Utilitarianism

[funkyducky]

Like someone said earlier, this is a case of cold logic vs. human emotions. Now with regards to the child in question: your level of emotional connection to the child is proportional to your stance on the issue. Higher emotional subjectivity favours the child's life and wellbeing, whereas emotional detachment renders the child's life little more significant than a fact; a statistic. There's no right or wrong answer here, because either option could be perceived as morally correct, depending on your stance. The key thing is that you have the decision to end the life of a child who would otherwise have lived, effectively making you a murderer if you choose to sacrifice the child. On the other hand, all those people contracting the horrible disease was something that just happened, unaffected by you and your choices. Those who are inclined to save the child (if it's a total stranger or a random child) do so because they can't bear to live with the guilt of having made the decision to rob that child of its life. Those who choose to kill the child can bear to shoulder the guilt, by reasoning that the child's life was not lost for no reason; that the lives they saved were worth it.

[Mao]

say that you have just killed your child to save nations dying.
unless you have no conscience at all, you would feel at least some sort of waste and pain, right?? (please tell me guys have feelings too

ALSO:
Murder is considered breaking a law right, so even if you save all those people, you would still go to jail, and have to reflect on the fact that you KILLED SOMEONE.

The suffering of the victim and the suffering of me (emotional + legal + whatever) is minuscule compared to the sum of all the suffering from people with the disease. I would do it, purely because my sacrifice (and that of a child) is outweighed by the good of the many.

When talking about utilitarianism, your own personal preference is as insignificant as any other single person, only the collective counts.

It makes perfect logical sense, but whether or not it is moral (because it violates the preference of that child), I don't think that question can be answered.

[ninwa]

It's completely ridiculous, the funny thing being: many females, given their primal need to take care of an infant, would not choose this option.

oh please, do me a favour -_-

Do you see a boy nurturing a plastic baby, as you see with girls?
Although, primal wasn't the right word...I suppose it's a psychological trait that ensures that offspring are well taken care of?

as a female the closest thing I ever got to "nurturing a plastic baby" was pretending to do surgery on my Barbies

and yes I have seen little boys hugging dolls...

see, I can give anecdotal evidence too

[s...]

"The personal repercussions are irrelevant."
That's rediculous. 

Okay, fine. Say that the child is not yours, or mine or anyone else's in this debate. Let's say that the child belongs to nameless people in some nameless country, okay?
In this case, I wouldn't want to inflict pain on the parents: they would be sad, right. (if you retaliate by saying that by taking away diseases would take away the pain of so many other people, fine.)
Also, even if the parents didn't want/like their child, the child should be considered too, right?

s.

[s...]

To: Bazza16

I have already stated that I am a selfish person in one of the posts above.

[giveup]

It's completely ridiculous, the funny thing being: many females, given their primal need to take care of an infant, would not choose this option.

oh please, do me a favour -_-

Do you see a boy nurturing a plastic baby, as you see with girls?
Although, primal wasn't the right word...I suppose it's a psychological trait that ensures that offspring are well taken care of?

as a female the closest thing I ever got to "nurturing a plastic baby" was pretending to do surgery on my Barbies

and yes I have seen little boys hugging dolls...

see, I can give anecdotal evidence too

You're kidding right? Because something is admit to exceptions, does not mean it is untrue... that is an assertoric observation.

You should probably think about how pretending to perform surgery would help you in a human social-construct 200,000 years ago. Get it?

[ninwa]

Well, you're the one "backing up" your claim with rubbish arguments like "do you see a boy nurturing a plastic baby". Give me solid proof that "many" females have still not been able to overcome this "primal urge" with logic and rationality.

[funkyducky]

The personal repercussions are irrelevant

The entire basis for this ethical dilemma is that the personal repercussions ARE relevant. If they weren't, this debate would be non-existent. Logic tells us that it's better to kill one child to save many, but our humanity leads us to empathise with that child and their loved ones. Ultimately, it's playing God, and IMHO we don't have the right to pick or choose who lives or dies - that boils down to murder. The victims of this horrible disease contracted it by chance/circumstance, the child's life, however, is completely in your own hands.

Personally, I can't say what choice I'd make without actually being in that situation, there are so many factors that could affect my decision at the time, and ultimately, it's pretty difficult to predict your own actions in such a situation. In the safety of a hypothetical situation, your heart may be set on one answer, but when your plunged into a real life-or-death situation, things change.

[Russ]

It's also important to mark the distinction between what what happen in practice and whether that action is morally acceptable. Most people would choose the elimination of disease(s), but you don't have to believe you're making a moral choice in doing so. There's a very solid moral argument (in my eyes) that you can't justify taking the life of an individual, no matter the benefits. I tried to advance it in chat but it was summarily ignored. Human life isn't something you can quantify and compare between situations or, in reference to earlier in the thread, with animal life. You have to judge your action based on what the action is, not on what you can expect out of it; ie the end does not justify the means.

