On the difficulties of non-equivalent parallel plot lines

[chris the cynic]

Also, DDL gets points for coming up with a situation in which there is clearly no right answer, you have to look for the least wrong one.

Yeah, he is a crafty one

Without doubt.

Eating is only surviving if it is necessary to survive

Yeah, It pretty much is... Edit: necessary to survive that is.

How often is it for you? How many times in your life where you were in a position such that, if you skipped that meal you would die?

Most of them time when people are eating they are doing more than what is necessary to survive. Or, to put it as I did in the sentance you quoted:

Eating is only surviving if it is necessary to survive, most of us are never in a situation where if we don't eat a given meal we will die so for most of us eating is not equivalent to surviving.

To which you responded "Yeah, It pretty much is... Edit: necessary to survive that is."

Are you honestly telling me that you have never had a meal in your life you could have skipped without dying? Every bite you've ever digested was the difference between being alive and dying by starvation?

I find that somewhat hard to believe.

If you were in one of these kill one save 100 situations I'd kill you in a heartbeat, even if I was one of the 100 who would die as a result of you being unable to kill the one. It may take a lot to make me willing to kill, but stopping a murderer from committing a murder would do it.

Interesting... So you would commit murder, to stop murder? Sounds like a textbook case of the greater goodsies

Not the greater good. The lesser good. The immediate right here, reach out and touch it good. Murder = bad. Stopping murder = good. Also, when I say I would kill, I mean I would kill if it were the only way to stop it that I could see.

Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that the word (if there is one) to describe using lethal force to prevent a murder is not, in fact, murder.

I thought that it was the killing the one that saved them

It is, It's just that I have a very wonky(but entirely functional) definition of direct.

Could you, perhaps share that definition with the rest of the class.

If you can, please use words whose meanings correspond to their dictionary definitions. (That is, don't say "the" in the definition and then tell us it is your own definition of "the" which is completely unrelated to the definition we would find in a dictionary.) I believe we can all access dictionary.reference.com (I certainly know of no reason why anyone wouldn't) so those would be good dictionary definitions to use.

not the least of which being that taking a life is canceled out by saving a life. Or saving ten lives as the case may be.

Yeah... I think this is more or less how it is, an accurate assumption, maybe not for me, but in the greater scheme of things... To tie back to the Triage example; 11 people enter my tent/station(whatever) with the same lethal disease, one of them has obviously been afflicted for a long time, and would need more medicine(antibiotics?) to be healed, namely, 10 times as much as the only recently infected people. And as bad luck would have it; you only have 10 doses. So, you can sacrifice the one, and save the ten, heal the one, and doom the ten (because they are still too weak to seek help elsewhere), or you could divide the doses evenly, and prolong the life/suffering of all. Like it or not, by saving the ten you are essentially killing the one(imo).

No, you are not. There is a difference between actively killing someone and not having the ability to save everyone. Now if ten people came in and you couldn't save them with what you had so you went of and killed someone else so you could feed his brains to them as part of a bizarre, but indisputable, cure then that would be killing one to save ten.

What you are describing doesn't involve killing anyone. Of course you give the cures to the ones most likely to be saved by them. It is basic triage, that means (hopefully) ten live and one dies. That one wasn't killed by anything other than the lethal disease.

And the thing I meant when I said proximity, was not the closest person available.

Well I sure as hell hope not. I was using proximity to mean the one you are most able to have an effect on. For example, in your volcano example the child is the one you are most able to have an immediate effect on. You can kill or save the child right there and then. To change he fate of the people on the platform you have to take several steps. The child is close to you in terms of actions and their effects, the people on the platform are distant.

[Rex]

No, you are not. There is a difference between actively killing someone and not having the ability to save everyone. Now if ten people came in and you couldn't save them with what you had so you went of and killed someone else so you could feed his brains to them as part of a bizarre, but indisputable, cure then that would be killing one to save ten.

