![]() Due to your proper training you see the opportunity to stop the thieves by killing them with little risk to your fellow hostages.ĭo you have the right to assume the 20 hostages lives are “worth more” than those of the 2 thieves? The thieves claim unless they get what they want they’re going to kill some of the 20 hostages, and menacingly they indicate they’re not satisfied with what they’ve gotten. Let’s say there’s a security guard whom they immediately kill to prove their intentions. Let’s say you’re at a store or bank and two armed robbers come in. ![]() ” Let’s take a more realistic example that could happen to us here at home. You say “it is morally wrong to attempt to try to compare the “worth” of life versus life. What if robbing 10,000 families of their life savings could have prevented the bombing? Would that have been worth it? The conclusion ultimately rests of whether or not it is morally wrong for the powerful to deprive someone of their rights against their will. If, somehow, murdering a single child would have prevented the Heroshima bombing, would it have been worth it to prevent all that death (assuming Japan would have surrendered anyway)? I assert that it is morally wrong to attempt to try to compare the “worth” of life versus life. Perhaps laws could be enacted to restrict the taking of life (or whatever rights might be considered sacrosanct), but there’s not a logical reason why the powerful wouldn’t eventually try to remove those barriers if there is nothing morally wrong with depriving an individual of his rights. If it is possible for someone else to determine which “needs” of the many are more important than the needs of an individual and they believe they have the power to deprive the individual of his needs in order to benefit the many (which most people in power around the world behave as if they believed), then there’s nothing to prevent the powerful from depriving the individual of even his life, should the benefit to the many (a very subjective quantity) be sufficiently large. Let’s proceed from the proposition that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few (not precisely what Spock meant, but that’s irrelevant-it was only an attention grabber).
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