RE: Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”
September 8, 2014 at 3:04 am
(This post was last modified: September 8, 2014 at 3:05 am by bennyboy.)
What if it's not guaranteed? What if, for example, killing a few suspected terrorists who are very possibly responsible for recent communications chatter about an imminent threat (but are not guaranteed to be: let's say it seems a 50/50 chance they are the ones) might save a city of millions? Is it more moral for me to commit the evil of killing a couple guys, not knowing but strongly suspecting they are the ones?
It seems to me that in the case of credible terror threats, almost any evil is worth committing, even if it changes the odds by a few percent either way. In other words, my killing act is probably a purely evil act-- maybe the guys weren't going to do it, maybe they were just goofing off and never had the means, etc., and I'm killing innocent people in the prime of their lives. However, the relative value of the million seems to skew any calculus I could make about it.
It seems to me that in the case of credible terror threats, almost any evil is worth committing, even if it changes the odds by a few percent either way. In other words, my killing act is probably a purely evil act-- maybe the guys weren't going to do it, maybe they were just goofing off and never had the means, etc., and I'm killing innocent people in the prime of their lives. However, the relative value of the million seems to skew any calculus I could make about it.