Liver, liver!
And if this 10 vials won't work, how do you feel? You gived more sick (=less odds of survival) all your resources, and if you give 1 vial to each of ten just infected, even if just 2 of them survive you saved more lives.

Edit: Aaah, i just understood ddl's story, kill one and watch it or kill 100 and don't ah.. great. I would kill one anyway, i somehow would endure the look of dead child.. better then feeling i killed 100, mind is superior to body.

[chris the cynic]

No, you are not. There is a difference between actively killing someone and not having the ability to save everyone. Now if ten people came in and you couldn't save them with what you had so you went of and killed someone else so you could feed his brains to them as part of a bizarre, but indisputable, cure then that would be killing one to save ten.

Liver, liver!

Call it convergent evolution.

And if this 10 vials won't work, how do you feel? You gived more sick (=less odds of survival) all your resources, and if you give 1 vial to each of ten just infected, even if just 2 of them survive you saved more lives.

Which is why in triage you save the most like to be saved first.

[~Psychotic~]

I thought, apparently incorrectly, that if I kept trying to read what was already in the thread before hitting submit I'd never actually submit my post.

I learned quickly that the topic went far too fast so now I try to reply to a few select posts and I never get time to read a whole page now before an entirely new one is made.

[Rex]

Call it convergent evolution.

Wish i know such words without dictionary to help me.

Which is why in triage you save the most like to be saved first.

I didn't expected answer, this was question like 'are you idiot?'. You know, just a sentence with a question mark.
p.s. Yaay, someone respond to my post.

[Moonbo]

First off let me confess that I haven't read this whole thread but if this jist of it is "would I kill one person to save 100"...in all honesty, I could intellectually say "if I weight the scales, then yes: the lives saved are greater than the lives lost", but I don't know if I could bring myself to do it.

This is one reason I simultaneously respect and feel sorry for soldiers or policemen who have killed in the line of duty: in this imperfect world sometimes people are forced into a situation that's degenerated into a state where force needs to be matched by force. But in that case, like all terrible situations, it doesn't just effect the person who is killed but also the person who has been forced become a killer. And I don't know if I would want to know what kind of person I would be like after I killed someone else.

But I think it's kind of strange that the focus is on killing someone to save 100. I would think a much more germane question is whether you would be would you sacrifice yourself if it meant saving 100 people's lives? Also, if you responded affirmative to that, then would you be willing to commit at least a part of your life to some sort of volunteer/religious/helping others work? After all, that's effectively the same thing, if on a less dramatic scale (i.e. helping someone in life instead of saving their life) over a longer period of time.

And now my boss is calling me to a meeting, so I'm off .

-Gelo

[Rex]

My life to save others? Never!
Yes, the policemans forced to kill when suspect attacks them. That reminds me a movie in which a policewoman was confessing in church. "Reverend, i killed a man, again.."

[chris the cynic]

Strange as it may seem, I think it is probably easier to give one's life than to give one's time.

What does it take to give up your life for another? A few minutes? Hard to believe it could be more than a few hours. What does it take to make the world a better place to live in? A hell of a lot longer.

It isn't as if you get to just run into a burning building and feed the hungry or house the homeless. To help people in those situations you have to do hard work for first days, then weeks, then months and finally years on end. And in that work you are likely to never see results as dramatic as a life saved while being bombarded with the constant awful truth that no matter how much good you do it will never be enough. Probably the only way to survive such work is to think in terms of starfish.

[Jaedar]

Eating is only surviving if it is necessary to survive

Yeah, It pretty much is... Edit: necessary to survive that is.

How often is it for you? How many times in your life where you were in a position such that, if you skipped that meal you would die?

You're looking at it the wrong way, we need food to survive it doesn't matter if the current meal you are having could be skipped, every time you eat, you are prolonging your life.(starving is a terrible strain on the system)

If you were in one of these kill one save 100 situations I'd kill you in a heartbeat, even if I was one of the 100 who would die as a result of you being unable to kill the one. It may take a lot to make me willing to kill, but stopping a murderer from committing a murder would do it.

