Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainYooh
This moral standing on categorical imperatives is childish. All this effort not only to spare a life of evil but to morally justify the reasons for evil to exist.
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This idea of “a life of evil” is pretty childish itself. If we agree that killing is the greatest “evil” or that killing is generally unethical or a higher degree than destroying or damaging property, then a situation that arises where you kill someone to stop them from destroying property (where no actual lives are lost) would make you the evil/more unethical person in that situation.
Depending on whatever theory you want to apply, there are of course reasons where killing is an acceptable (such as the trolley problem, or other issues where one is sacrificed for many).
By killing the bomber, you remove the further ability of life. We can’t possibly know their thoughts or their circumstances, so you can only judge the situation based the value of life vs property, in which case, life inherently produces more happiness and has more potential than property.
You can list any number of possibilities to justify the reasoning behind whether a condition is good or bad. Maybe the bomber reforms and builds ten houses for families who can not afford them later in life, maybe the house was going to collapse the next day when the family returned, killing all of them inside it, etc. So it’s completely pointless to list any number of conditions regarding before and after, because that isn’t the question. The question is, is it ethical to kill someone to protect property? And if you believe the value of life is greater than the value of property, then no, it is not.
Coming up with different conditions or situations that change the ethical nature of the problem is fine, but you should be able to apply clear and simple reasoning to the base problem and work from there. Throwing up your hands and saying “it can’t be solved!” isn’t really sensical. Of course it can be solved, you just solve the base problem and solve for each condition as it’s applied based on proper reasoning.