Help on indentifing a philosophical problems

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

hello to the forum,

This is my first time ever participating in something like this so please excuse
any mistakes as attempt to express myself via this ave. of communication.

First off I am a student, currently taking a class in philosophy and I must admit I feel challenged by alll the different ideas that are being expressed in theis class. The book we are using Pjilosophy for Dummies, ( a title befitting at the present moment).

Our instructor has given us several challenges that we must investigate I would apprieate your ideas on the following problemas describe by the instructor:

"suppose I have a rich, very old uncle who has a fortune and I have leaarned that he intends to change his will next week to leave all his money tot KKK instead of me.(20 million) Knowing that the KKK would us the money to promote more hate and intolerance. I would give most of the money(19 million) to to organizations that promote harmony and peace, keeping a small portion myself (1 million). he is very ill and only according to the doctors only has about one month to live.

I could kill him before he changes his will knowing he going to die anyway so the lloss to him of four weeks of seriously ill life would not be great. I think if my uncle lives to change his will next week there would be far less good than would be produced by my murdering him before he can change it. "

So, I have read the principles (as discribed in Morri’s book Phil. for Dummies) and I think according to Morris this would be "The Principle of Belief conservation.

Please what does anyone else think about this.

thank you

2

Welcome to ILP.com! Never ask for school work to be done by the people online. But you are just asking for ways to approach this situation, right?

Consider why people hate the KKK. Is it because they have lynched people? Then how can you kill your uncle without becoming as bad as they are?

What I dislike about non-real-world examples like this is that they often offer only an A-or-B solution. What happens if you ask the preacher to come by and speak with him. What if you pray (or ask your preacher to pray with you) for your uncle that he have charity in his heart and give his money all away to good charities?

Plus, I think you would be the main suspect in his murder.

Now, time for the casuistry…

3

The murder is justified. We hate the KKK because they harm lots of people. We can harm one person, who will die soon anyway, to prevent some degree of harm to many others. The net total effect in terms of body count is positive: you save lives by killing your uncle. If lives are your priority, you should kill him.

4

Things to consider:

Are morals absolute or relative?
If morals are absolute, is it always wrong to kill?
Is the greatest good for the most people always the best choice?
…or should you only care about yourself?

You will find proponents for any immaginable combination of the above (and more), so you really have to come up with your own solution based on your own beliefs. Never put to much trust in the conclusions of others, including your instructors – as a philosopher you have to be able to think for yourself. Also question everything you already “know”, perhaps it’s not as self-evident as you thought.

Personally I would have killed him and taken all the money for myself, go figure…

5

But does he have the authority to kill his uncle? Or will he be a vigilante – again, like the KKK?

6

As long as nobody stops him, he has the authority to do whatever he wants. The law is only valid to the degree it is enforced (by self or others).

7

You might want to ask yourself the following sort of question (which the philosopher Kant would have suggested you ask yourself).

Would you want everybody who thought that he would do more good by murdering someone than by not murdering that person, to murder that person? So, for instance, if I thought that some child was a “bad seed” and would someday grow up to be another Hitler, would it be right for me to murder that child?

If you think it would not be right for me to murder that child, then you should not think it right to murder your uncle. You should not act on a principle which you would not want everyone else to act on.

8

Hi to everybody !

The philosophical identificatin of your problem is :

your problem is posed within a frame of utilitaristic ethic whic premise demands the most good and hapines for the most people (of society) but not for all. (for instance Dewey) In that sense you can of course ask yourself whic is the minor evil ot if you want greater good (for the most people)

According to all objectivistic etics ( and even by contractualistic orientated etics) murder is unacceptable. In rhetoric we cal such kind of question you posed a false dilema. So you should use the art of rethoric (persuation) and tray to change uncle’s opinion.

Greg

9

From a Kantian perspective you should not kill your uncle. By the way, for clarity, Kant’s ethics are not circumstantial, so we can’t make an argument of justifting murder in certain cricumstances and treating that as a universal principle for that particular circumstance–his ethics don’t work that way. As a perfect duty, according to Kant, murder is always wrong, even if it has jusifiable utilitarian ends.