Interesting... So you would commit murder, to stop murder? Sounds like a textbook case of the greater goodsies

Not the greater good. The lesser good. The immediate right here, reach out and touch it good. Murder = bad. Stopping murder = good. Also, when I say I would kill, I mean I would kill if it were the only way to stop it that I could see.[/quote]
But how would you know I was going to kill the one? Pre-emptively striking a soon to be murderer is still murder, cus he hasn't done anything YET.

I thought that it was the killing the one that saved them

It is, It's just that I have a very wonky(but entirely functional) definition of direct.

Could you, perhaps share that definition with the rest of the class.[/quote]
It is entirely foreseeable, and preventable by you, therefore you are directly affecting the 100 with your decision. The only variable in what will happen is you.

And the thing I meant when I said proximity, was not the closest person available.

Well I sure as hell hope not. I was using proximity to mean the one you are most able to have an effect on. For example, in your volcano example the child is the one you are most able to have an immediate effect on. You can kill or save the child right there and then. To change he fate of the people on the platform you have to take several steps. The child is close to you in terms of actions and their effects, the people on the platform are distant.

I am equally able to effect both the one, and the 100.
The people are also close; namely 2 actions away (placing the girl on weight, pulling them to safety)
The child is one action close(pick up, and walk away)
But this doesn't really matter, if, in order to save the people, you needed to find the correct combination of levers and switches (multiple actions required) to raise the platform, you would still take the girl, if you followed what you wrote above.

[chris the cynic]

Eating is only surviving if it is necessary to survive

Yeah, It pretty much is... Edit: necessary to survive that is.

How often is it for you? How many times in your life where you were in a position such that, if you skipped that meal you would die?

You're looking at it the wrong way, we need food to survive it doesn't matter if the current meal you are having could be skipped, every time you eat, you are prolonging your life.(starving is a terrible strain on the system)

You asked whether eating is surviving.

First off, sometimes eating is deadly, so eating and the act of surviving cannot always be equivalent. Sometimes they are opposites. Of course, if you do not eat anything, you will not survive. The act of surviving clearly includes eating a certain amount of food.

But if we are asking when eating is surviving, then we are talking about equivalence. For things to be equivalent they need containment both ways. You need an iff statement. Not just, you will live if you eat this, but rather you will live if and only if you eat this. The "only if" is important. Without that we don't have equivalence.

Eating in general is necessary for survival, a given act of eating probably not so much. As you may recall, we were talking about a specific action that was equivalent to survival when you brought up eating and asked, "Do you also call eating surviving?" (As in, you will live if and only if you stop someone from killing you with lethal force.)

The answer was (I'm paraphrasing) only when that specific act of eating is itself necessary for survival.

The reason for that answer is that otherwise there isn't equivalence.

But how would you know I was going to kill the one? Pre-emptively striking a soon to be murderer is still murder, cus he hasn't done anything YET.

The law, and many people, disagree. Attempted murder, even if you are only part way through the attempt, is not nothing. It is something. As such the claim of of hasn't done anything yet is completely false.

Obviously if you were a liar instead of a murderer, and just walked away, then you get to live. As you may recall, I said, "I would kill if it were the only way to stop it that I could see," if it could be stopped by simply letting you walk away, I would let you walk away.

It should also be pointed out that if the original question had been, "Would you kill one person to prevent that person killing one hundred other people," I would have answered, "Yes, if it was clear that the one person was actually going to kill the one hundred other people." With certain caveats built around exactly what was happening. (There are situations in which the one person might not be in the wrong, I'm sure we can all construct some around wars, death penalties, and such.)

It is, It's just that I have a very wonky(but entirely functional) definition of direct.

Could you, perhaps share that definition with the rest of the class.

