morality test

[BlaqueKatt]

ok I have great arguments with this one with people that think due to religion they are morally superior to me.(if you have an issue with the person I've chosen feel free to replace with Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao-Tse Tung**-anyone who is directly involved with a mass genocide{Bush is not an option-he's killing his own soldiers mainly})


You have a chance to go back in time-to Germany in 1902. You have the opportunity to stop the holocaust before it happens by killing(without a weapon) an (at the time) innocent child by the name of Adolf Hitler. There will be no worries of arrest or detainment or getting caught. Do you do it? Can you morally justify killing an innocent person to save 14 million.

I cannot, even though many of my ancestors died because of him, I would not be able to kill someone based on something they haven't done yet, even if it was "for the greater good"-morally I could not do it. Killing another human that is not a direct threat to myself or someone else is not an option.

Most people who claim greater morality than I have by virtue of religion would have no issue with killing an innocent child "for the greater good"-because of all the lives "they" would have saved by killing one innocent. And since this is hypothetical.....could history be worse if he had not come to power? I can think of at least two reason why it could've been.

Reason one:
Hitler was not a good military strategist, they could have found someone much better.

Reason two:
Hitler having himself been a victim of mustard gas in WWI* was hesitant to use chemical weapons in battle(he didn't consider the Jewish, Roma, Polish, and disabled to be human or in his words "life unworthy of life"), would a different person have felt this way?


So there you go-could you kill an innocent to potentially save millions? Explain your choice morally without using religion to back it up.


*October 15th 1918-he was temporarily blinded during a mustard gas attack though there is question as to if it was the gas or a hysterical blindness.

**I greatly encourage anyone to do some minimal research on all murderous dictators due to the fact that if you do not learn from history you are doomed to repeat it. I believe that by reading and somewhat understanding, as much as possible, we may be able to prevent something lie this from happening again. By understanding the actions we may be able to use them as warning signs and prevent things from getting out of hand next time.

[Pedersen]

I'll sidestep the question entirely, since I don't know my own answer as yet, and ask a supplementary question:

Since you have the power to go back in time to before the first world war, why wouldn't you work to change the state of the world such that neither of the wars occurs, thereby saving all those same lives by preventing the wars from occurring in the first place?

[Slytovhand]

Yeah - that's part of the thinking I had when I read it, Pedersen...do you know that if you go back to that time, that there is nothing else that could be done to change history, other than by killing?

I presume, for the sake of the argument, the answer is 'not really'? Although, if that were true, then the 2 options BK gave for not doing it, wouldn't happen...

So, if someone else worse could come up instead, then also in theory, you have the opportunity to change Hitler's (or whomever you decide fits the bill) personality or world views.

Also - there's a fair bit of 'prior knowledge' involved in the scenario...

I like what you often see in Sci-fi series, where they do the parallel universe thread. 'Hey - my universe is about to get wiped, why should I save yours?'. If you 'go back in time', and things can change, then all you're doing is changing timelines... which means - in that timeline, Hitler may not be the atrocious bastard he turned into...


But, to answer the question for me.. yep - I should be able to do it (whether I would or not is a different story). I don't need religion to grant a sense of morality to it, but I do use my beliefs for why I'd be willing to... I believe in reincarnation, so the death of 1 creature isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Slyt

[BlaqueKatt]

I'll sidestep the question entirely<grr>

Since you have the power to go back in time to before the first world war, why wouldn't you work to change the state of the world such that neither of the wars occurs, thereby saving all those same lives by preventing the wars from occurring in the first place?

I knew this would come up and technically that's cheating-so I'll qualify it further:
Because you only have 10 minutes in the past. Plus as I said you don't have to use Hitler-how would preventing WWI change what Stalin, Lenin, or Pol Pot did?

[Zyanya]

ok I have great arguments with this one with people that think due to religion they are morally superior to me.(if you have an issue with the person I've chosen feel free to replace with Stalin, Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao-Tse Tung**-anyone who is directly involved with a mass genocide{Bush is not an option-he's killing his own soldiers mainly})

I have to use a little bit of religion to answer the question, and I'll use the Christian one because it's the one I am most familiar with.

The only way to prevent the actions of those people is to go back in time and kill a gardener named Adam.

[AFPheonix]

Adam wasn't a Christian, though.

[crazylegs]

To be brutally honest Killing Hitler wouldn't have stopped WWII, Germany was in such a dire position that any number of people could, in theory, have come to power who might have done a similar thing, it would be more beneficial to look at the treaty of Versailles to prevent the humiliation of a nation to stop that war.

[Zyanya]

Adam wasn't a Christian, though.

:::checks her bible:::

Sure looks like he is a figure in the Christian mythos.

[the_std]

Zyanya, so was Jesus. But he was a Jew. Hm.

[tyr]

I wouldn't mess with the past, doing something like killing Hitler could have some major unforeseen consequences that could be far worse then anything that happened in world war 2. Not saying that it wasn't really horrible but i cant think of one movie or book that had time travel that didn't go wrong in some way. But then again i am a pessimist.

[CancelMyService]

Also, to further stir the pot, if Hitler had never came to power, you wouldn't have had people like Albert Einstein coming to America to flee the Nazis. That probably would have changed a LOT of things right there.

[tyr]

Also plastic, fake rubber for tires and super glue to name a few things that were invented during the war. Necessity is the mother of all invention

[Boozy]

I hate "what if" history questions, and that's not really what BK was asking us.

The answers to "what if" questions fall into the realm of fantasy; it's impossible to know how things would be different, because our minds don't know and can't process the literally trillions of variables that would be involved.

But I think BlaqueKatt's scenario presents a good question. How about rephrasing it? How about asking, "There is a child right now, in the present, whom for whatever reason you KNOW will grow up to be the next Hitler/Pol Pot/Stalin. Do you kill him or her?"

[Slytovhand]

... and presuming that the only way to prevent such a thing is to kill him or her...

(otherwise you get where Pedersen was going....)

[AFPheonix]

:::checks her bible:::

Sure looks like he is a figure in the Christian mythos.

He's a figure in many of the mythologies of religions that arose in the Fertile Crescent. Unfortunately, since he predated Christ and more importantly, the followers who came up with Christianity as a religion, he was not a Christian.