed say if this element exsisted or not before finishing said formula. Neither did I rule out getting volunteers. That was for the person answering the question to decide.
You are correct that things like this get nowhere, however. Thanks for your participation this far, and good luck.
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Mytical
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posted August 05, 2009 10:58 AM |
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Now to answer another question posed to me. What city? None specifically. More like 'a city's worth of population'. How many? I honestly do not know what my limit would be. Take into consideration the following.
How many people cancer kills a year.
How many people these deaths affect.
How far away might a cancer cure be.
The quality of life somebody who is surviving cancer is.
Once you factor in all of that it is hard to give a number. Because would I kill a 100 to save a million? Yes. Would I kill a thousand to save 10 million, yeah. Ah but there is another factor. What if I went ahead and did this, then the next day somebody figured out a BETTER cure that would cost NO lives. (So as you see my question was never without some uncertainty).
My answer is once I had done the math, figured out how many people it would save in the next 10 years..I would divide that number by 1000 and that is how many people. Sounds twisted I know.
I would rather be considered a monster for killing 1 then know I was a monster for letting 1000 die.
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JoonasTo
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What if Elvin was female?
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posted August 05, 2009 11:14 AM |
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Edited by JoonasTo at 16:43, 05 Aug 2009.
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@JJ: People are here to enjoy this thread, not to listen you whine about it being useless in RL.
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Corribus
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posted August 05, 2009 04:22 PM |
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The problem with Mytical's questions is that they are not really difficult moral questions. They are simple questions of math.
Would you kill X number of people to save Y number of people?
If X < Y, Yes.
If X > Y, No.
Simple to answer, because the people involved are just numbers. There's no moral question really at all, because most sane people believe that less people dead = better option.
If Mytical really wanted to make tough questions, she'd make it more personal.
Such as: would you kill your mother in order to save 10 strangers? Would you kill your brother to save yourself? Would you poke out your own eyes in order to save a random child? No simple math there because the people involved don't have the same value, and the differing values are subjective.
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TheDeath
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posted August 05, 2009 05:06 PM |
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Quote:
The problem with Mytical's questions is that they are not really difficult moral questions. They are simple questions of math.
Would you kill X number of people to save Y number of people?
If X < Y, Yes.
If X > Y, No.
Simple to answer, because the people involved are just numbers. There's no moral question really at all, because most sane people believe that less people dead = better option.
I don't think it's that easy. You see Corribus, it's not just the end result that most sane people care about, it's whether they are responsible or not. People like me believe that inaction doesn't hold guilt. You can never be guilty for something you haven't done. On the other hand, if you push a button to kill some people (but save others), you are responsible for their deaths.
Let's take an example. Suppose you have two children of equal age and you love them both equally (not always the case mind you). Someone asks you to pick one, otherwise he kills both.
What do you do?
(this is not the case of "someone personal vs a stranger" since both are "personal")
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Corribus
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posted August 05, 2009 05:47 PM |
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Doing nothing is an action as well.
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mvassilev
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posted August 05, 2009 07:10 PM |
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Quote:
Suppose you have two children of equal age and you love them both equally (not always the case mind you). Someone asks you to pick one, otherwise he kills both.
What do you do?
Pick one of the children, obviously. Better only one of them die than both.
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TheDeath
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posted August 05, 2009 07:13 PM |
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Quote:
Doing nothing is an action as well.
Inaction is the lack of action. Quote:
Pick one of the children, obviously. Better only one of them die than both.
Easier said than done mvass.
Suppose that dude then says "Ok I was just joking".
Then please look into the child you picked's eyes, alright?
Have fun with him/her.
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