Morality: Action Vs. Inaction
Battlehamster
Member Posts: 298
in Off-Topic
@kamuizin - Who asked for an interesting, but totally off-topic moral debate.kamuizin said:I find funny these kind of debates, so let me left here a question to be answered by anyone who want:
You know that a man, a good man, with family and friends, will in the future kill a hundred other good persons. You're presented with this knowledge and a chance to kill this man before all that happens. What would you do? What would be the good thing to do? What would be the lawful good thing to do?
Just remember that with the knowledge and by inactivity, you're so guilty of the act as it's perpetrator.
Lemmie take this up a notch and respond to your question with a question.
Someone existing outside spacetime approaches you with opportunity to kill the man in your example. If you do so, these hundreds of good people get to live. However, one of these good people he kills ends up creating a new form of fusion providing clean and safe energy for the world and does so with good intent. However, he creates this energy immediately before a massive war breaks out and as a result, the energy he created with the purist intent is weaponized and leads to the development of a weapon which destroys the planet.
IF you choose to let these hundred good people die he presents the following alternative scenario. Because the man previously mentioned dies the energy source which would destroy mankind is still created, but only a year after the mentioned war by someone intending to weaponize it. He pursues this weapon with great zeal and vigor but isn't as competent in the design. As a result, during one of his experiments, he makes a mistake causing but a small amount of energy (far less than in a completed weapon) to be mishandled and as a result, destroys hundreds of miles of land rather than the entire planet. After seeing this, mankind realizes that turning such power into a weapon would assure the destruction of humanity and chooses not to weaponize this energy source thereby saving every living being on the planet from extinction.
It is then asked again, will you kill this man to save hundreds?
In response, my idea of morality requires foresight to adequately make a decision. I.e. making a decision based on the best information at the time which extends into as many post-consequences as possible. The real problem I see here is, how far do you carry that knowledge out as being morally actionable, because at some point you DO have knowledge but its purely hypothetical. So is it still "good" to act on something not knowing the full extent of the consequences? Or do we accept that sometimes doing the "good" thing is an unintentional evil?
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Moral is what the outside world expect from you, it doesn't define good or evil as in drow society for example is expected that a priest of lolth to perform ritual sacrifices. There, kill someone in sacrifice is morally correct.
To every act there's a consequence and what define you as good or evil isn't the label that other people put on you, but your true intent.
You bring in your question a concept of total oblivion. Atm as humans we didn't identified inteligent life outside earth (what obvious exist, from a mathematical point of view the universe is infinite and we already have 1 example of inteligent life, so finite inteligence into an infinite universe is ... a bit stupid). Based on the previous concept, our world atm resume to the existence of our planet.
Based on the infos above, both actions would be good. Kill the man to avoid the total oblivion of our existence is a good act, the person would have to endure the death of that innocent knowing that he saved the future of his specie. Do not kill the man is also valid as good, he follow his ethics and decide to not play god, if that will result in the end of humankind, only time will provide as by a rule, no future result is 100% accurate but only a possibility.
BUT also, both actions can be evil, it's all based on what was the intent of the guy who killed or didn't killed the innocent man.
Are you bringing up the heated argument of moral relativism vs. moral absolutism as a moral standard? Basically its the belief that "Right and wrong / good and evil" (I think its both, its been awhile) are determined by the tenants of a society rather than the perspective of an individual or the person existing outside of it. Then you have moral absolutism which is exactly what it sounds like. (I'm not trying to downtalk you either btw since I think its totally feasible you have heard or at least understand these perspective, its just making it easier for me to line my response up.)
I think intent is important, but not AS important as the actual action. Intent is well and good, but if you have an evil or good intention you aren't ACTUALLY impacting others - based on pure intent your morality exists in an existential vacuum. I think you're intent can intrinsically make you a good or bad person but its what you do which makes you externally good or bad.
