Nerd Pride Radio

Is taking a life ever justified? If so, where is the line? When is a person’s life considered forfeit?

If ending that life is necessary to save other lives, it is justified. After that, I'm up for discussion.

Help me.

Bad guys understand the value of mortality; good guys understand it implications, otherwise there'd be lots more dead bad guys.

I really cannot with this. What's the benefit of having a conversation about when people no longer deserve to live and thus have somehow "forfeited" their life? Does this imply they initially had some claim lodged with the universe or God or some white-walled office with bland decor, which then had to be rescinded? What happens once the forfeit occurs?

What do we gain from setting up a debate about whether it's okay to dismember one person to save the lives of several, given the profound insight that 'several' is a larger number than 'one'? No, obviously none of that is okay. Did this insight help us in any way to settle moral dilemmas or think about the value of life? How does any of this have to do with whether it is justified to take a life, when justification is something entirely different than "do simple math"?

Because if you're doing something like programming the AI for a self-driving car, and you're dealing with those conditions where someone will be killed no matter what you do, it does boil down to simple math because that's about all the AI has to work with. The AI doesn't know whether or not the person in the crosswalk is a neo-Nazi that deserves to be run over more than the other person who volunteers at a homeless shelter and is a bona fide saint-in-the-making.

It can't come down to pure numbers even in that situation, because you have to privilege the lives in question according to their location with respect to the unique functionality and situation of the vehicle, combined with predictions about other unknown factors in the surrounding area. Even in this most apparently mathy of situations, an enormous number of non-mathy evaluations and principles are being used in order to tell the vehicle how to respond! When do you ever get a situation where it's a crystal clear "should you kill this one unit over here or these two units over here"? That happens so rarely, yet people obsess over those dilemmas as if they're instructive compared to the vast plurality of other, real-life, very likely dilemmas. Why? 2 is a higher number than 1. The question is pointless.

Yes, I simplified things, go figure. Yes, there are more variables involved than just numbers of people. But the thought exercise and "math" involved still have a role to play. This whole discussion really isn't that different than the link Mike posted to the self-driving car exercise about who you would prefer to kill/save; it just moves beyond the car to a more general discussion. It's a thought exercise on what criteria go into making that decision on in individual basis.

P.S. - I love you Phoebe, please don't think I'm mad at you or trying to argue out of a position of anger or hate. I'm trying to work through the thought exercise myself, which is why I haven't posted an answer yet. I don't think there's a cut and dry answer.