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Comment by lev99 | Hacker News Reader

> - Is pursuing an AI that kills 10 bad guys but saves 20 good ones overall bad?

- Yes. If your philosophical development is to the point where there are clearly defined good guys and bad guys in your mind I suggest you read more.

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Am I philosophically underdeveloped if I think it's pretty clear that 20 merchants and shoppers in a souk are the good guys, and the people with suicide vests on are the bad guys?

An argument that relays heavily on racial prejudice and emotional appeal is philosophically underdeveloped.

A suicide vest isn’t racially prejudiced. Identifying those that are wearing them isn’t an emotional appeal.

The identification of a person wearing a suicide vest isn't a racial or emotional problem.

Declaring that a person wearing a suicide vest in an Arab market is inherently bad does play on racial prejudice and emotional appeal. It's impossible to separate that statement from a decade and a half of propaganda, and the trauma caused by the numerous suicide attacks on civilians in the western.

> Declaring that a person wearing a suicide vest in an Arab market is inherently bad does play on racial prejudice and emotional appeal.

In what contexts is a person wearing a suicide vest in a market anything other than inherently bad?

Forget "inherently" good or bad. It's entirely possible that the guy in the vest isn't a morally horrible person; he may have been brainwashed since birth and genuinely believe that his actions will bring about a better world. Still, he intends to kill himself and as many other people as possible, and if I have the ability to cause the only death to be his, I'm doing that every time.

I understand the self defense argument. Law Enforcement and Armies are trained to respond with violence to people with intent to kill. The passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 are heros.

Killing "bad people" to save "good people" is not a self defense argument. The statement is too general. Is it okay to do medical testing on criminals if it speeds the advancement of medicines that saves law abiding citizens lives? We could have limits to only use people found guilty of the worst crimes and increase the legal burden of proof for criminals going into the medical testing program. It would decrease overall harm. It would kill bad guys to save good guys. Still, this practice is illegal for good reason. We need a better reason to kill someone than they are bad.

There was no argument - I was only expressing my feelings. And what racial prejudice is there?

61% of Americans have unfavorable views of Islam. [0] Islamophobia is prevalent across the western world.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/12/09/what-americ...

Are you in that 61%, and that is why you assumed I was talking about an Islamic suicide bomber?

Or...ya know...we don't want those people to kill us or our loved ones. Maybe the suicide bombers are the ones with an underdeveloped philosophy.

It is relatively easy to define good or bad though. Telling black from white isn't hard. The problem is all the shades in between (where the majority of the colours are).

> Telling black from white isn't hard.

Yes. That's kind of the problem.

His statement doesn't really depend on the definition of "good" and "bad", as the logic only requires that the good people be half as valuable as the bad people, not more valuable.

Mathematically true, ethically dubious.

You actually are implying that there are no bad guys? Under no standard of humanity would ISIS or the Taliban be confused for good guys. There are a lot of grey areas in the world for sure, but acting like badness is just a matter of opinion is ridiculous. There is evil in the world.

> There is evil in the world.

The argument here isn't that the people have the right to defend themselves. The argument here is that a person wearing a suicide vest is bad and deserves to die for being bad. They are evil. This argument is used by governments and religions throughout history to justify killing. Often by both sides of a conflict. It's a worn out argument, old and tired. Who is the judge of what is evil? The only long standing definition for evil involves religious context to believe. Anything else is poorly defined, not widely agreed upon, or hard to test against.

'Evil-skeptics give three main reasons to abandon the concept of evil: (1) the concept of evil involves unwarranted metaphysical commitments to dark spirits, the supernatural, or the devil; (2) the concept of evil is useless because it lacks explanatory power; and (3) the concept of evil can be harmful or dangerous when used in moral, political, and legal contexts, and so, it should not be used in those contexts, if at all.'[0]

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/

Ask the question, US or THEM. Those who want to defend the things they love from THEM, will always choose US over THEM. Simple. One can argue that "it doesn't have to be that way" but sadly there are millions of years of biology to prove that incorrect.

The argument that we should defend ourselves or that we should kill our enemies does not require the existence of evil.

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