So to use the drow priest, that person would maybe be intrinsically good as they want to do something they perceive as beneficial to their society because they want to help...but in reality a society where killing someone who could be beneficial to the society is warped to be "helpful" is actually evil. So objectionably, the person is wrong. Its why I'm such a big fan of Nietzsche who I think was trying to get people in line with the idea of think for yourself in moral decision making and don't stick to cultural norms. That isn't to say you shouldn't consult others...but I think the process of consulting others in your own moral views which allows you to establish a set of morals which are neither conformist nor purely anarchically generated - and its that process which helps you to better align your intentions with your actual actions.
So with the killing the man example...
Initially - Killing would be Good, but evil
With Oblivion - Killing would be evil or good based on the intention (are you trying to just save yourself or are you doing something for the sake of all life and not just your own?), but right.
In both cases your intent is misaligned with your actions...but you can't really do anything about that one way or the other so are we just supposed to say everyone is evil? That seems...off.
Anyway, that's my buck-oh-five and not by any means some sort of absolute truth.
When i speak of intent, i don't speak of it based on moral, in fact you can say i'm an amoral person, i don't follow society rules for the sake of society, but only to avoid the penalities. In my timelife i adquired some degree of knowledge, and based on that, on my life, on my environment and on my psychological tendencies i formed a mind of my own. I base my moral choices on that.
Because of this habit of mine in perceive everything around me without the society moralism i tend to behave in the same way.
It's funny that this behavior of mine that some times put my perceptions against the rules of my society (still as an attorney i tend to respect that to avoid retribution), is officialy taken as a rule in the criminal laws of my country, where we adopt the theory of intent instead of punish in reason of the result only.
There are actually 2 questions:
1.) In the first question you do NOT know about the consequences and are asked what you would do. Mankind would still ultimately be destroyed, but at the time - you don't know this.
2.) In the second one you are given the same action but all of the consequences associated with your actions leading to the destruction of mankind.
Also, it is assumed there are absolutely no consequences for you killing this man, only the consequences of his life and/or death.
So that's what I would do. And that is what I normally do when some info about the future leaks out and someone want to use it.
Of course I am good in no way whatsoever and, theoretically, the good thing to do would be to do what is good. And this depends entirely on the viewpoint. E.g a sane naturalistic good person would let nature handle it, for their own good. Then, again, a manic altruistic good person would sacrifice themselves to a stupid cause (either 'good of family' - not killing, or 'good of population' - killing) not even imagining any possible consequences, as it happened many times already. And what would lawful stupid good do? Probably fail to cast 'Detect Evil' (as evil does not exist; there is only good, or 1, and the absence of good, or 0, and that is why humans use mathematics and not more complex cosmographical systems) and then consult their direct spiritual superior (these guys are always disguised oppressors) and do whatever they say, as in 'There are children dying there! Hundreds of poor civilians slaughtered by a dictator! If we bombard the dictator, we might still get some frags even though the fun is nearly over! Now get your sorry ass outta here, go to war and bring me something caloric on your way back!'
Somesuch. Now hand over that honoris causa PhD in philosophy and begone.
this is one of them scruples questions, ain't it? =p
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/151771/scruples
As for the insanely long reply, let me see if I can briefly recap it...Basically morality exists purely according to the perspective of one's own unique reality which is entirely circumstantial. So we should throw out logical structure (which I am behind) when it comes to morality since its all subjective and circumstantial anyways and trying to use logic only results in 1 or 0.
You can kill a perfectly healthy man to steal his organs and save 4 people, or you can not, and 4 people will die, and one will live. The "correct answer is to kill the person, and save the 4, because more people are saved.now, don't anyone go and say "well, we all die anyway, so....." Acknowledging this fact This pretty much abolishes any reason to have an ethical debate concerning death ethics, and reality is subjective, because I say it is(don't get me started on this) so the correct option with this rational will be inactivity, so that the human race survives.
I personally, believe that we should all save our efforts and just lay down and die, so that cats can finally have their go at ruling the world proper, instead of manipulating us humans.
