(May 8, 2021 at 2:46 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: That would seem to be the thing that's different between a necessary and unnecessary evil as I conceive of them, yes. Necessity - both are evil.
Are they the same amount of evil or not? You seem to be saying both yes and no.
(May 8, 2021 at 2:46 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think I dropped a line about this one a few responses back - so long as we have to stick a kid with a needle to vaccinate them - that's what we're going to do. In either case, the killing of a person or the vaccinating of a child - if we constrain the field to nothing but bad things - it may be the case that some of those bad things leads to better outcomes than others but that doesn't suggest that we don't recognize or work to eliminate the bad in that thing as we see it.
I think you're equivocating upon different senses of bad. Let me ask you this, should we punish people proportionate to the severity of their crime?