The moral issues of killing
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Morel codes differ from person to person, to me It usually goes by age. I will always choose to save the younger person. I will likely always choose if age differences is to close to tell a woman over a man.
You say potential?Jonluw said:
You think backwards.
It's not that the kid has potential, fuck his potential. It's that an adult is guilty, of something, anything- and you'll sleep better about killing the adult you can imagine cheating on exams, banging their mistress, killing Iraqi children while they were in the war, etc.
Children are innocent, at least until they're old enough to knock over a lamp.
Then, for me, it's kind of a toss-up.
While I'm against killing anyone regardless of age myself, I think the reason it's considered more okay to kill an adult than a child is less to do with potential than it is to do with a couple of other things:
- The child has experienced relatively little thus far in life, so it would seem unfair to cut its life short
- In most situations in which people might consider it okay to kill someone, that person would have to have done something to warrant being killed, there are very few people who'd advocate random murder as morally acceptable. So they might have, for example, joined the opposing army, become a dangerous criminal, done something terrible someone wants to avenge. None of these are things a child can reasonably do and even if they could we don't expect children to take full responsibility for their actions.
- The child has experienced relatively little thus far in life, so it would seem unfair to cut its life short
- In most situations in which people might consider it okay to kill someone, that person would have to have done something to warrant being killed, there are very few people who'd advocate random murder as morally acceptable. So they might have, for example, joined the opposing army, become a dangerous criminal, done something terrible someone wants to avenge. None of these are things a child can reasonably do and even if they could we don't expect children to take full responsibility for their actions.
I have a simple means to justify the death of a child over the death of a adult. Its simple. What does killing a person do to them? They die, of course, but they were always going to die. Everyone is going to die. You have made them die sooner, and as such you have taken away much of their lives. A adult has lived more life and has less life to live than a child. If you kill someone 3 seconds before they were going to die anyway has any harm been done? But if you kill someone when they would have lived years and years if you didn't its clear there is more harm there.Jonluw said:Hiya escapists.
So I've spent some time thinking of killing.
I am no proponent of infanticide. If forced to choose, I'd rather kill a random grown person than a random child.
I am not the type to let my ethics be dictated by emotions, so I've been working on trying to understand why it is, logically, that it is better to kill an adult than a child.
The one logical reason I've arrived on is potential.
A child yet has potential to become a great person, contributing much to humanity, and live a fulfilling life, while most adults will already be living thoroughly mediocre lives, plus they have already gotten to experience a great deal of life, so I'm not taking away their potential to experience life in the first place, as I would to a child if I killed it. I believe it better to let two babies live half a lifetime each, than for one of them to live an entire lifetime at the cost of the other's life.
I consider this view to be consistent with my view that I'd rather kill a newborn child than a person who is currently doing something great for humanity as well.
So it seems that this logical basis for my ethics works well.
However, if I value life on the sole factor of potential, I should really be against abortion.
Which I'm not.
Moral code inconsistencies. Ouch.
An fetus has just as much potential as a newborn child, but still I'd rather terminate a pregnancy (given it isn't somwhere around the 7th month or later) than kill a grown person.
I've been trying to work out why it is I think like this. Am I simply biologically wired to value newborns over most every other life, this being what my ethics in truth are based on?
After all, in natural conditions, a newborn is worth more than a fetus, since pregnancies are risky and it's not even certain the mother will be able to carry the fetus to term. A newborn represents this risk overcome, and as such, working hard to preserve its life is far more reasonable than thinking "oh I can just make another one anyways".
I've also tried a different angle: seeing as a fetus's brain isn't highly developed, killing it isn't much worse than killing a fish or a similar low-standing animal.
But if I am valuing the lives of humans based on the stage of development their brain is in, I should more readily kill an infant than an adult.
The only somewhat satisfying answer I've been able to come up with is that I logically value life on the basis of both potential and brain development.
[small]Positive scale markers missing, because drawing arrows is hard.[/small]
The graphs may not be to scale in relation to one another.
So what do you think, escapists? How do you determine what human lives, on a general basis, are worth more?
To me, based on the last 5 minutes I've spent forming my opinion on the matter from my inherently biased perspective, much of it is the conception of fear and pain (specifically in relation to death) within an individual and their mental capacity to deal with that pain/fear. This is why I'd save the human over the dog, the dog likely doesn't grasp death and its own existence as well as the human would. The child over the baby, because the baby is no different than the dog (probably even less intelligent), and the child likely has a better conception of self and how scary death is. The child over the adult, because while the adult may be scared, they've had more of a chance to understand life and death and have likely developed more mental faculties to help themselves deal with those fears and pain. I also generally don't believe abortion past a certain stage is okay unless the mother is truly at risk, as the fetus, while having no conception of death, may actually feel "fear" and pain once it's developed to a certain point. The mother's life takes precedence though, since her fear of death is far more developed than the fetus', even if she has developed mental defenses against it.
