RE: Given a chance would you kill baby Hitler?
November 14, 2015 at 10:01 am
(This post was last modified: November 14, 2015 at 10:04 am by Edwardo Piet.)
Despite the fact more innocent babies dying is worse, I don't really see someone killing one innocent baby as any less immoral than if someone killed billions. It's worse in body count but every individual innocent baby from its own perspective still experiences dying. Which is fucking horrific.
Like I said I don't think utility can be aggregated as simplistic as many utilitarians do.
For example it doesn't matter how many pinpricks oneself or millions of other people experience, every experience of a pinpick both multiple times by the same person and by different people is still only a pinprick and could never be as bad as torture of the worst kind to even one other person.
However, 2 pinpricks of the same pain level is clearly twice as bad as one, and a million a million times worse than 1. But higher pains and sufferings are unreachable from the pinprick level.
Likewise a more horrific death will always be a more horrific death from a pain/suffering perspective... and more painful grief from more loved ones will always be more painful grief from more loved ones. Every individual is different and every individual matters:
However in practical terms there is often no clear way to judge so many different individual sufferings and deaths and the griefs of others and it would be completely biased and unethical if one seriously attempted to do so. The best approach at least for practical terms= Greater suffering and death in quantitive terms leads to greater suffering and death in qualititve terms.
Besides the chances that anyone suffers the exact same identical level of pain and experience of death even from seemingly identical experiences is extremely tiny so basically greater suffering and deaths in numbers almost guarantees greater suffering from the qualittive perspective too.
So obviously more dead babies is far worse but I think that even 1 dead innocent baby is so bad as to make more being obviously worse but clearly hardly an improvement. Every death and extreme suffering is relevant.
If one had to choose between the death of one or the death of many, obviously the former is almost certainly a better result but I wouldn't ever want to "play God" with such matters because I think that the former isn't much better in result than the latter.
And lets say it was a choice between a million painlessly dead and 1 painfully dead? What then? I don't like to play with people's lives.
In my personal opinion in that case one would have to think of whether the emotional grief and pain from any of the millions of dead could at all outweigh the suffering of the 1 that died painfully, including any long term impact of sufferings on the planet and earth population in general after the millions died.
But this is hypothetical, in practical terms I would prefer to never "play God".
Like I said I don't think utility can be aggregated as simplistic as many utilitarians do.
For example it doesn't matter how many pinpricks oneself or millions of other people experience, every experience of a pinpick both multiple times by the same person and by different people is still only a pinprick and could never be as bad as torture of the worst kind to even one other person.
However, 2 pinpricks of the same pain level is clearly twice as bad as one, and a million a million times worse than 1. But higher pains and sufferings are unreachable from the pinprick level.
Likewise a more horrific death will always be a more horrific death from a pain/suffering perspective... and more painful grief from more loved ones will always be more painful grief from more loved ones. Every individual is different and every individual matters:
However in practical terms there is often no clear way to judge so many different individual sufferings and deaths and the griefs of others and it would be completely biased and unethical if one seriously attempted to do so. The best approach at least for practical terms= Greater suffering and death in quantitive terms leads to greater suffering and death in qualititve terms.
Besides the chances that anyone suffers the exact same identical level of pain and experience of death even from seemingly identical experiences is extremely tiny so basically greater suffering and deaths in numbers almost guarantees greater suffering from the qualittive perspective too.
So obviously more dead babies is far worse but I think that even 1 dead innocent baby is so bad as to make more being obviously worse but clearly hardly an improvement. Every death and extreme suffering is relevant.
If one had to choose between the death of one or the death of many, obviously the former is almost certainly a better result but I wouldn't ever want to "play God" with such matters because I think that the former isn't much better in result than the latter.
And lets say it was a choice between a million painlessly dead and 1 painfully dead? What then? I don't like to play with people's lives.
In my personal opinion in that case one would have to think of whether the emotional grief and pain from any of the millions of dead could at all outweigh the suffering of the 1 that died painfully, including any long term impact of sufferings on the planet and earth population in general after the millions died.
But this is hypothetical, in practical terms I would prefer to never "play God".
