[General Battuta]

It's a massive red herring because it doesn't address the point and never did.

Of course it does. It addresses the point perfectly. If you'll recall from your calm and careful reading of the thread before responding, the point was: "I disagree. The best option available in a situation may still be very wrong; I don't think anyone would dispute this in certain arbitrarily constructed forced-choice scenarios. If you have to kill one innocent person or kill two, you'll kill one, but it'll still be wrong, just less wrong. "

Okay, show me. I'm quite serious here; construct for me a situation that could in some manner be regarded as normal where you can either kill two completely innocent people or one completely innocent person as a conscious choice.

A conscious forced choice, remember. For example: you are a paramedic with time to treat either one person with major injuries or two people with slightly less major but still fatal injuries. Resource allocation problems like this happen all the time. Or, more actively, there are two groups of people in an unstable structure and rescuing one will cause the other to be killed in the collapse. Or there are two groups of people stranded on a mountain, about to die of exposure, and you have only time for one helicopter flight. Or you have several babies in respirators and you only have enough oxygen available to keep a subset of them breathing.

Or hell, here's a good one: you have one bomb and a choice between two critical targets, each one in a house. One house contains one innocent person, the other two. The targets are otherwise equivalent.

You can go on about how this isn't valid because their lives are already in danger, it's a question of who to save rather than who to kill, but in the end morality is synthetic and constructed and if you disagree it's simply because you've built a different one. As far as I'm concerned you're making a decision to kill someone - circumstances may have forced it, sure, but in the end circumstances force everything - and the justifications and guilt involved are the same.

[Flipside]

I don't think any sane person ever chooses to kill, so it's sort of a moot question anyway. Choice, in this situation, is a very difficult thing to define. Sometimes, because of the nature of the world, and the nature of the species, it is considered neccessary, but ask any soldier whether he wants to be in kill or be killed situations and the answer would, or at least should, be 'No'.

[StarSlayer]

Hold on now, thats not valid, this thread is about killing someone; not having some situation where you can only save a limited number of people.  In those scenarios the fact that the victims lives are in jeopardy is not of your own making, regardless of your decision some or all are going to die.  Deciding who lives isn't the same as deciding who your going to kill.

[General Battuta]

Hold on now, thats not valid, this thread is about killing someone; not having some situation where you can only save a limited number of people.  In those scenarios the fact that the victims lives are in jeopardy is not of your own making, regardless of your decision some or all are going to die.  Deciding who lives isn't the same as deciding who your going to kill.

in the end morality is synthetic and constructed and if you disagree it's simply because you've built a different one. As far as I'm concerned you're making a decision to kill someone - circumstances may have forced it, sure, but in the end circumstances force everything - and the justifications and guilt involved are the same.

I don't think killing someone by neglect and killing someone with a bullet to the head are meaningfully different. To the hiker trapped on the mountain dying of exposure "they're leaving us" is pretty equivalent to "they shot us in the face."

This being morality I expect that the difference is one of personal belief and no amount of yelling will meaningfully impact it.

The question at hand is not the original post topic but this dispute:

If you have to kill one innocent person or kill two, you'll kill one, but it'll still be wrong, just less wrong.

This is an invalid scenario, however, because in the situations in which killing is already morally "on the table" so to speak, innocence is typically not. At the very least we're usually up to intent or attempt.

As far as I'm concerned killing is on the table when you have to make a choice between lives.

[StarSlayer]

Granted I'm not drawing on a bounty of empirical data this isn't my field, but I cannot fathom strangulating someone who otherwise would live has the same moral impact as having to make a decision between saving one person and not another.  Otherwise EMTs and doctors should be absolute basket cases.

They both will have emotional impact to be sure, but taking a life should have a larger consequence then not being able to save someone.  One is active one passive.

[General Battuta]

Right right, that's the point I was going to make as soon as I got back to a PC (which I have), that there may well be a difference between killing someone who would otherwise live and failing to save someone who would otherwise die.

I just think that in the context of this discussion they both fall under the context of 'killing'. You can create a distinction between actively killing and passively killing if it's useful.

Doctors and EMTs are basket cases, though. 

[Mikes]

Just want to point out "having a cause", as mentioned earlier,... is such a wonderfully loaded...  and historically so often abused phrase.
Some of the most heinous crimes against humanity have been committed by people who were totally convinced they "had a cause".

As far as my opinion on the subject goes... even if the act of killing objectively saves lives in one instance...  taking another human beings life has a profound effect on the person committing the deed - no matter the circumstances... it shouldn't be rationalized, not justified and certainly should not be trivialized without context just to be generalized right after.

Furthermore, I believe the moment you justify killing for any potential cause that same justification will sooner or later be abused, possibly by someone else in a different context. Therefore i am firmly against any kind of justification and especially any kind of justification by hypothetical example.

Just imagine someone goes away from this discussion with one of the justifications that were given in their head and you only read later in the news of how these justifications were "applied" in a totally different context...   I believe that's the truly relevant hypothetical outcome of justifying killing with mere hypothetical wordplay.