Your actions could be, the situations are is fucked but your actions are not. Sorry if I was unclear.
You are absolutely right about the whole thing being a net negative, I am just trying to get accost what I mean when I say killing is a net positive.
Nah, clear enough, I think. I've just got a bit of a consequentialist bent, heh. And yeah, I wouldn't exactly condemn someone for doing the best they could in a particular situation, or doing what's most moral given their understanding of a situation (we're fallible, information's imperfect, etc., so forth, so on.). Just maybe suggest that if we
can do better than that given a more perfect understanding of the situation, then we should.
Insofar as practicalities are concerned, I'll be content when we've actually figured out how to get our species to witness the heat death of the universe without making everyone involved miserable. I could stand less than ecstatic, but I'd like better off than the present, heh.
Its a net good if it turns out better then the other options.
While I will agree that against a baseline of "nothing bad happens, no one dies, and no crimes are committed", killing someone is never a net good. But if option is "kill the person and prevent a greater evil" or "Not killing them, and letting whatever they are going to do happen due to a lack of any other options" then killing them would be more moral then doing nothing.
Yeah, I totally agree with that, sans the net good bit*. My quibble is that something can be "more moral", or even
most moral without
being moral. I set a fairly high bar for moral action and leave a wide strip for amoral action, more or less. Like I said, leaves plenty of room for improvement. Also leaves a lot of wiggle room for "good enough" (or, more precisely, "closer to good than other choices").
*An easy financial example is that you'd probably not call losing only a million dollars when you stood to lose five million a
profit, y'ken?
Definitely less of a loss, and most likely the best you
could do (and "best can do" is basically the ideal in relation to practical action, f'me), but you're still a mil' in the red. With the 1 vs 10 thing, in that case,
someone lost a million dollars. Other people may have kept ten mil, but you started with eleven million. Loss on the net.
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Topic: The Morality of Killing (Read 14567 times)