Digest Number 649

[Guest guest]

frankly... how can the life of one person be more important than the life of

thousands? in a hypothetical situation, if you say you must kill one to save

a thousand lives, another way of saying this is that if you don't kill one,

you will kill a thousand. so why is the life of this one person more

important than the life of a thousand? what makes this person so special?

save one or save a thousand, and you choose one. this makes absolutely no

sense.

anyway, this is just a hypothetical situation and would never happen exactly

as described, but i thought a major point of veganism is that all life is

worth the same. so how is one life worth more than a thousand?

-Isabelle

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

> frankly... how can the life of one person be more important than the life

of

> thousands?

 

It is to that one person.

 

I bet if i were to kill myself, way more than 1000 lives would be spared

from what would have been the course of my life. Sure, i'm as vegan as i

can be, i don't buy or use *anything* with animal products, but indirectly

i'm still killing many. If it's not the animals who are killed in the

production of my vegan food, it the ones killed in the production of the

other resources i use, or even walking down the street and accidently

stepping on some critters.

 

If i were to honestly believe that thousands, hundreds or even ten lives are

more important than one, the only logical recourse is to kill myself.

 

I have yet to hear a practical use of the 'one vs many' argument.

 

Even using extreme examples like killing Hitler - we don't know if it would

save more people if he were dead or not. Perhaps if you prevented his

birth, but that isn't a reasonable option.

 

Killing Hitler in his prime may have exaberated the situation even more;

pissed off Hitlerites simply killing every Jewish person on the spot, or

people that look or sound or smell Jewish, rather than transporting them to

camps, which may have saved lives. (I don't really know what i'm talking

about with this example, i'm painfully ignorant of what happened, but this

seems logical that transporting people and giving them more time to live

would exponentially increase the chance of escape..)

 

All we know for sure in killing Hitler is one more person would be dead. I

don't feel that i can justify even that one death.

 

By taking on a philosophy that gives you the power to choose one life over

the other forces you to judge and rank every life, and by what standard??

(Would killing one human baby to save a million slugs be considered alright

to you? Sounds absurd, but sounds as absurd to me as killing one slug to

save a million human babies.)

 

Life is no more precious than to the one it belongs to.

 

- Dave