It is entirely foreseeable, and preventable by you, therefore you are directly affecting the 100 with your decision. The only variable in what will happen is you.

Directly affecting with your indirect actions. Interesting idea. You still are, explicitly, doing nothing to them, but you claim that it is a direct link. It is as if you didn't kill a butterfly, thus allowing it to flap its wings which caused a sequence of events that, in the end, led to a tornado in Texas (note the reference to the original butterfly effect scenario) whose only impact was to make a pig stay awake instead of sleep.

Did you directly cause the pig to stay up, even though you were never in Texas and never met the pig? You would, apparently, say yes if the pig's temporary insomnia could have been foreseen by you. I would say no because the only thing you are interacting with is the butterfly, not the pig.

I am equally able to effect both the one, and the 100.
The people are also close; namely 2 actions away (placing the girl on weight, pulling them to safety)

Not according to you. To get to the people first I have to poison the girl, then I have to put the girl on the weight, then I have to get on a ledge, then I have to pull the people up (one at a time) then they have to get off the volcano (hopefully they can do this themselves, even if they are barefoot) and all of this while the lava is rising. To save the girl I only need to get her off the volcano.

But forget about that, just consider this. I may be able to help her and the people on the platform equally well, but I am closer to helping or harming her. Made all the more clear that to help them I must first harm her. She needs to be closer, in terms of actions, because my actions on the others can only be made through her. If step one of helping the people on the platform is "deal with the girl" then the girl is closer (in terms of actions at least, it is conceivable that one could be physically closer to the 100 and still have that hold true.)

But this doesn't really matter, if, in order to save the people, you needed to find the correct combination of levers and switches (multiple actions required) to raise the platform, you would still take the girl, if you followed what you wrote above.

Not quite. If all it takes to save the people is pull some levers and flip some switches the situation has changed then we are no longer faced with the clear fact that the girl is of closer proximity. (Remember that what made it clear is that the girl had to be dealt with as a part of the plan to save the people on the platform.) The girl still might be, she might not be. The situation needs to be evaluated. Carrying someone down a volcano might be more than flipping switches and pulling levers. Of course, that is merely argument by proximity.

Consider what that would mean in terms of triage.

If the chances of saving the girl by carrying her off the volcano are greater than the chances of saving the 100 by screwing with controls then the girl still gets priority.

Of those who need saving you save the ones you are most likely to save.

If, on the other hand, the likelihood of saving the people on the platform was greater than, or even equal to, the likelihood of saving the girl the time has come to look at the levers and switches. Of those who need saving, you save the ones you are most likely to save, even if it means making the little girl wait. Even if the waiting might prove fatal.

Maybe she can help with the levers and switches.

-

One thing that triage doesn't cover is killing people. Which is why, even when you ignore proximity, in the original situation triage says save the little girl first. You save the ones you are most likely to save. You are sure you can save the girl, the one hundred not so much (since triage doesn't include killing people, which you assure me would be necessary to save the 100) so you save the girl.

[Jaedar]

Did you directly cause the pig to stay up, even though you were never in Texas and never met the pig? You would, apparently, say yes if the pig's temporary insomnia could have been foreseen by you.

Yes... then I would be responsible, but such a thing is impossible.

I would say no because the only thing you are interacting with is the butterfly, not the pig

So, you are only responsible for what you interact with? So you must be one of those people who claim that guns kill people, and not the people who fire, since they only interact with the gun. Whereas I would say that the person firing is responsible, since he knew what would happen when he pulled the trigger.(foreseeable and preventable.)

To get to the people first I have to poison the girl

You don't have to poison the girl... It's just the merciful thing to do(so she doesn't have to suffer through being roasted alive), cus even I can be soft and do stuff like that sometimes.

The answer was (I'm paraphrasing) only when that specific act of eating is itself necessary for survival.

fine, you have a point.

