Logically inconsistant, my ***

[PrayingMantis]

[ QUOTE ]
Killing people like Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, Michael Moore, Stalin, etc. is not at all a sin, because these are evil people.

Killing 1000 of these people is the moral equivalent of killing one "normal" person, and about 1/10th of a "very good" person (think Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, etc).

[/ QUOTE ]

What?

I'm not sure there is necessarily an inconsistency between 'I'm against killing' and 'it being ok to kill someone in a certain situation'. Or any other similar example you can come up with. The fact that it could be ok to kill, say in self-defence, doesn't make the initial statement 'I'm against killing' a contingent statement. It's about an application problem, or to put it in more common parlance, about choosing the lesser of two evils. You can only establish any statement as truly inconsistent by example of it's application if, in that example, every option is available - ie the person making the choice is omnipotent. I'm against plenty of things I find myself doing, such as hanging out with my family.

The +/-EV thing with Hitler is pretty cool, made me smile [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] But all that's really doing is digging up the utilitarian/consequentialist school of ethics vs value ethics. If an individual has genuinely constructed an ethical framework based on value/act, then no amount of +/-EV is going to sway an action.