Comment by kbutler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbutler | Hacker News Reader

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> In actual reality you will never have any certainty about the outcomes of interactions like these. All you have control over is whether or not you hurt the person in front of you.

There's a shooter actively killing people.

Is it OK to shoot the shooter?

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What's the benefit of doing physics problems "in a vacuum", etc? It lets you get to the essence of the question.

Similarly, a philosophical thought experiment lets you analyze your beliefs - rather than just a knee jerk ("No, I would never harm someone and anyone who harmed someone is not a morally decent human being"), you can come up with a more complete ethical framework for your decisions and judgments.

By identifying extremes, you can identify your priorities and understand the tradeoffs you will actually be faced with - what degree of harm are you willing to cause, and at what distance from "in front of me", to what benefit?

Your scenario is just as contrived as the first one. It assumes a complete and accurate knowledge of the situation as well as a perfect ability to execute on your decision to harm the shooter.

If your only means for investigating the nature of human relationships is via intellectual contrivances then you will always produce results which reaffirm your preexisting beliefs.

The first point to understand is that violence is a dicey business and never produces as tidy of outcomes as the intellectual justification for it expects. The second point to understand is that the pursuit of morality via intellectualization is counter-productive at best.

I don't disagree with you, but human society exists because of our ability to control violence via intellectual rules.

That feels like you're working really hard to avoid the ethical question. You have to choose whether to try to shoot the shooter. Police officers face this question far too often, and sometimes as an armchair judge, I disagree with the choice.

Do you have a better framework for pursuing morality? It seems like telling stories, asking questions, and thinking about them are the basis of all moral and ethical teaching, from religion to law school.

Torturing someone with the hope of getting information they may or may not have is in no way analogous to shooting someone who is actively killing people right now.

So we've established that sometimes it's OK to harm or kill someone.

Now we're trying to establish the boundaries of that.

Killing someone is different than torturing them. You're arguing a point nobody is making.

Not if they suffer a torturous death. They might even not die if shot, but be captured instead.

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