"I would kill if it were the only way to stop it that I could see," if it could be stopped by simply letting you walk away, I would let you walk away.

But you can't know I'm going to inject the one with the poison until it has entered it's system, at which point it would be too late. I mean, I could stand there, with it in my hand, contemplating whether I would actually be able to do it (and I probably would, for a few seconds at least), and I could still put it away pick the one up and go. Also, it isn't the only way; if you could convince the hundred to come to a unanimous decision that they would rather the one live than they, I would comply, I won't waste time saving those that do not wish to be saved.

You are sure you can save the girl, the one hundred not so much

I believe the inherent thing about the theoretical situation is that you would be sure you could save the hundred. (and for all you know, you might trip while carrying the one, leading to it taking a deadly tumble down the mountainside)

[DDL]

I'm also with jaedar on the indirect actions thing.

Assuming it's predictable, no matter how indirect it is, it's valid to consider you linked to the action (or lack thereof).

Say I were at the end of a long chain of people, each within shouting distance of the next in the chain, alongside a bullet-train rail track, looking out for trains in case they came smushing through the maintenance team working on the track. If I spot a train, I can either shout to the next dude, and they shout onward and onward etc and the workmen hear eventually and get out of dodge before becoming railtrack sandwiches...or I can remain silent. I know that even if the next guy shouts as soon as he spots it, there won't be enough time for the workmen to get out of the way, so clearly I can see that my complete lack of interaction with the workmen right down the other end is immaterial as to whether my actions decide their fate or not (which they do). It's predictable, though, which is the key point.


So for example in a "shoot the small child or the lunatic kills 100 small children" example (and discounting third options by handwaving because I'm tired and unimaginative), you are directly causing the children to die if you refuse. You're not KILLING them yourself, but you are actively choosing to let a situation in which they die...exist. The question is whether this is worse than actually committing murder. Legally, hell no: you're blameless for their deaths, since psychoboy did all the killing. Psychologically? Well, that's much more personal.

Honestly, personally, in that situation, I would probably not be taking it seriously at all, because WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE. So my actual view on 'what I'd do' is unlikely to be valid. I'd test fire the gun at a wall fer sure (coz if it's blanks, then JOKE'S OVER, FUCKHEAD), and then maybe do some other timewasting shit while trying to work out what was going on.

[chris the cynic]

A gun is a tool with which to shoot a a bullet into something else. A butterfly is not a tool with which to start tornado in the far off land of Texas. It is a butterfly. There is a difference here. The one person you are killing is not a tool with which to save 100 other people. He, she or it is a person.

A gun is a tool for direct interaction, for the most part they can't even survive intermediary steps. Try to shoot something in water and you will find that guns, and the bullets they fire, are very very bad at multi step processes. In general they go from shoot, to hit water, to fuck off. The thing you are aiming at is left unharmed. Very hard to do things indirectly with a gun.

Of course that is skipping something very very importation. (Note the proliferation of verys today.) The gun doesn't go off via inaction. Guns don't fire bullets at people on their own. When you talk about being directly responsible for things you didn't directly do or contribute simply because you didn't take extreme measures to prevent such things it is like holding Person-1 responsible for the shooting death of Person-A because Person-1 didn't push Person-Alpha into the path of the bullet.

Was the death of person-A predictable? Yes, for the sake of argument it was. Was it preventable by Person-1? Yes, it has been established (s)he could have pushed Person-Alpha into the path of the bullet thus saving Person-A. Does that mean Person-1 is responsible for the death of Person-A? Hell no.

The person responsible for a death by gunshot is the person who shot the gun, not the person who failed to throw someone else into the path of the bullet even though doing so would, indeed, have prevented the death in question.

You can't be held responsible for the actions of everyone. It is true that when you make a choice you are also choosing the foreseeable consequences of that choice, that does not mean that you are responsible for everything you can forsee.