From a utilitarian perspective, I’m sure you could justify it; but I think that utilitarianism is flawed, and a poor guide by which to judge our ethical decisions. I am particularaly fond of Kant’s critque of utilitarianism.

It would be very hard to even justfiy such an action through a guy like Nietzche, I would think; for if you consider throwing out ethics then see what follows: your throwing out ethics, in order to do what you feel is ethical (not have the kkk get the money); hence, doing so is an obviouse contradiction.

It is really hard to see how killing your uncle can be justified by any ethical system except that of utilitarianism; and even there I’m not sure if qualitative utilitarianism would permit such an action, Bentham’s versian, on the other hand, certainly would.

I personally, would not do such an action (commit the murder), for I would not forgoe certain priniples that I hold and believe to be important to maintain a principled society, (I.E. do not murder, Liberty [right to do with one’s money what one desires] et cetra).

Furthermore, the money is not yours, it is not for you to decide what should be done with it. Your action would deny your uncles will, so you would be violating his rights, as well as societal principles like: do not murder–or, I would think your own as well, for if your against the kkk having the money, it would be based upon principles that you hold important, such as do not murder, et cetra.

10

Livingdesign, I do not see what “The Principle of Belief Conservation” has to do with this. I had no clue what it was, but from a quick Google search I got the impression that that principle is an argument against skepticism, and I do not understand from the little I know of it what it has to do with ethics.

As for the dilema, Celox said my opinion already, refer back to him if you care to know how I feel.

11

Numerous form of consequentialism would demand that you kill your uncle. I would argue that even Kant should demand it. For Kant, people are ends in themselves, so people dying is bad. Stated this way, and given that funding the KKK leads to more than one death, it is necessary that you kill your uncle to preserve as many ends-in-themselves as possible. Kant also thought reason was an end in itself, and the KKK is a machine that disregards it, and even spreads unreason.
One could say that it is the resonsibility of everyone who knows that your uncle is going to fund the KKK and that you will fund charities to kill your uncle. It may also be true that not killing your uncle isn’t that bad. But it seems to me that most ethical systems should conclude that killing your uncle would be the morally better thing to do.

12

No Kant wouldn’t allow the killing of the uncle… One simply can’t violate perfect duties like that. We don’t know the money the kkk gets will lead to more deaths and we are only aware of our own intents.

13

I think this is where Kant’s theory falters. Killing is not acceptable, even if we know it will save more lives. It seems self contradictory. If the choice is between saving one or two people, duty states that we should save the two, even though the one dies. But if we have the choice of killing one person to save two, duty states otherwise? It is people that are valuable, and the same number of people are saved either way. Why is it morally significant whether it is achieved by carrying two small people out of a burning house and letting the larger person die, or killing one person to transplant his organs into two others? If anything, the morally significant difference is that in the case before us, the uncle is being bad and irrational, thus decreasing his worth as a human.

14

If someone said you have to choose to kill five people on the left or six people on the right, all hidden from your view so you can’t judge their types, and you have to either say left or right (saying nothing, or anything besides left or right is synonomous with saying right) and you’re shackled down firmly, you can’t escape, fight back or kill yourself. Again, saying nothing or yelling “fuck you” to your captor is tantamount to a decision to kill the people on the right and this has been made clear to you.

You can not wriggle your way out of making a decision. In that case, I’d kill the people on the right.

But what if you can see the people on the right, and they can see you, and the people on the left are blindfolded. The five on the right know what’s going on, and they look to you with pleading expressions. The six on the left are more or less oblivious to what’s happening. Would you kill the five on the right with them watching, fully aware of what you’re doing, or the six on the left who never saw it coming?

Would you kill 10 million random chinese people to save your own kids? Should you?

If some chinese couple killed you and 10 million other Americans just to save their two kids, would you think they were wrong and evil for doing so? Would you hate them? Should you?

15

First some claims from evolutionary psychology:

Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.

Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.

