Quote Originally Posted by Fithos
I dont want to get to involved in this argument because it dosnt affect me personoly. my opinion is my own as is everyones. but i must question this. how can killing be less or more wrong? does killing an enemy in defence make them any less dead? killing is killing in my opinion. and i dont mean to belittle your opinion, on the contrary i respect you for your arguing what you belive in. but it is my belife that you could justify almost anything, but when it comes down to it, its either right ir wrong. and most all people can tell the difference.
Let me if I can explain this a bit better. It isn't just the act itself that you look at. It's also the situation. So you could have a situation like Columbine HS, where people went in and shot others essentially for fun. Then there's a situation where a person is pointing a gun at you, ready to take your life. Or perhaps a situation where you come upon a person about to murder someone else. Then there are the situations where this person is a mass murderer, someone like a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. where every day hundreds of thousands die simply because the person ordered their deaths.

Now to me killing a person is wrong because it takes away something extremely valuable, that being a human life. So you'd have mitigating circumstances depending on whether the person was about to take someone's life, or several lives.

The first one is pretty obviously wrong. No one would say that killing for fun could ever have any possible justification. No good comes from it.

But on the second and third case (defending yourself, and defending someone else's life), there is a major difference. If you don't shoot the man with the gun, someone will die anyway. The only question in the matter is who will die. So in my view, this would be more or less a wash, unless you wish to consider the worthiness of that life, which would be hard to do.

The third case would be obvious as well, but going in the opposite direction. Since the reason for the commandment (and other forms of the moral law) "Thou shalt not kill", is that it preserves a valuable thing called human life, I think it would be far better to take a single life and thus save thousands than it would be to take 1000 lives because I was unwilling to take the single life that was causing it all. Not to say that taking the single life would be a morally good action in itself, but that the result of not doing so is by far worse than doing so.

and to be on topic, I'll show you how this relates to the whole torture thing.

Why is torture immoral to start with? It's immoral because it causes the other person to suffer and lose his dignity. But the same reasoning holds here, too. Excepting for one thing, suffering is more desirable than death. One can recover from suffering, any suffering. It may take years, but it is possible. Until pheonix-down technology is perfected, there is no cure for death. Once your life is taken, there is no going back.

But just like above, there are different situations in which the torture could happen. First, would be torture for the sake of hatred or because the other person likes to. Second would be the reason C#9 brought up a while back, which is getting a confession. The third would be getting intelligence. The fourth would be that in some totalitarian systems, torture is used to get obediance, or to punish disobediance.

The only torture situation that has any mitigating circumstances is #3. But it would depend on what type of information you could expect to get. It could be the "where is the rebel base" type of intelligence (yes I stole from Star Wars, get over it). That isn't going to save lives, or at least it doesn't seem that it would. The second would be "Where is the ambush", which is better because if you know where the ambush is, you can save the lives of your own soldiers. The third would be "Where is the terrorist attack", which could save many civillian lives.

On the "Rebel Base" scenario, you don't really save lives, because you still have to take the base. That will cost just as many lives if you find it by using an aircraft. It doesn't change the situation, except maybe saving time. So it isn't counterbalanced by any moral good in the results. Therefore, it is immoral.

On the "Ambush" scenario, there is a moral good. You save people in your own army. I would compare this to self defense, except in this case, instead of killing to protect your own people, you are torturing to save your own people, so it is actually more moral than the case of killing for self defense, because you don't even kill the person that you torture.

The "Terrorist Attack" scenario also has a moral good. You save the lives of noncombatants. This would be like shooting the person about to kill someone else, except that again, the person being tortured doesn't die.

Torture would still be wrong in all of those situations, it's just that it can in certain instances be less wrong than allowing the bomb to go off and kill scores of people when you had the ability to stop it.