Quote:
Originally Posted by Heaven Can Wait
So do you have a stance on it? I'm guessing you're saying it's wrong, but saying that 'other issues are involved' is a cop out, are you saying you can't put a price on life? something like that?
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To be honest I don't quite know what my stance on this article is. I understand that the infringement on rights, justice, and care is relatively small, but so is the gain in utility.
Yes, it will save lives, but that does not mean it is automatically ok to intentionally cause harm to a helpless child. This is why ethics is more than arithmetic, because the answer is not always obvious; horrible evil could be justified through a simple body count, and on the other side horrible injustice can be carried out in the name of an inalienable right to life.
The entire crux of the argument is that you have rights, justice, utility, and care to consider, and the answer is not just which meets more of the 5, its weighing the particular circumstances; determining when one becomes more important than the other.
I'm not saying you can't put a price on life, I'm saying that the "price" is not simply a measurement of lifes, a bodycount. Is saving a life worth impeding on rights? Is saving 20? 20000?
What I'm saying is that a simple utilitarian equation is not good enough, saving lives is not always justification enough. Less people would have died had the Allies simply surrendered peacefully to the Axis; far more lives than this study on babies could save, and unimaginable horrors could have been spared, and yet, it was not the ethical thing to do, for the reasons I'm trying to explain.
Even if you do accept complete utilitarianism, is a couple hundred thousand lives worth more than ensuring the quality of others lives through protection of their rights?