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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mardoc Redcloak" data-source="post: 3253298" data-attributes="member: 40569">But either way you are sacrificing lives.  If you kill one to save five, then you sacrifice one life for five; if you just let the five die, you sacrifice five for one.So either way according to the moral framework you have advocated, you are acting outside of your rights - but in the first case, you are doing so with regard to one life, and in the second, you are doing so with regard to five.  Consequentialism says: maximize the good and minimize the evil.  Save the five.You have no "end no one's life" option.  If you did, no consequentialist would propose killing anyone.This doesn't help your case, because the exact same logic could be used to justify the opposite action - what do you think the five people whose lives you saved would think?  Once again, maximize the good, minimize the evil.  If human beings (or, in the D&D case, sapient beings) are of equal moral worth, then five trumps one.The proper viewpoint is the objective one, measuring people's lifes, preferences, and happiness equally instead of being partial to one or the other.In fact, if you take the deontological theories founded upon universality and impartiality (say, Kant's Categorical Imperative, or Rawls' application of it with the veil of ignorance thought experiment), it isn't that difficult to use them to support utilitarian conclusions.  The reason for this is that once we have assumed an impartial perspective, it is difficult to see why we would NOT save five lives over one, rather than one over five - because we have no partial perspective from which to value one life over another.Perhaps, but every inaction does as well.  What we have to do is try our best - consider what we know, and utilize our reason to the best of our abilities to decide which action has the best consequences.Yes, we will make mistakes, but making mistakes is an unavoidable aspect of being human.Certainly, but if the person making the decision did not know and had no reasonable way of knowing that this was going to happen, there is no basis upon which to hold him or her accountable for the failure.</blockquote>

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