The Value of Human Life (a poll for BigSooner)

[sweetjazz]

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letting someone die when u have the full power to stop it is just the same as killing them yourself.

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Since you have the full power to take in one of the starving children in Africa (or one right near your hometown) and provide her/him adequate nutrition to prevent starvation but you aren't doing so, you must consider yourself a murderer.

To equivocate between voluntarily sending a death ray that kills ten people who otherwise would not have been killed at that time and not interceding to stop someone from dying from a terminal illness because there is no morally acceptable way to do so is absurd. Perhaps you can come up with an argument that it is ethically permissable to save your loved one in this hypothetical scenario, but suggesting that it is murder to not do so shows a gross misunderstanding of the term.

[BigSoonerFan]

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Pretty sure 85% qualifies as a "vast majority."

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Yes, pretty sad.

[Lestat]

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Pretty sure 85% qualifies as a "vast majority."

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Yes, pretty sad.

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Why is it sad? Do you not value your most treasured love one more than 10 unknown kids from Africa who will probably starve anyway?

I suppose you'd make the decision to allow your child to die a horrible death? Or are you one of those sob artists who just likes to wax poetically about morality?

[PokerAmateur4]

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I suppose you'd make the decision to allow your child to die a horrible death? Or are you one of those sob artists who just likes to wax poetically about morality?

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Sat shoots, he scores!

"If this is an accurate representation of people's feelings, then it certainly illustrates the moral decline that seems to be accelerating of late. I've always said that man's biggest deficiency is selfishness and this certainly reflects that. "

BSF are you for real? How have you been monitoring and analyzing the accelearation rate of society's morality over time? What criterion do you set for something being moral? It is moral when you say it is?

As for why I am sure you are a hypocrite, how much of your money goes towards starving children? I'm guessing but I don't think it would cost more than $300 to save 10 african children's lives for a year.
What was the last thing which you purchased? How much did that cost, in dollars or in the length of time it could of sustained an impoverished child. Finally why was that purchase a more moral use of your resources then someone's life?

[NLSoldier]

IMO, killing the african kids is for the greater good. if they live they are going to reproduce and the result will be more starving african kids who live miserable lives.

[sweetjazz]

What about a simpler moral question? Suppose that the 10 people you most care about all have a terminal illness. (Yes, you have that effect on people.) And you can save them all by firing a death ray from space that will kill merely one starving African child.

I think it is clear that the greater good is to save your beloved friends and family. Even so, it is not at all clear to me that is morally correct to kill the African child. We don't, as a society, go around killing people anytime we think it will be, so to speak, +EV for society.

I am not saying that I would blame people for saving the people (or person) they care about in either scenario and it certainly seems like saving your loved one(s) is what most people would opt for. So if the poll is merely asking "what would you do?" then I think the overwhelmingly chosen answer is obvious. If the question asked is "what should you do?" then I think the answer should change.

EDIT: The key distinction to be made is that our choice is between allowing a natural process to continue in which, sadly, a beloved person will die or taking an action which will result in the willful killing of ten people (who we happen to know have a poor quality of life and to whom we have no emotional attachment, and we also happen to know we will suffer no punishment for our action). It seems to me that the ethical principle of not killing innocent people is more fundamental, and therefore takes precedence, over trying to produce the greatest good in society. You can dress the situation up so that just about anyone would, because we are humans and not moral robots, do the morally wrong thing, but that does not make it right.

I strongly suspect that, were the scenario a real one, I would end up using the death ray in the hypothetical situation outlined, even though I am fairly certain that it is clearly wrong to do so.

[mr_whomp]

HMKpoker, theres two ways to go here. Utilitarian, (the greatest good); or deontology (outcome matters less than the morality of the action itself).

Actually 4 ways to go...

Utilitarian
deontology
virtue-based (should do whatever a person i look up to as a role model would do)
divine belief (should do whatever god says to do)

so your answer to this question depends on which of these you use to frame your ethical/moral belief system. I think also that a utilitarian (greater good) could go both ways on the issue.

The fact that the children were "starving" is what swayed my decision (death ray). I looked at it as if I were preventing 11 people from dying a horrible death. 10 by starvation, and 1 by some disease. If the 10 children were perfectly healthy, then I probably wouldn't have done it. I would instead do just about anything to get the cure to the disease without killing 10 innocent kids in the process. If that was in no way possible, then I might recommend that my loved one overdose on sleeping pills (or some such painless way to die).

Killing the children painlessly (or near painlessly) if they are starving would not be immoral. If the question was "Save one healthy, happy African child or save 10 loved ones who have been transported to a desert island with no hope of survival", I'd have chosen to save the child.

[hmkpoker]

And thus we open the can of worms that Sklansky opened a few months ago, with a series of uncomfortable questions structured as "would you rather save this, or this?" And eventually we'll boil it down to the fact that the value of human life is variable and relative. I assume that most people here have figured that out by now.

Now here's a REAL question.

Is there a "best" or "better" method of judging the value of human life, so as to provide the most benefit to the most people?