Only repressed minds need to have the hypothetical explained. If you cannot think of one possible scenario where killing a stranger would save yourself or another person, you are retarded. I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it literally. I bet if Sohi's life were at stake, he COULD think up a hypothetical situation where his life depended on the death of some one who was a stranger to him. That's a compliment to him, in that I don't think he really is retarded.
Anyway, if you don't want to play, don't bother. No one is forcing you to take the quiz. But don't give some lame excuse about how it is impossible for you to imagine any scenario, however remote or fantastic or unlikely, in which you could face a choice like this. That's a cop out. Hell, just look at the movie the Good Son, mother had to choose between saving her evil child or her good nephew. Or there could be a deadly disease and only enough medicine to cure one person. The possibilities are only as limited as your imagination.
And FYI, the point of ethical issues like this is not to prepare you for what you would do in case this came up in real life. So the fact that these hypotheticals are incredibly unlikely does not lessen their value. The point is to think about your moral compass and how it compares to others, to help you understand your own gut-level sense of right and wrong.
Most people read these questions and knee-jerk a "no killing" response, because we are ingrained to think that killing is bad, except when you are killing some one who is, themselves, trying to kill you or some innocent person. Killing an innocent person to save yourself is not the same.
On the other hand, many cultures (including American culture) value family very high. And many also promote the idea that no power or force is greater than love.
So, if you believe that nothing is more important than your child's life, theoretically you might see it as moral to kill however many strangers as necessary to save your child. It would be interesting to see if the answers of those with children varied from those without on average. This might mean that whatever you THINK you'd do to save your child when you have no real child, there is some biological imperative that will click in when you really do have a child that will change the way you think.
And so many media outlets, movies, novels, promote the idea that people should be willing to do anything for love, that a person might have to go ahead and kill strangers to save a loved one. Hell, this has been used many times as a gimmick in stories where a person is forced to help bad people kill lots of innocent people because the bad people have that person's spouse or child hostage.
Lastly, there is a problem of getting into a more specific hypothetical because every fact you add will have some effect on the result. Maybe some one could let others die by giving the only cure to their own child, but they do not think they could shoot another person if they were ordered to do it if they wanted to see their child again. Communication -- hell, all cognitive processes -- are inherently a method of simplification and generalization. To say "I like ice cream" might seem specific, but what about ice cream made from raw pork? From snails?
So to communicate ideas, we must generalize and simplify reality. The same goes for ethics. The Bible says "thou shalt not kill" but most Christians find many implicit exceptions that allows them to kill.
What is the difference between understanding the ethical implification of the phrase "thou shalt not kill" and or the phrase "thou shalt not kill an innocent stranger to save your child"? Hell, the latter phrase is MORE specific, more detailed than the biblical phrase. All you have to do is ask yourself whether you think the latter phrase conveys a correct moral view or not, knowing that it will STILL be a generalization subject to some exceptions, same as "thou shalt not kill."
The big lesson is that those who jumped on the "Hey, this is too vague to possibly answer" band-wagon, to recognize that there is something in you that is obstructionistic, narrow-minded and/or fearful in your ethical reasoning. You might want to consider why you were so eager to sidestep this quiz with a lame excuse about how the hypotheticals are too vague to answer, or could never be possible no matter how unlikely a scenario we are permitted to imagine. The bottom line is you do NOT need more specifics to answer. Just answer. Done. Is that so hard? And if you DID need more specifics (which you don't), you could easily have invented them yourselves without much effort. Why so reluctant? Certainly not lack of time, or you would not have bothered posting on here. Rather, you seem to find something threatening in the very idea of committing yourself to an ethical position whose ramifications you cannot fully think out ahead of time.
What, you want to avoid a "trap"? Are you afraid you'll state an ethical position which can then be used to show that, to be consistent, you must support a war you currently oppose, or oppose a war you currently support, or give more money to charity, or stop buying Nike shoes? See, finding your ethical inconsistencies is not a trap, it is the crux of improving your ethical position. Because if you DO have ethical inconsistencies, that is a problem you should uncover and fix, not something you should run away from with your hands over your ears screaming "la-la-la...I can't hear you--la-la-la...I'd rather not know if I have ethical inconsistencies...la-la-la." But, in essence, that is what those like SoHi and wanderer are doing.
~psychoblast~
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
