I can understand an ethic based on obligation one might have to those he knows or loves versus strangers. I may not agree with it, but I can see how your action would logically follow it.
When it comes to the statistic of ten million deaths…I can sit quietly and slowly meditate on the number until it becomes more than a statistic. I picture my family part of that number, my friends, or I picture a bunch of kids dying, I see their faces. I think of geography, a map, a city, a country. I picture crowds at football games. I bottle the feeling. I remind myself the reality is bigger, much bigger. I tell myself I can’t feel the number but not to let that fool me. Some things are bigger than my feelings, and it’s my intellect’s job to take over and weigh the ethical conclusions. Is this exercise in imagination beyond you?
I admit that choosing to kill ones own children, even to save millions of others, is not easy, and I don’t deny that I would probably do the same as you, xanderman. But I would have to admit while I did it that in every logical way, what I was doing is wrong.
Stalin’s quote could be interpretted differently than you use it. It could be that when one person dies, we can deal with it and face the unpleasantness; but when a million people die, we cannot deal with the implications, and we use statistics to turn those same people into cold, emotionless numbers. It seems not so much that we can’t understand what millions of deaths mean, it’s that we don’t want to.
A dollar is a dollar, is a dollar. It’s a false analogy to compare the relationship between ten million dollars and ten thousand dollars WITH the relationship between ten million people and ten thousand people. People are different.
This numbers game turns people into things. This [large quantity of things] is more than that [small quantity of things] therefore this [large quantity of things] is better than that [small quantity of things].
It is a battle of Universal Untargeted Compassion and Specific Targeted compassion. The authors of the second Matrix movie touched on this conflict at the end of the second Matrix movie, but lacked the follow-thru to explore it further. Here is my take. The previous Neo’s were like Buddha/Christ/Krishna. They advocated and embodied a Universal Compassion. An impersonal or perhaps transpersonal love of life.
Then this last Neo was something new, he followed a path of personal love. His devotion was targeted and specific. He was an individual who found him meaning in a relationshjip with another individual.
I have accepted responsibility for the guardianship of my children. I am their caretaker of my own will. I have not accepted responsibility for the rest of the world. Nor will I allow it to be pressed upon me. I refuse it!
If I decide to kill the ten million I might easily be hated and reviled. My name might become synonymous with evil. My own children might hate me and never understand my decision. Yet I would remain true to myself.
If I were to decide to kill my own children then I might get hailed as a hero. Yet in my own heart I would have confirmed the dread of my own terrible corruption. I would have proven myself evil to myself in a way that would put me beyond the power of any redemption. That would condemn my own soul, my core, my essence, my heart to the lowest pit of hell. Burning forever in icy, impotent rage.
“What profit is it to a man to gain the entire world and loose his own soul?”
Carleas
I take it as an actual lack of ability, not just unwillingness. Even one who is willing to contemplate a million deaths will be unable to experience it. We are alienated from the mass of humanity by our inability to hold all of it, except in the most abstract form. There is a point of sensation saturation beyond which there is only numbness or unconsiousness.
You can’t defeat me that easily. There are too many of us. What about Jeremy Bentham? What about real military decisions where commanders have to choose between the lives of few versus the lives of many? The lives of his own men on a lone U-boat versus the lives of thousands of comrades on the Mother Ship? DO you think you can take the easy way because you’re a civilian? I’m of the opinion that Butler’s are NOT civilians. Cadbury has a very real responsibility to set an example…he must be a paragon of virtue and judgment.
As Jiminy Cricket says…let your conscience be your guide. So I suppose you have. But with an ease and resoluteness that surprises me…I’m not sure if this is self-pity I’m feeling, or pity for you.
as the old saying does: “Is this a private fight or can anyone join?”
The crowd can overwhelm the individual and crush him 'til he is no more than a stain on the ground. (Mob Justice, now that is democracy in action.)
Good ol’ rational Bentham, eh? Simplify, turn it all into a number game. Let the accountants take over.
Now you are changing the game-space. Its a whole new world. The theater of war has different protocols, traditions and mythology. That is a whole 'nother discussion.
Not quite. The manservant must demonstrate respect, humbleness, poise, supportivness, industy, loyalty, reliability, attentiveness, steadfastness and temperence.
If you have ever sacrified too much and taken on too many burdens then you begin to starkly realize your limitations.
Well played, Xanderman. Let me up the ante. Would someone (not you, why make this personal?) be compelled to sacrifice their own two children to save the rest of the worlds’ people from twenty years of extreme torture performed by a team of barbaric droids who are programmed to maximize physical and mental pain and follow it with a painful and prolonged death?