03-11-2008, 09:10 PM
Quote:I am not an advocate of such decisions, because that would treat the subject too lightly, allow violence to be used too freely. I am reminded of both Lord of the Flies,where little boys go crazy in absence of civilization, and Star Trek's OS epsidoe "A Taste of Armageddon", where war is treated too casually and death too common a Such decisions always result in victums, will result in imbalance of power and never be fair. justification to be lazy rather than work towards peace.
There will always be "victims", yes. But is a person dead by human hand necessarily a greater problem than a person dead by nature? Remember in the cave, the choice was not between no deaths and one death. That's an easy choice. It was between one death and five deaths, which to me seems to also be an easy choice, just one that requires thinking in terms of the physical situation, and not an idealised plane of a lawful society. One of the commentaries mentioned this, and I agree. There is a degree of softness in law created to govern societies that is simply inapplicable in a strict survival situation, where deaths are certain and choices are clear-cut.
The choice was made randomly, which strikes me as the correct method, unless someone is willing to commit altruistic suicide. The choice of victim reflected the roll of the dice, not pre-existing power relations.
The obvious thing to say in the Trek example is to stop fighting any wars, imaginary or not, unless it can be shown beyond any doubt that the continued "imaginary" war is the minimum loss of life. If that is the case (which would be strange, but hypothetically), then why not accept it? What is so fundamentally wrong with the ToA situation that, if it was a certainty that more lives would be lost by stopping it, you'd stop it anyway? Wouldn't that just be functionally equivalent to killing all those extra people just because you're being squeamish about the ones who are already dying?
It is not right to kill and eat one of the people in the cave because it is fundamentally okay to kill and eat people. It is right to do so because not doing so means killing 5 times as many people.
-Jester