Justified killings and Why I support it

Originally posted by hotpinkurinalmint
One real brain teaser is a situation in which you see a train heading towards two innocent people. If you do nothing, the train will hit the two people and surely kill them. Your only option is to flip a switch which will redirect the course of the train. If you do flip the switch, the train will surely hit and kill one innocent person. You are a conductor working for the railroad line. What do you do?

Easy:

I yell out the window: "Hey! You idiots get offa the track! You're gonna get run over!"

Problem solved.

i live in florida, and its totally legal to blow away an intruder threatening you in your home. all i know, is if somebody is threatening the life of my loved ones and i, im going to express my god given right to defend myself and stop the person with any means necessary. that includes the total destruction of their brain via buck shot if i have to. and in florida, the judge would applaud me. one of the RARE cases of the government/judicial system getting it right. star and flag for this excellent post with a good point.

Personally, I believe that, in such situations as OP's, that killing is justifiable in self-defense.

I am a mother. And being a perfect mother bear, if anyone were to willingly threaten my child's life, such as an intruder, I would kill someone without thinking about it.

People will kill each other whether it's wrong or not. Complex moral arguments like these only affect people who are aware of them, which is fewer than you might think. Taking the life of another is only "wrong" insofar as the murderer is capable of appreciating the difference from right; frankly, based on the people I've met, few go to the trouble of really probing into those considerations, further than maybe accepting wholesale some Bronze Age religion's codified system of right and wrong, and applying it when and how it suits them.

We are a violent species, descended from a long line of predatory ancestors. Our instincts lean toward, rather than away from, the act of murder as a recourse in split-second decision-making in situations like the one described in the OP. Even a person with a refined sense of morality, who has spent years considering these issues and formulating thorough, rational arguments for their personal beliefs about good and evil, will be hard-pressed to maintain a cold intellectual detachment when unexpectedly charged by a knife-wielding thug.

When the decision is to kill or be killed, and one has a single instant in which to reason out this decision, our evolutionary history has seen to it thoroughly that we choose to kill. Self-preservation is the first step toward success in an environment rife with natural selection pressures such as that in which our species developed.



There's another thing, too. Let's reword the scenario in the OP for analysis from a more Utilitarian perspective.

There are two parties described here. One, the home invader, intends to make off with the family's valuables, killing every person in the house if necessary. The second party, the family, has only the desire to sleep peacefully and go on living, preferably maintaining possession of their valuables as well. In this comparison, which party has the greater right to fulfill their intent? If the first party actively tries to kill a member of the second, forcing the second party to choose either accepting this fate or killing their attacker, and they choose to kill, they are preventing a great loss of overall happiness at the cost of a proportionally smaller one, that of the attacker being unable to fulfill their vastly disproportionate selfish desire.

Considering the levels of overall happiness in the world in the two different outcomes, the defending family slaying their attacker is by far the preferable of the two.


I can't think of a rational reason to expect a person such as the one described in that scenario to do anything other than retaliate with lethal force, unless they are absolutely sure that they are able to subdue the attacker without killing them, and without incurring greater risk to their family. The nature of our species, and what I feel is a sound consideration of potential outcomes, is fully in support of the taking of life in certain dire situations.

[edit on 12-3-2010 by The Parallelogram]