Would you kill 10000 people to save the person you love most?

[CurdinHenry]

Context -

You would just have to press a button and you wouldn't have to see it happen

You would be guaranteed not to know any of them beforehand

No one would know it was you unless you confessed

Yanbu yes
Yabu no

I would to save my children.

Only one pack of baccy til payday, nothing but snakes in this town, just me and the kids now, if U can't handle me at my worst, U don't deserve me at my best. taps the anchor tattoo, with 'I refuse to sink' written underneath it....

I would decline to choose.

That the people in this thread boasting about not losing sleep are almost certainly talking shit, or are actual psychopaths (they walk among us).

But that the need to obey authority/follow the rules/conform/avoid conflict is stronger in most people than any moral scruples they might possess. Spineless moral cowards.

Just look at the Covid regime - a Little Hitler's paradise - for a recent example of how people will do blatantly immoral and inhumane things when ordered or encouraged to by authority figures/the status quo. We had people willingly keeping people away from their dying relatives - forcing people to die alone. We had women forced to give birth and spend the post-partum period alone, some in extremely traumatic circumstances - they and their babies being denied the comfort of a single kind human face. We had elderly people with advanced dementia condemned to solitary confinement and denied the familiarity of human faces and the necessity of human contact.

When my cat was rushed to hospital and died - in a largely empty building full of people in Hazmat gear - we weren't allowed to see him unless he was brought out into the car park. A dying cat, hooked up to machinery. Absolute cruelty and absurdity everywhere.

Many rule followers were gung-ho or even gleeful about this systemic desecration of human rights. "It's da rooooolz," they mindlessly intoned, as they routinely inflicted immense cruelty and suffering at the proverbial press of a button. You can bet that most of them would be in the 66%.

Judgemental?
Yes i am Judgemental: my Judgement is capital punishment is wrong.
Killing Christa Pike won't bring back Colleen Slemmer. Nothing can do that. And yes it is absolutely horrendous for her mother to lose her daughter in such an awful way but how will watching Christa being put to death make it any better?

So @McSilkson 66% are saying they would do it, kill 10,000 people to save someone close to them?

Thank you, I was wondering what the split was!

In a heart beat. Tbh to save my kids, husband or family members I wouldn’t care if I had to do it by hand or if I knew them.

🙄

I thought that I had read somewhere that Colleens mother wanted to watch the execution but afterwards she said that no one deserved what Christa Pike went through. She has more humanity than a lot on this thread.

Yeah but wouldn't feel great about it.

I think what I object to on this thread, is the assumption that not being a utilitarian = not being moral. I am with Antony- "Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch/ Of the ranged empire fall. Here is my space." It's not that you weigh the life of your child (or other beloved) against the lives of all the other people and decide that your child is worth more. Rather, choosing to save your child is a rejection of the notion that your love for them is something that can be outweighed, that attempting to weigh these things is anything other than an obscene kind of category error.

(This is the sort of decision that people often take in tragedy and the consequences are generally death and destruction, and yet this is still a better outcome than the bean-counting alternative.)

Actually, Milgram's experiments have been successfully replicated multiple times in various countries over the intervening decades, with pretty consistent results (in fact, some iterations found an even higher rate of compliance).

https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/new-milgram-replication-poland-finds-90-cent-participants-willing-deliver-highest

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/03/milgram

It's possible to research this in much greater depth, and I did so at uni.

And I don't think of it as a utilitarian calculation. I see it as murdering 10,000 "innocent" people - most of them mothers, fathers, sons and daughters themselves - for ultimately selfish reasons. How can that be "right"? No calculation is required. What if the 10,000 people were all babies/children? Would that affect anyone's decision?

Thanks - I knew she was in favour of the execution and that she wanted to watch it but I hadn't heard what she said afterwards.

For my kids or my husband, yeah. I’m not sure how I’d cope afterwards but I would do anything for my family.

Well, it's actually 61% "for" in this thread at the moment, but it's close enough.

No, I wouldn’t ever do that. I wouldn’t want anyone to do that for me and I couldn’t imagine having to admit to my DDs what I’d done. And killing another person, let alone 10,000, is always wrong.

Thankfully it’s a theoretical question.

(If you've studied it you'll be aware that even Milgram couldn't replicate his own findings https://www.forskningsetikk.no/en/resources/the-research-ethics-magazine/2021-1/are-we-not-evil-after-all/ and cherry picked his data to show the result he wanted. (This is a bit of a diversion from the thread though.))

I think you are making a utilitarian calculation. Why do you think it's worse to kill 10000 than to kill 1? Because there are more of them. That's a utilitarian approach, The fact that it seems obvious to you doesn't mean that it's not based on a utilitarian premise (such as, it is morally better to cause suffering to fewer people than to more people).

For people who would kill their own child rather than 10000 people, I'd love to know whether you have a cut off. Would you make the same decision if it was 1000 people? 100? 10? 2?

This

Innocent men not making it on to your exemption list! Also do we really need to specify ‘innocent’ or would you kill 10’000 women provided they had on occasion done something a wee bit nasty at least once in their life?

She did not say that. She actually said she wanted to finish Christa Pike off herself. Understandable.

This is traumatic to think about and I don't really see the point of the question.

Can we choose the 100 strangers? Maybe all the dictators around the world could be first in line? Then all the paedophiles, rapists and abusers next?

Definitely for my family, without hesitation.

Is this AI fishing for accomplices 😦

There is a film with Cameron Diaz where her and her husband get a million pounds if they press a button that kills lots of people they don’t know. I think they pressed it. It’s really really rubbish.

Kill 10,000 people by hand. Ok, hun.