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(I need suggestions is what I'm saying.)

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Total Members Voted: 0

[Aramco]

I choose this alternate option:

Kill the nearest person, and harvest their organs. Then proceed to build a shrine to Armok, and burn the body in it.
Hopefully, he will smile upon me and fill up the organs I harvested with enough water to get me back to town. Or the next town. Whichever is closer.

[Shambling Zombie]

Take some of the water so you can turn around and make it back to base. Tell anyone on the way that there's no water there, and as soon as you arrive, start preparations to re-stock the water, even if it is late.

As expedition leader type person, you have the others in the group's lives in your hands, and so you have to save them first, and hope the next people along aren't silly enough to march into the desert without enough water to make it if something goes wrong.

[Dsarker]

As expedition leader type person, you have the others in the group's lives in your hands, and so you have to save them first, and hope the next people along aren't silly enough to march into the desert without enough water to make it if something goes wrong.

So you mean they have to be better than you?

[Shambling Zombie]

As expedition leader type person, you have the others in the group's lives in your hands, and so you have to save them first, and hope the next people along aren't silly enough to march into the desert without enough water to make it if something goes wrong.

So you mean they have to be better than you?

Hoping they're not as stupid as I was? Yep.

[Muz]

I'd just take the water. Ethics is a luxury when survival is at stake. I mean, hell, I could be all ethical and refuse to anything that was once alive, and I'd be dead. If they're not someone I know or someone who will help ensure my survival or the survival of people like myself as a whole, no point in being nice.

And hell, if they're going to leave something as precious as bottles of water around without someone to guard it, it's going to get stolen. That's why we can't live in an anarchic society.

[Dsarker]

No. Ethics is never a luxury. If we don't keep them at times of hardship, what's the point of them at all?

[MorleyDev]

Ethics and morality only exist so long as the people benefit from following them. There's no benefit from dying, put life on the line and ethics and morality should be the very first thing you throw out.

[Dsarker]

So ethics and morals are merely another form of selfishness? Then why bother having them at all?


No. Have them always or never.

[MorleyDev]

So ethics and morals are merely another form of selfishness?

I'm simplify my answer: Yes.

Then why bother having them at all?

Because in modern society they are a practical benefit, the social contract. Otherwise I'm a dick to you needlessly, you're a dick to me needlessly, mutually assured destruction.

[anzki4]

Ethics and morality only exist so long as the people benefit from following them. There's no benefit from dying, put life on the line and ethics and morality should be the very first thing you throw out.

There's also no benefit in leaving you alive instead of killing you and taking your wallet, if some random guy walks past you on a lonely place. A lot of people still wouldn't do it.

[MorleyDev]

Let's see the likely chain of events there:
I stab you in lonely place. -> I flee with your wallet. -> Some time passes. -> I hear knocking at the door. -> Oh crap police! -> I go jail.

...yep, that was a good decision -.- It's the system of reprisals that makes such acts less than beneficial. Be that system legal, social, economical, spiritual etc. The requirement for an act to be committed by a person is when the benefits (or sometimes other things, like anger) outweigh the fear of the reprisal.

[SalmonGod]

I think ethics applies differently to this sort of situation than it does in normal society.  Hiking in the desert is understood to have inherent risks, and choosing to do so is choosing to accept those risks.  In fact, I imagine that's part of the appeal.

In this dilemma, you are facing the reality of this risk.  You happen to luck out of danger.  In the process, you have passed the challenge on to someone else, who has also accepted this risk. 

I would expect anyone forced to do this to take whatever actions they could to mitigate the risk that they are passing on, but not to simply choose death.

I think we could discuss much tougher dilemmas regarding competition for resources.  Modern society is built on the stuff, after all, where one person's luxury is another's sacrifice.  How much can you justify participating in a society that victimizes others for its own convenience?  This is a question almost no one in the "civilized" world truly absorbs as they should.

[Dsarker]

Let's see the likely chain of events there:
I stab you in lonely place. -> I flee with your wallet. -> Some time passes. -> I hear knocking at the door. -> Oh crap police! -> I go jail.

But the thing is, I like stabbing people. And I'm going to die sometime, so I just want to take some of you with me.

[anzki4]

Let's see the likely chain of events there:
I stab you in lonely place. -> I flee with your wallet. -> Some time passes. -> I hear knocking at the door. -> Oh crap police! -> I go jail.

You only get caught if you do it where someone sees you, or you leave something on the crime scene (for example finger prints.)

You are in a remote location = no witnesses. Wear gloves and don't leave any stuff on the crime scene. Voilá, you are one wallet richer.

[MorleyDev]

You only get caught if you do it where someone sees you, or you leave something on the crime scene (for example finger prints.)

You are in a remote location = no witnesses. Wear gloves and don't leave any stuff on the crime scene. Voilá, you are one wallet richer.

Except people have that fear of capture, even a fear of damnation, fear of being stabbed in a retribution killing, engrained into them by society and if there is no need for that wallet, if they are not so desperate for money then there is very little need, not enough need to overcome that fear.

Hence why I describe morality as a con, but a con society needs to function.