To be honest I've always found examples like that ridiculous. But they tend to be good because you look at it and go "Well this is ridiculous!". I agree its ludicrous but my point is trying to figure out why it is because some people need a rationalization of freaking everything, which is rather silly when you realize that with enough time and effort anything can be rationalized.
Sometimes when you try to be nice, you accidentally mess up. You give a depressed friend flowers, turns out she's allergic and ends up in the hospital. You help a charismatic leader patch up his impoverised country, turns out he's a megalomaniac who sets people on fire just so he can sleep at night. Lack of future knowledge is not evil.
Hell, as far as I'm concerned, Good and Evil should be kept to the books. Aside from everyone having different standards, people also have inherently different standards between themselves and everyone else. Stalin believed he was doing his country a favor by having a brutal dictatorship that sent one half of the country to work themselves to death in Siberia so the other half could starve. The Crusades believed they were on a mission from God and doing good work in carving a bloody swath through Europe. Most serial killers believe they only kill people who deserve it, meaning they themselves are not evil.
What's the point of labelling any of these people good or evil when the labels themselves have no inherent value because they're different to anyone?
You can't put a price on a thing without anyone knowing what currency you're using. And the lines are too vague to declare one or the other Absolute Truth.
I'm sorry, I'm not much of a philosophical person.
If you kill a man, you are commiting murder. But murder is bad.
However, if you don't you don't he's going to kill other people. Allowing murder is bad.
But why is this preordained? Why not instead of killing the guy, you just stop him from killing people. Lock him up or prevent the deaths in another way. If someone is somehow mystically aware that a person is going to kill a bunch of people, then I'd suggest reporting it or if that fails doing something about it short of murdering the person. There is no guarantee that this guy will kill other people other than you saying so.
Basically, what is it that will allow you to put an assortment of people into a room without having one person say their subjective reality is better, but to get there they have to kill everyone else in the room? If we define too little - anyone can do as they please. If we define too much - anyone can do as they please as long as they can rationalize it.
What price would you pay for security?
Would you take off your shoes for an airport scanner? Would you allow yourself, others, kids to be scanned naked so that you can be checked for bombs? Would you capture and torture people you suspect might do something bad later? Would you hold them indefinitely without trial?
These are slippery slopes my friends....
However the hipotetic situations aren't the main issue, the importance in in the individual answer, it's like criminal law class examples, they're always crazy cos the example isn't important, how people deal with them that is.
If one side is slippery, so is the other. Then again, me being an anti-extremist I tend to have conflicts with both an absolute police state as well a total anarchy. How can you say a state where your every action is judged by a state is any better or worse than a state where any given action is judged by every individual? The problem with using a slippery slope argument is that you lose your footing to ANY point and the only "right" decision it leads to is ultimately inaction, which I'm pretty sure appeals to nobody or a very, very select minority. The real problem (in my totally subjective opinion) is that we need more balance in our society which tends towards extremes and polarities rather than unification and compromises.
That's right - You guys really need to pay more attention to druids. They aren't all a bunch of tree-loving hippies.
The rights of society vs. the rights of the individual.
Middle ground can be exceptionally hard to pin down. Middle ground is just that - a subjectively defined line or someone's opinion. This can be "commonly accepted" or not and can change over time. 1950s values are not values that we hold today necessarily. Common sense isn't common as the saying goes.
How much torture is acceptable in the name of freedom? none? some? It's a slippery slope both directions.
Anarchy means "no masters", not "no laws". It means everyone (anyone who cares, at least) gets to have a saying in what the laws should be. It means participation instead of delegation.
Yes, I know what's the dictionary definition of anarchy. I wanted to express what it means on a deeper level, for someone who is an anarchist at least.
Although the bit on the "no masters" vs "no laws" is etymologically accurate
It's Minority Report.
But I think that system wasn't corrupt, just massively flawed by ignoring the fact that knowing the future beforehand means it can be changed.