To better illustrate this, if you advocate the moral acceptability of killing one child to save a million then what's your stance on the Nazi human experiments? (yes it's somewhat of a strawman, but it's still relevant)

[giveup]

Well, you're the one "backing up" your claim with rubbish arguments like "do you see a boy nurturing a plastic baby". Give me solid proof that "many" females have still not been able to overcome this "primal urge" with logic and rationality.

We live in a world that by majority believes that the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, there is a lack of logic and rationality. I did not say that a female's need to nurture a child at any cost was not admit to exceptions , but you can also admit that such exceptions are rarely the case. On a forum that seems to value evidence and rationality, it is the case.

[JellyDonut]

To better illustrate this, if you advocate the moral acceptability of killing one child to save a million then what's your stance on the Nazi human experiments? (yes it's somewhat of a strawman, but it's still relevant)

Admittedly I know shit all about Utilitarianism, however, if the point of utilitarianism is to assign a value to human happiness and pain, surely one could still make an argument on utilitarian grounds that Nazi experimentation is unacceptable, considering that the pain experienced by the subjects grossly outweighed the benefits it produced.

[Panicmode]

Ok, people seem not to understand that this question doesn't really have a right or wrong answer. They look at this from a purely logical point of view (which is fine) and then say, well now you have to use logic to back up your statement. Fair enough, I will use proof.

There are several ethical theories on the way decisions should be made. Each theory explores a different method of analysing and approaching a moral dilemma. Using a variety of ethical procedures, I will justify my stance.

Natural Law
It is natural that people die of disease. In a world where the population growth is exponential and there are fears of demand on public resources soon exceeding supply, the repercussions of preventing the natural deaths of millions of people must be analysed. Yes, you may be saving the lives of many suffering from the disease but at what cost to their and other's quality of life?

Hedonism
Killing the child will only bring me emotional pain. The fact that I "saved" others is irrelevant as I would be directly responsible for this child's death. Not killing the child is the best way for me to avoid pain.

Ethical Egoism
Killing the child places me in a compromising position. I would have to deal with not only the family of the child (should they come to know) but the public. It would be wiser and much safer for me, both physically and emotionally, to let the child be. I am not directly involved in the deaths of those who suffer from the disease. Therefore, (in the eyes of the general populous) I have no societal obligation to help those suffering with the disease. My safest and best option is therefore to not kill the child and let the others be.

Relativism
In the society we live in, there is a strict taboo against murder; especially the murder of an infant. The overall consensus on morality of the society I live in dictates that I should not kill the child. Therefore, I shouldn't kill the child.

[giveup]

eh... nazi experimentation is unacceptable? there was no real benefit to t he wider population, and they basically tortured people against there will (were animals coudl have been used

Are you aware of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731. It irritates me to see people, and Australians particularly, talk about the Nazi's experimentations while the number of victims was so little compared to the Japanese's experimentation that took as many as 400,000 lives.

Considering they were the ones that were invading us (not the Nazis), and the ones that inflicted war atrocities upon us, Unit 731 is the warcrime that should be spoken about by Australians...

Completely off topic, I'm gonna gtfo of this thread now.

[Russ]

eh... nazi experimentation is unacceptable? there was no real benefit to t he wider population, and they basically tortured people against there will (were animals coudl have been used

Erm no, there was benefit to the wider population. They weren't just torturing people for kicks, they were doing research ("research") to benefit their regime. The most common two examples are the research they did into hypothermia and into altitude sickness/depressurization because those were relevant to the war effort (fighter planes crashing into the Atlantic, the Eastern Front etc.). There is a huge contemporary debate in scientific circles about the ethics of using the data gathered under those circumstances.

eg

Rascher used a decompression chamber to simulate high altitude conditions. He would often dissect several of the victims' brains, while they were still alive, to demonstrate that high altitude sickness was a result of the formation of tiny air bubbles in the blood vessels of the subarachnoid part of the brain.

If you don't like that, what about the Tuskagee studies? African Americans were essentially used as guinea pigs to develop better treatments for syphilis. If you're advocating that the end justifies the means, what's different here?

Are you aware of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

Yeah I am, but their experiments are less well known. For simplicities sake, the Nazi ones are most relevant here.

[giveup]

Why isn't the stance taken by many people here, including myself, also taken for the use of torture?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html
tl;dr ... The ticking time bomb scenario, a man is knowingly going to kill many people if a code is not given. Is torture justified in saving thousands of innocent lives?