green slime said:
example 1:
- you are in a room with someone who can set off a bomb and kill thousands of people.
- you have a gun, the other person has a trigger for the bomb.
do you...
1) kill the bomb person saving thousands of lives?
2) not kill the bomb person and thousands die? but because you didn't kill them (except through inaction) then you're still morally "ok"
example 2:
- you witness a car accident.
- a truck flips over, the cab is all smashed in, the driver can't move and you would need "the jaws of life" to get them out (the thing that cuts cars apart to get people out of them, i think that's the term they use).
- the truck lights on fire.
- there is a gun handy.
- the driver can't move even his hands (can't shoot himself).
- the nearest help is 50 miles away (can't get there in time).
- the driver is faced with: Burn alive or convince this witness to kill me.
- burning alive is a horrible horrible thing (I have a friend who was in a house fire, he's lucky to be alive but he's massively scarred from head to foot, so I'm going on his word that burning alive is horrible)
do you:
1) take mercy on this driver and kill him?
or...
2) watch him burn alive knowing full well that you could have saved him that suffering and the end result would be him dead anyway?
Example 3:
- someone will kill you.
- you can kill them first.
- if you instead try to maim them there's a good chance that you will miss and die anyway
do you:
1) just let them kill you.
2) defend yourself and kill them.
3) hope to maim them knowing full well you could probably end up dead anyway.
et cetera.
most examples of negation of a universal "killing is wrong" tend towards "greater harm through inaction", "unavoidable death anyway, prevent horrific events in the process", or "self defense". at least the ones that I've read.
Once you've been through enough philosophy courses you sort of have to admit that in most cases universal laws are too weak to argue, you instead should argue that "killing is almost always wrong" or "killing is usually wrong."
the thing is: if you disagree with the specific examples I've given someone else can always think up another example. To prove that a universal law is not true you only need one instance in which it fails, to prove a "usually" law is not true you need to have a lot more than one.
as far as morals in D&D go, some people rule that "allowing evil through inaction is wrong" so in the "thousands die or you kill the mad wizard" situation above a paladin or cleric who has the rules:
1) killing is always wrong.
2) allowing evil through inaction is wrong.
is basically screwed... damned if they do and likewise if they don't. same as if you were in that situation in RL and had those moral rules for yourself.
That changes if you give one rule a higher priority than the other, say rule 2 as is, add the clause to the end of rule one, "as long as it doesn't interfere with rule 2" or whatever.
You can argue that the situations I've presented are too perfect to support my arguement, or whatever. However, that doesn't change that the situations could occur, and if they did occur you are left with the moral problem of holding onto "killing is always wrong" and seeing the consequences of such belief.
Personally, the truck one hits home for me the best (and the self defence ones are pretty close too at least when presented better
). As I said, I have a friend who was lucky to survive being burnt alive in a house fire (the firemen were standing over him thinking he was dead talking about how bad off he was... really horrific). I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy and if I could save someone from that torture then I would. The problem - killing someone like that in the US is illegal, so if I was in that situation and was forced to choose: likely jail time, or help this poor man. It's hard to say but I'd still likely help the guy out, just because of that friend of mine, and hope that the courts understood that I couldn't allow someone to be in that much pain with no hope to survive.
maybe I forgot one of the conditions in the situations, but those are the general ideas for them. like i said, you can disagree with the specific situations here, but if you're being reasonable that's pretty difficult.
you could justify the bomb one with a counter arguement that maybe letting that many people die would help more (over population) but it's still kill the guy, or allow the guy to kill people. however, saying someone is responsible for something through inaction is dissagreable to me, as if I recall correctly it doesn't stand up under scrutiny.
In one philosophy class I was in we tried to figure out what the minimum moral standpoint would be from a reasonable point of view.
it ended up being something like: you shouldn't go out of your way to hurt other people.
meaning: if you see a kid fall off a dock and start drowning it's "okay" to watch them die. but you shouldn't push the kid off the dock. (life guards recommend that you don't try to save drowning people if I recall correctly, beucase the people panic and are just as likely to pull you under as you save them, unimportant side note).
That's not to say that you shouldn't hold yourself to a higher standard. and it's basically a modified "golden rule" (which is weak, by the way, the golden rule allows you to go around killing people as long as you commit suicide in the end - you treated them as you wanted to be treated; you wanted to be shot in the head).
Then again, anyone can be unreasonable and just stick their head in the sand in the face of reasoned arguements, in which case it's not worth getting into a debate over anything with them because they aren't "on the same page" as you.
That's why I listed #2 - if two people aren't discussing something from "the same page" then there's no point in argueing. If someone says, "God says Thou shalt not kill," then the best I can say is, "I hope you are ready to accept the implications of following God's word, and I hope you never get into a situation where you need to experience those implications first hand." Beyond that - it's silly to try to argue the point at all.
If, however, two people are approaching the discussion from a similar stand point (familiar with ethical and moral problems and philosophy in general, or what have you) then discussion may not be a waste of time. In that case then you assume that presented with reasonable arguement that one party or the other may concede with at least a begrudging "okay, I guess you're right, until I prove you wrong." At which point you may enter into something like the medieval philosophers who were argueing the existatnce of God.
person1 - "God must exist because _____"
person2 - "person1 is wrong because _____"
et cetera, and they never got anywhere.
