Boston Bomb Explosions
- Thread starter BK_123
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Very true......
muz
Golden Master
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so if you are saving your own life it is self defence .
Self defence can be applied to saving the lives of others as well . The police for example will kill someone if they are posing a threat to the lives of others . And under the law in this country I may also use force to prevent someone else coming to harm .be that a family member or even a stranger I have never met
Im aware there are other options but say all of those where ruled out . If someone had kidnapped people I cared about the first thing I would consider is going to the police of course but what if the people who had kidnapped your family said they where watching your every move ?
Lets change the situation up slightly so its not about bombs . Your working at a railway junction at the bottom of a hill . Your hearing that there are 10 heavy goods wagons carrying dangerous chemicals which have broken away from a train and are hurtling down the hill towards your junction . With the points set how they currently are these wagons are about to enter a line that has a train on carrying 50 people , 3 of which are members of your family . your wife and children . There is another line which you could pull a switch and divert the train onto which has a train carrying 100 people , none of whom you know at all .the resulting crash will kill all of the passengers on the train the wagons hit . what do you do ?
I think my previous responses tell you what id do
ps.dont presume I dont have no morals just because I would happily kill to save people I care about , I know many people would do exactly the same . just because someone moral compass points in a different direction doesn't make either person wrong or lacking of morals
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Personally, I'm not convinced that I'd know what I would do. I'm not convinced that you know absolutely that you would in this very narrow situation do either.
The conversation starts as,
a bad guy has your family, and says you must kill one person to secure their release, it's easy to say that you'd kill this person, and provided that you didn't have to go to outrageous measures to kill them then it's easy enough to say that you could do that.
you can justify this, the needs of the many out weight the needs of the few, my family, which lets say has four people in it, are a greater number than the one person.
Then the parameters change, can you plant a bomb to save your families life... then the answer is, maybe yes, maybe no, there is a reasonable chance with a bomb that nobody would die.
2 bombs killed three people, in a crowded area, bombs are statistically poor weapons for killing, they are great for inflicting injury or terror, but not very effective killing weapons. So for this thread we'll say a bomb is likely to kill 1.5 people. Needs of the many etc... plus you're removed from the action, it's not like pulling a trigger, of beating someone to death or strangling someone, you put a bag down, it's an easy action.
Now you're talking about absolutely killing 100 people.
Sure you're going to save 50 people, but 50 more people have to die.
It's no longer a justifiable proposition (using the earlier logic) to say well if someone has to die it should be the fewest amount possible...
a more difficult question would be to pose that question the other way around.
you've got a runaway train loaded with chemicals heading for a city train station, with lets say half a million people either in the station or within 2 blocks that in the event the train crashes will be exposed to lethal doses of whatever material is on the train and will die. alternatively, you can crash the train early. But it'll be into the train carrying 25 people including your family.
or go to the logical extreme,
Your family is taken hostage to a particular country, the only way that you can save them would be to start nuclear Armageddon starting with your launching missiles against your home country.
e.g. you're British, your family are taken hostage to Nepal, where you go to rescue them, the only way to rescue them will be to push a button that launches Russia nuclear missiles at the UK.
this will result in at least the total annihilation of the UK population, (with the exception of everyone who is out of the country). and likely cause a country attack by an allied nation against Russia causing huge amounts of decimation there too...
so at least 60million Britons die, plus roughly the same amount of Russians, to save your family, (are we talking only close family or extended family too?)
now what do you do?
just take one member of your family, (who ever you're closest to, mum, dad, brother sister, son daughter) that one person will be killed unless you undertake a series of actions that will lead to WW3, and billions of deaths around the world.
the parameters here are 1 person from your family v.s 2 billion deaths, (1/3rd of the worlds population), but they are all strangers to you...
As has been said a couple of times now. truthfully you'd only be absolutely sure that you'd know what you were doing at the time.
The conversation starts as,
a bad guy has your family, and says you must kill one person to secure their release, it's easy to say that you'd kill this person, and provided that you didn't have to go to outrageous measures to kill them then it's easy enough to say that you could do that.
you can justify this, the needs of the many out weight the needs of the few, my family, which lets say has four people in it, are a greater number than the one person.
Then the parameters change, can you plant a bomb to save your families life... then the answer is, maybe yes, maybe no, there is a reasonable chance with a bomb that nobody would die.
2 bombs killed three people, in a crowded area, bombs are statistically poor weapons for killing, they are great for inflicting injury or terror, but not very effective killing weapons. So for this thread we'll say a bomb is likely to kill 1.5 people. Needs of the many etc... plus you're removed from the action, it's not like pulling a trigger, of beating someone to death or strangling someone, you put a bag down, it's an easy action.
Now you're talking about absolutely killing 100 people.
Sure you're going to save 50 people, but 50 more people have to die.
It's no longer a justifiable proposition (using the earlier logic) to say well if someone has to die it should be the fewest amount possible...
a more difficult question would be to pose that question the other way around.
you've got a runaway train loaded with chemicals heading for a city train station, with lets say half a million people either in the station or within 2 blocks that in the event the train crashes will be exposed to lethal doses of whatever material is on the train and will die. alternatively, you can crash the train early. But it'll be into the train carrying 25 people including your family.
or go to the logical extreme,
Your family is taken hostage to a particular country, the only way that you can save them would be to start nuclear Armageddon starting with your launching missiles against your home country.
e.g. you're British, your family are taken hostage to Nepal, where you go to rescue them, the only way to rescue them will be to push a button that launches Russia nuclear missiles at the UK.
this will result in at least the total annihilation of the UK population, (with the exception of everyone who is out of the country). and likely cause a country attack by an allied nation against Russia causing huge amounts of decimation there too...
so at least 60million Britons die, plus roughly the same amount of Russians, to save your family, (are we talking only close family or extended family too?)
now what do you do?
just take one member of your family, (who ever you're closest to, mum, dad, brother sister, son daughter) that one person will be killed unless you undertake a series of actions that will lead to WW3, and billions of deaths around the world.
the parameters here are 1 person from your family v.s 2 billion deaths, (1/3rd of the worlds population), but they are all strangers to you...
As has been said a couple of times now. truthfully you'd only be absolutely sure that you'd know what you were doing at the time.
muz
Golden Master
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- 6,928
When I studied moral philosophy at uni we considered at length these various different scenarios .consequentialism would indeed say that you should do the greatest good for the greatest number but this fails to account for the extra weight you clearly place on the life of your family members . we played around changing the parameters a fair bit to see peoples different natural reactions and the differing weights they applied to the lives of different member of society , what if the train with 100 people on was a train full of prisoners ? or what if the train with 50 people on was just women and children and the one with 100 people on was solely men ? we all have natural reactions and apply different weights to the lives of others depending on their status in society
I came to the conclusion that for my family I feel I could justify killing 50 extra ordinary people I didn't know . there does become a point though where you wouldn't save your family because the deaths that would occur as a result would be an even worse consequence .for example if it was save your family vs nuclear apocalypse it would be worthless saving your family because the world wouldn't be a worth being alive in anyway . and again if it was save my family vs 10,000 people it would be a tough call and I wouldn't know what to do unless I was in that situation
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