Our ancestors spent well over 99% of our species’ evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies. That means that our forebearers lived in small, nomadic bands of a few dozen individuals who got all of their food each day by gathering plants or by hunting animals. Each of our ancestors was, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted an entire lifetime, and this way of life endured for most of the last 10 million years.

Our species lived as hunter-gatherers 1000 times longer than as anything else.

Natural selection is a slow process, and there just haven’t been enough generations for it to design circuits that are well-adapted to our post-industrial life.

The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American – they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others. For example, it is easier for us to deal with small, hunter-gatherer-band sized groups of people than with crowds of thousands…

YOU CAN read the WHOLE article here:
psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

If you accept these claims then it could lead us to this:

When you get into large numbers like thousands or millions of people it is just completely beyond our psychological grasp. It just becomes a number or a statistic. It has no experience of importance, no weight, no gravity.

So this question has no psychological impact. “Would you kill 10 million random chinese people to save your own kids?”

Also it needs to be personal. No guns, which seperate and insulate you from the grewsome and horrific experience of killing another living organism. It is better to ask,
“Would you stab to death, fifteen random strangers in order to save the lives of your two children?” or something like that.

16

First of all, I think such theoretical questions are pretty stupid–I’m all for the feminist approach to these matters. However, I do like the point you mentioned Marge, about the people looking at you, it goes to Levinas’s philosophy of “the face” and “The Other” which I have been deeply impressed with of late. People looking at you, only make you that much more aware of your responsibility to the Other. Furthermore, the immediacy of the Face, as Levinas puts it, makes one very conscious of their responsibility–so it would be very, very difficult to kill those looking at you I imagine.

(I’m of course not awnsering this question for I don’t like playing these either/or ethical games, but I did want to throw Levinas out there) Perhaps the Face will make the weight of one’s responsibility so acute that afterall most would end up killing those on the left, but who really knows.

17

Good point. But in my scenario you don’t have the luxury of choosing the question. You are merely being asked to answer it and I’m fairly sure you didn’t. Maybe it’s because you think the answer is useless, or maybe it’s because you don’t have an answer. But indulge me, please. Would you kill ten million random strangers to save your two kids? (And tghe imbedded flipside is, would you kill your two children to save ten million strangers?) So which is it?

This reminds me of a slumber party question for eight year olds. God I used to love those. We’d watch Thundar The Barbarian and eat pancakes and apple jacks. Then mom would drive us to the arcade for games like Space Fury, Crazy Climber and Dig Dug. ILP is a good way of continuing that slumber party long after the cool kids go home to play soccer with their dads.

18

Marge,

I would kill the 10 million. It would probably ruin the kids life to be saved in such a devilish bargin, but they would still have a tiny chance if you let them live. If you kill them you know they are dead and that is that. I just don’t care the same about about the strangers, even if there are ten million of them. Plus in the awful reasoning of statistics what is 10 million in the context of 6.3 billion?

19

xanderman, I don’t entirely agree with your post on evolution. True, we may have difficulty grasping the concept of ‘10 million’, but that is not to say that we cannot understand it at all. We can reason through and draw some implications in simpler terms. I can think of all the people I know, possible a few hundred. I can think of their families. I can think of my coworkers, the people that live in my town, every person I pass on a given day. I can think of all these people and do some vague calculations to determine, to some degree, what ‘10 million’ means in terms of the people I see and hear and touch and influence. Our ‘stone aged mind’ can still build computers, spaceships, and all manner of very un-stone-aged things.
Your reaction seems to fell in line with the ‘i’m just another animal’ line of reasoning. While it is true, humans are a special animal, if only because they are the only animal that thinks ‘I’m just another animal’. For that reason, ignoring reason in favor of emotion or instinct is below you. You know what it is like to be human, and what death means to humans: you can empathize with the people you would choose to kill, and with the people who know them. You can reason through 10 million to discover that it is much much larger than two. As a human, with all the benefits that fell out of human evolution, you can reason through your actions. Why then should you make the myopic choice?

20

Killing the two to save the 10 millions may be the smarter choice, but it would NOT be my choice.

I agree with this sentiment:
“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin.

Quantity is not the only weight in making a decision.