RE: End all Suffering now? you have the power.
January 11, 2013 at 12:49 pm
(This post was last modified: January 11, 2013 at 1:05 pm by Brian37.)
(January 11, 2013 at 12:27 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: I have no right to judge for someone else whether their suffering is too great to bear or their life too precious to lose.
Not asking you to. But you also fail to understand that by not doing such you are still going to affect the families of the dead you don't save by doing nothing so it is impossible to make a moral absolute either way.
You could say the same about D-Day and Germany. If Hitler had gotten the bomb before the west did, he would have used it. I doubt you could argue with anyone in Europe or the states that lived back then or is living today that staying out of WW2 and doing nothing would have been right rather than what actually happened.
Once again, morality issues are not absolute. In the case of Bush or shooting down those jets you would still have to answer to a family if you could have shot them down but did not.
If one of those jets had had been right on the tale of the first one that hit (and was right behind it the minute it was hijacked) and the passengers knew the intent of the hijackers, if I had been on that plane knowing I was going to die anyway, I would have said the same thing Bush did "take em out". My death in that respect would save the lives of others because that plane wouldn't have hit.
You could not argue that the family members of the dead in the towers would condemn the jet fighter for saving their loved ones if that had been what had happend.
And the last plane to go down in PA had already gotten word, and again, they knew they had nothing to lose and took the plane down themselves before it could hit a target. I don't think they would have minded a jet doing that. I certainly wouldn't like to die, but if someone is holding me hostage and they intend to kill me anyway, what do I have to lose by telling the cop to shoot?
But again, that is not the example he is giving in any case so don't allow him to distract you by confusing his comic book example with what cops and military deal with in hostage situations all the time.
You cannot make morality an absolute. That is what political and religious idealism does. In real life everything is situational and conditional and fluid.
The trap he set you up in is "you have no right to play god". He is depending on us to fall for that which is not the argument we should be falling for.
No one should play god, sure, but what he doesn't see that you are falling for is not seeing the third option. Humans are not gods and gods don't exist. So in real life everything is a crap shoot and all we can do is the best we can.
It isn't a matter of playing god, it is a matter of reducing harm. If the jets had shot all for planes down before they hit mass populations, sure it sucks that we would have to do it, but as a result less people would have died, and the people saved would certainly be thankful and the people who we would have shot down would be very understanding, because they would know that their lives are no more or less important(like you said). Otherwise why would that PA plane's passengers take themselves out? Because they knew they had nothing to lose and would reduce more death by making the jet crash before it could kill more people.
No we should not play god, I agree, but since gods don't exist then we have to deal with reality the way it is not the way we want it to be.
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