[sweetjazz]

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Killing the children painlessly (or near painlessly) if they are starving would not be immoral.

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And how do you decide this? Are you able to go around and distinguish between which people it is moral to kill and which it is immoral to kill? How do you accomplish this feat? At what point of hunger and food deprivation does it become moral to kill an individual? Extreme starvation? Beginning stages of starvation and no stable source for acquiring food in the future? One skipped meal?

Does the morality of killing the starving African children change if it is possible to communicate with them and ask them if they want to be killed? What if -- and I know this may come as a shocker -- they are still desparately clinging to a hope that their lot in life will improve? Even though that hope is completely unfounded, do you still find it morally acceptable to kill them?

And since there are innocent people who can be killed without it being immoral, how do we know that gamblers and poker players are not among that group? Or Americans (as Osama bin Laden might suggest)? Or people who are depressed and seem unhappy? Or people who have cancer and are going to die pretty soon anyway? (Actually, we are all going to die fairly soon, from a geological perspective.)

As is probably clear by now, I find your quoted statement quite controversial, and I am amazed that you could simply state it is as a fact without providing any argument that suggested your claim is true.