I'm guessing that is why you repeatedly say that triage is equivalent to killing people. It isn't. Choosing who to save does involve choosing who not to save, which means choosing a situation whose foreseeable consequences include the death of the ones you are not saving, but that isn't the same as choosing to kill the person. The person was killed by something that happened, in all likelihood, before the person doing the triage showed up.

Choosing an outcome that includes a person's death does not necessarily mean responsibility for that person's death. Life is not that simple. It would be nice if it were.

[Added:]

I thought it might be a good idea to add a bit about why triage does not make one responsible for the deaths of those not saved. The reason that you are not saving the people you are not saving isn't so much that you are choosing not to save them but rather that you are fucking busy with the people you are saving. In a triage situation if you could save everyone you would. It isn't even that you choose not to help the people, you choose not to help them now. If you are lucky you can get to them later or additional help will come.

[Jaedar]

Yeah you are right, Triage was a stupid example, it should never have been brought up

A butterfly is not a tool

Oh, really?

with which to start tornado in the far off land of Texas.

Oh. But it is still random and unpredictable, which means you cannot be held responsible.

A gun is a tool for direct interaction

This is where you lose me, there are tools for indirect interaction?

The person responsible for a death by gunshot is the person who shot the gun

The person responsible for a 100 deaths is the person who saved the one.
The one is a tool to save the 100, just as a gun is a tool to kill someone, just as firing the gun is the action whereby you kill someone, so is killing the one the action that saves a 100 people.

The one person you are killing is not a tool with which to save 100 other people. He, she or it is a person.

I'm sorry, where does it say that a tool has to be an inanimate object? I mean, you could consider the electorate to be the tool with which one attains presidency. In fact, that is pretty damn accurate, the politician who is best at using(read: exploiting) the tool obviously has more success.

[chris the cynic]

A gun is a tool for direct interaction

This is where you lose me, there are tools for indirect interaction?

There is a means of reinforcement in which you say redundant things to (get this) reinforce the point.

"A gun is a tool" is true, but it does not serve to remind the reader that tools are used for direct interaction.
"A gun is a tool for direct interaction" is equally true and serves to remind the reader that it is used for direct interaction.

The person responsible for a death by gunshot is the person who shot the gun

The person responsible for a 100 deaths is the person who saved the one.

In your original scenario the one didn't need saving, so no one saved the one. That would mean that, according to you, no one was responsible.

More to the point, one of the surest tests of responsibility is sine qua non (without which not.) Responsibility for a thing can be pinned on those things without which the thing would not have happened. Would the 100 die without the person who saved the one? You said yes. If the person does nothing at all they still die. If the person magically disappears, they still die.

Of course, you could argue that it is not necessary (though I assure you it is sufficient) and that one can still be responsible for those things that they clearly had no part in. In fact you have been arguing that so I expect you to continue to do so.

I, however, blame the deaths of the 100 on whatever it was (or whoever it was) that killed them. Not the person you have bent over backwards to demonstrate had not part in what killed them. I certainly wouldn't blame their deaths on someone who had no part in killing them because he or she had no part in it. Which is what you are doing.

The one is a tool to save the 100,

And this is, probably, where we disagree most strongly. People are not tools, certainly not ones that you can dispose of as you please. Or at least I don't think they are. You, on the other hand, just said something very different.

The one person you are killing is not a tool with which to save 100 other people. He, she or it is a person.

I'm sorry, where does it say that a tool has to be an inanimate object?

I never said one does. Who exactly are you arguing against? Myself or some straw man you just invented?

What I did say is that a person is not a tool. It is worth pointing out that even in your example a person is not a tool. The electorate, and abstraction meant to encompass an ever changing group of people, is your example of a tool. Can a person be part of an institution that is a tool? Sure, I certainly go with you on that one.

Of course this is a case where I am like you. My definition doesn't match the dictionary's. The dictionary says that if a person is a cat's paw then the person does meet definition number seven, and if they are a pickpocket they meet definition 8b.