Is it morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people..?

Question

Is it morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people..?

Answer 1

No. no one person is "god". no person can decide who lives and who dies. us as a people don't have the knowledge to choose for other people. I say this in the case of "killing" not sacrifice. if a person sacrifices him or herself. in that case i think it would be okay.... but would it be moral?? that depends. lets say there is a 7 year old girl that will be save but she has to watch it happen? that little unknowledgeble girl will be exposed to something even most adults can't even handle

"every life is precious, use yours to it's greatest advantage"

                             -Edward Day

"take a breath for it may be your last"

Answer 2

Can you allow anyone to murder one member of your family in order to save 50 members of his own family ?.....Well !

Answer 3

It may be logical and even permissible in certain instances, but the moral consequences can never be zero: so, no, I do not think that the term "moral" is appropriate.  Many actions lack moral confirmation, even in the event we could agree on what "moral" actually means.  

Therefore it is untruthful to bring morality into the equation when speaking of permission to do such a thing.  Some people might see "the greater good" as a moral imperative; others may not.

Justice and military personnel make such decisions on a regular basis, usually employing the "greater good" argument; however, one of my personal favourites is regulators and politicians who make a statement such as "this new treatment or technology will save fifteen thousand lives a year" when they have just held up the implementation of that treatment or technology for a number of years so that it could be "adequately tested" - presumably condemning fifteen thousand people a year to death in the process.

In short, we cannot decide what is morally permissible until we decide what "morally" in fact means.

Answer 4

In the film soldier morality was ground out of soldiers and they shot both an innocent person and the person holding a hostage in wars.

In wars citizens are bombed so that they may be free according to news about Saddam and Iraq but most cite WW2 bombing of Germany as moral as it gave opportunity to stop Holocaust. People also say Hiroshima and Nagasaki were moral as lives of soldiers were saved. Say to bomb both places saved more lives than if the wat continued though Japan was losing.

Answer 5

For what?

Wasting time.

Let little horror chucky do the job.

For short-changing, conning and deceiving them in broad daylights.

In hitting them on the head with the Book of the Dead.

See who run out of town holding the crown of thorns with two empty hands and two shrinking balls.

Leviticus 4. 13,22

What do you think?

Answer 6

It's one thing we have in common with terrorists.  i.e. 1 suicide bomber somehow saves more of the terrorists' lives.

For us, killing Saddam Hussein saves more of us.

Philosophy tries to help us with topics like this one.

Answer 7

Is it better to allow many to die to save one?

Answer 8

Spock declared in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, that the needs of the many oitweigh the needs of the few. In that movie, he sacrificed himself for the many. Self-sacrifice for all the right reasons is always permissible. But it can not be called moral in a universal sense. Spock had the morals to sacrifice himself because he knew the outcome would benefit the many. I say all that to say that inn my opinion we could never morally justify killing someone for the needs of the many. We can certainly kill someone for the needs of the many but it can never be morally justified. Someone would have to bear the burden of that guilt as the perpetual and symbolic reminder of an unjustifiable act.

Answer 9

ARE YOU KIDDING?

this is a disgrace to all LD debaters everywhere.

Learn to write your own arguments, please.

Answer 10

No but that person can sacrifice themselves for the good of the many.