(June 23, 2013 at 3:00 pm)missluckie26 Wrote: Potential cannot be measured unless you are omniscient. Prior acts mean nothing when future acts can be anything; one person can change the entire world, you mention Abraham Lincoln. If as a young tree chopper you decided not to save him from a threat of death because you measured your worth higher than his: and you do nothing with your life, imagine what the world had just lost. I suggest merely that our default position for the betterment of our species and that of society, should be to give the other the fighting chance because the repurcussions of not doing that are far greater. The moral implications of having a future society that measures peoples worth and engages in self preservation tactics, will lead to a possible end to our entire species. We are all pieces of a whole, and if we don't connect then eventually that whole will crumble.
Potential can and are measured everyday, potential is not a guarantee, if you're omniscient you get to look into the future, potential is only a concept because we are not omniscient. We decide who gets scholarships. Who gets bank loans. Who gets organs to live on. We do it everyday. We cannot function well if we don't, imagine a society where getting scholarship is a lucky draw. You get smart and hardworking people entering the workforce early because they cannot afford school. You get people who slack through school going to university. You cannot honestly think that they have equal potential. Which I think is what you're proposing here, that everybody has equal amount of potential but have manifested different amounts of it.
Prior acts DO limit future acts. For example I cannot be a ballet dancer. I did not train when I was young enough. Or acrobatics. Or an athlete. There are limits to what humans can do, and often this is limited by past actions. If I am a convict and do not have the papers I need, I cannot get work as easily as you can. Are you more likely to agree to dinner with a known rapist or are you more likely to have dinner with your sister (or insert a relative you like here)? You measured what they'll potentially do, and you chose self preservation.
Maybe I was unclear, I do not advocate not helping the weak, the poor, the physically disadvantaged, and so on. I merely think, to require someone to die, it has to be for quite a lot, enough that you value it more than your life. And if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying any life will be worth yours.
Let's say in a scenario A is in trouble and if B dies A gets to live. You say that if B doesn't, A doesn't have a fighting chance. But what about B's fighting chance? Why doesn't A die so that B doesn't have to? Only one person comes up alive here, who is taking away whose fighting chance?
