(June 5, 2013 at 4:26 pm)John V Wrote:(June 5, 2013 at 2:35 pm)Ryantology Wrote: If a judge sentenced every firstborn child in America to death because President Obama refused to follow that judge's command to free a certain group of people from prison, would this be immoral?Depends on who the judge is.
Last weekend I sentenced every member of two colonies of ants to death for digging in my patio. Few people would call this immoral. However, if another ant did the same, that very well could be immoral.
If you had the ability to reason with the ants and get them to move elsewhere? If you had the ability to instantly, and effortlessly, move the ants to a remote location where they could exist without troubling you, if you had the ability to know ahead of time that ants, which are ignorant of the idea that your patio is anything but a unique obstacle which they have to work around, would nest in the spot you chose to build your patio in the first place and still decided to build it without taking any steps to prevent the ants from one day proving to be a hindrance? If you had the ability to make ants simply not want to go anywhere near human habitation?
If you had any of these powers, and still chose to kill the ants, that would be immoral. Assuming that you're not a psychopath who enjoys killing for the sake of the pleasure it gives you, you most likely killed them out of some necessity; there was no other plausible method available to you to deal with the problem their presence caused. It's certainly not moral purity, but rather what we would consider an acceptable circumstance of our own imperfections.
So, you're right, it does depend on the judge. If a judge has the power to solve any problem in any way imaginable, absolutely any decision to solve a problem non-violently is about as absolutely immoral as one can imagine, no matter how inferior the victim, because a virtually infinite number of non-violent alternatives are available to this judge yet ignored in favor of violence and death, which means that if that judge kills, the only reason for it is because it enjoys killing.
