Kill to Save

[ShatteredDiamond She/Her]

It seems to me that a recurring theme in the stomlight archive is that it is not worth it to kill one person to save two people. I love the storm light archive and do like a lot of the little "morals of the story", so to speak. But.

I'm not picking up on the logic. It's like that one riddle/question/whatever where you have three children and must choose one to die or one to save.

If multiple people's lives are at stake, then it seems worth it to take one life to save the rest.

I mean, seriously. You have to kill this single person or everyone you ever knew besides them will immediately die.

How is it, in any way, moral to refrain from killing one innocent when it will save ten innocents? Aren't you effectively killing ten instead of one? Please help me its keeping me up at night

[Treamayne]

On 1/16/2025 at 9:29 PM, Phendorana said:

It seems to me that a recurring theme in the stomlight archive is that it is not worth it to kill one person to save two people. I love the storm light archive and do like a lot of the little "morals of the story", so to speak. But.

I'm not picking up on the logic. It's like that one riddle/question/whatever where you have three children and must choose one to die or one to save.

If multiple people's lives are at stake, then it seems worth it to take one life to save the rest.

I mean, seriously. You have to kill this single person or everyone you ever knew besides them will immediately die.

How is it, in any way, moral to refrain from killing one innocent when it will save ten innocents? Aren't you effectively killing ten instead of one? Please help me its keeping me up at night

I'm slightly confused. Are you discussing the "Watchers on the Rim" Philosophy (mentioned by Kaladin and in the Starfalls vision in WoK)?
- Please note, if you are referencing any spoiler information, then this is the wrong forum to discuss that.

That said, it depends on your moral base. Those that ascribe to the idea that not killing an innocent in that situation would also argue that you are not killing ten people - the moral failing of their deaths is on the person/entity that does kill them.
For example - If I'm in public and somebody tells me to kill one person at that location or he will kill everybody at that location - then, my refusal to kill an innocent does not mean I am to blame for what the criminal does to everybody else. They are to blame, they are killing people, not me.

Dean Koontz had an interesting book with this kind of moral dilemma as the primary plot device. Velocity. It opens in chapter 1 with:

Spoiler

As he approached his Ford Explorer, he noticed a rectangle of white paper under the driver’s-side windshield wiper.

Behind the steering wheel, with his door still open, he unfolded the paper, expecting to find a handbill of some kind, advertising a car wash or a maid service. He discovered a neatly typed message:

• If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher somewhere in Napa County.
• If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work.

You have six hours to decide. The choice is yours.

Of course he considers it a prank, and only later learns the teacher was killed. The Psychological thriller progresses with more moral dilemmas and the protagonist struggles with this feeling - that they are to blame for the actions of this killer.

It is only moral to account for your own actions, not the actions of other people that they try to pin on you through false moral dilemmas.

That reduces your question to "Is it moral to kill this innocent?" The answer is generally no.

 

All of that said, this is the kind of thing that causes a lot of trauma for military and first responders - no amount of philosophical theory can prepare you for the raw emotion and trauma of this kind of event.

Edited January 27, 2025 by Treamayne
SPAG

[Duxredux he/him]

Versions of this debate have been popularized as the "Trolley Problem" and there are countless places where one vs many debates show up. My personal feeling is that circumstances between each scenario are never identical, and that to simplify the problem necessary to make it a universal philosophical debate excises the details that provide useful information. 

The trolley problem is the scenario where a trolley is going down a track toward a unspecified group of people standing on the track, while someone stands at the track diverter and has the option to divert the trolley to hit a single person standing on the alternative path. I heard someone listen to the scenario and declare that this wasn't an ethics problem, it was an engineering/administrative problem that allowed this many people stray into the path of an on-coming vehicle in the first place. Just as an example of the shortcomings of this kind of either/or presentation of a problem.

There are hosts of other examples. Insurance companies asked to provide funding for extremely expensive medical treatment for late-stage cancer patients versus approving dozens of lower cost medications for people not terminally ill. Medical first responders tasked with triaging disaster victims by likelihood of survival and being trained to tag individuals as dead or dying even though they could absolutely be saved if it wasn't during a large-scale disaster and personnel weren't spread so thin. An engineer asked to design a vehicle or bridge and balance cost and safety for a product that needs to stay within a budget to be implemented - knowing that perhaps with a couple more thousand dollars 1% more lives are statistically likely to be saved if a safety feature was included. School teachers with large classes who have to decide what level of material to teach - a level that 80% of the class will understand or slow teaching to a crawl for the remaining 20% who need individualized instruction, pushing the class as a whole behind in curriculum. Military faced with enemies using live hostage shields during combat. Teachers who have flagrantly disruptive students who almost certainly need one-on-one help or the the other 95% of the class who are losing instruction time as the teacher goes to manage the disruptive student - when if they were to be expelled the probability of them failing to obtain higher education, higher skilled jobs, and more, increases with expulsion. A shepherd with a flock of sheep when one goes astray with the question of cutting losses and preserving the rest of the flock or leaving the larger group unattended to rescue the one. I mention this one so you won't be surprised if an ethics question starts to involve questions of morality and religion.

The list goes on. It's not always just an ethics problem, sometimes its resource constraints, conflicting parameters, time constraints with next to no time to deliberate, and more all make this branch of philosophy tricky at best in my opinion, though I only dabble in philosophy and generally against my better judgment.

It gets pretty heated and in my opinion not the best example of one of our debates on 17th Shard, but there was seven pages of discussion on Roshar's version of the Trolley Problem. In one of the philosophical debates between Dalinar and Taravangian, they discuss a lord tasked with giving a judgment on a group of hogmen, only one of which was a murderer but who it was remained unknown. If this kind of thing interests you and you are fine with a bit of vitriol, here is the thread:

I would caution against reviving that thread though.

Edited January 28, 2025 by Duxredux
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