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Comment by bdr | Hacker News Reader

What if he'd just been an ordinary guy? I think the damage to his life and the lives of those who knew him is more important than what he would have invented.

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Just to be clear, subjecting someone of lesser brilliance (99.9999999% of the population) to Turing's treatment would be equally immoral. Seriously destabilizing a suicidal person is murder and on a moral level I don't believe in claiming that a particular murder is more or less immoral than another. Murder is murder and I don't think you can compare magnitudes. So if he had been an ordinary guy, his murder would still have been wrong on a moral level. I'm simply arguing that in addition to the usual costs of murder (felt in large part by the deceased family), society has borne an additional cost.

Doesn't murder require intent? Are you saying that the government planned on destabili+ng him in order to make him commit suicide? Am I just thinking of murder 1?

I was using murder in a colloquial sense, not a legal one. I'm pretty sure in England the legal term for what was done to Turing is constructive manslaughter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter_in_English_law#Unl...). But IANAL.

>I'm pretty sure in England the legal term for what was done to Turing is constructive manslaughter.

The legal term would be something like "proper application of criminal law". You can't claim that it was constructive manslaughter to apply the law at the time.

That doesn't seem obvious to me. Inventions can change many lives, but the scope of a person's social life is necessarily limited. Why do you say that?

I don't think any amount of human suffering is really worth some perceived progress. Not only because the progress will likely come around eventually anyway if it's for the better, but if we're trying to better humankind we shouldn't start by harming even a single human.

Really? even Alexander Fleming before his accidental discovery of penicillin?

It's a fine line, but if the patients are willful participants then I guess that's a different story.

If they are not willful then I'm unmoved on my stance.

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