That's just a general gist of my views. Obviously there would be more variables to consider in a real world scenario, and holes can be poked in what I just said (I can think of a few right now), but then it's not some well formed philosophy as it's not something I generally concern myself with.
That's just a general gist of my views. Obviously there would be more variables to consider in a real world scenario, and holes can be poked in what I just said (I can think of a few right now), but then it's not some well formed philosophy as it's not something I generally concern myself with.
I find it interesting that pretty much the entirety of this discussion so far has been from a largely utilitarian stand point of ethics. As someone who takes more of a virtue ethics approach, I might be able to offer a bit of different perspective.
The whole question of "who is more valuable?" or "Who is more worthy of being saved?" is moot. Say that you have a forty five year old man and a twenty year old woman in the hospital both in need of a heart transplant, but only one heart. Big dilemma, right? Wrong. You give heart to the candidate least likely to have complications. Or what about the classic train track dilemma? Do you save the people on the train and kill the individual or condemn the occupants of the train to keep a single individual alive? Don't make that decision. You simply follow procedure. To be frank, I find the whole idea of attaching math to individuals both appalling and vain. At the end of the day, such numbers mean just about jack shit, especially when people have no way of quantifying even a small portion of human society. There is little in this world to suggest to me that there is a cosmic morality accountant that is recording our +5 gain of pleasure or -30 loss of it. And that is speaking as someone who believes in God.
Granted, some people might immediately ask how something being procedure makes something right; it doesn't. The whole reason that you carry out the procedure is because you believe that it is conducive to a society that you want to live in. The society you want to live in is built off of certain virtues (and tainted by vices). Killing isn't illegal because the act itself it is immoral (was the gun fired because of self defense? Rage? Cruelty? The motive doesn't necessarily have a bearing on the immediate outcome), it's illegal because a society can not function with our modern virtue of equality without freedom from coercion on an individual level. For example, I think vitreous society would make drugs legal, but the use of drugs itself is strongly indicative of a vice. It wouldn't be virtuous of a person to take another person's stuff, but in a virtuous society, there are people who would forgive them.
So how does this all tie back to the question of abortion? Basically, the question of whether or not abortion is morally justified in the act itself, but in what it says about both you and society as a whole. Do you think that society is better off for allowing women to have abortions? Do you think a virtuous society would have women getting abortions for the reasons that they do? Answer those two questions and you'll be closer to reconciling your ideas.
If nothing else, the fact that you're thinking about it at all is a good sign. Way too many "philosophy" threads on these forums essentially amount to the poster using it as a soap box to express their own views rather than to actually look at tough issues (or as a way of saying "hey look at this tough issue that I'm aware of" completely without a prompt.)
The whole question of "who is more valuable?" or "Who is more worthy of being saved?" is moot. Say that you have a forty five year old man and a twenty year old woman in the hospital both in need of a heart transplant, but only one heart. Big dilemma, right? Wrong. You give heart to the candidate least likely to have complications. Or what about the classic train track dilemma? Do you save the people on the train and kill the individual or condemn the occupants of the train to keep a single individual alive? Don't make that decision. You simply follow procedure. To be frank, I find the whole idea of attaching math to individuals both appalling and vain. At the end of the day, such numbers mean just about jack shit, especially when people have no way of quantifying even a small portion of human society. There is little in this world to suggest to me that there is a cosmic morality accountant that is recording our +5 gain of pleasure or -30 loss of it. And that is speaking as someone who believes in God.
Granted, some people might immediately ask how something being procedure makes something right; it doesn't. The whole reason that you carry out the procedure is because you believe that it is conducive to a society that you want to live in. The society you want to live in is built off of certain virtues (and tainted by vices). Killing isn't illegal because the act itself it is immoral (was the gun fired because of self defense? Rage? Cruelty? The motive doesn't necessarily have a bearing on the immediate outcome), it's illegal because a society can not function with our modern virtue of equality without freedom from coercion on an individual level. For example, I think vitreous society would make drugs legal, but the use of drugs itself is strongly indicative of a vice. It wouldn't be virtuous of a person to take another person's stuff, but in a virtuous society, there are people who would forgive them.
So how does this all tie back to the question of abortion? Basically, the question of whether or not abortion is morally justified in the act itself, but in what it says about both you and society as a whole. Do you think that society is better off for allowing women to have abortions? Do you think a virtuous society would have women getting abortions for the reasons that they do? Answer those two questions and you'll be closer to reconciling your ideas.
If nothing else, the fact that you're thinking about it at all is a good sign. Way too many "philosophy" threads on these forums essentially amount to the poster using it as a soap box to express their own views rather than to actually look at tough issues (or as a way of saying "hey look at this tough issue that I'm aware of" completely without a prompt.)