(September 23, 2014 at 9:48 am)Rhythm Wrote: Your example led to us determining that both are, in fact - people....which they are. Your conclusion was a poor one because both, in fact have "future expected" and "past personhood". You decided instead to conflate this with their ages for some godforsaken reason...after intentionally and explicitly manufacturing a dilemma when you decided that you could "only save one of them". Neither metric can make that decision for you - because they are both equals on both counts. Assuming for a moment we live in an alternate universe in which they weren't...it wouldn't be all that surprising to find that we reached a different conclusion - since you used different metrics to reach those disparate conclusions. This is not what the term "contradictory" means.
Have I helped you reach an understanding of why and how you fucked that up so completely, and why the use of the term contradictory in such a situation is incorrect? Make your decision, save either - you'll be a hero either way, eh? Personally, I'd save the kid, they're easier to carry - and it appeals to an emotional standard that many human beings use to value the very young over the very old (perhaps even the old man in the burning building would agree).....it isn't logical - but it doesn't have to be......because it's a personal value judgement.
Most of us save the new born because the baby has potentially quite a long lifetime ahead of it while the old man on the death bed does not. The thought experiment shows we value future expected personhood and for the most part ignore past personhood except in when we want to abort.....(which is really not a good reason to favor past person over future personhood).
