Ripheus23

Sophie's choice in the Ripheus story

This is extremely relevant to an issue having to do with the ecographic nature of the Form of Evil. Now as it stands, the intuition one is "supposed" to get from the case is that Sophie will feel guilty no matter what she does. This might be because she will never know if she subconsciously chose the one child over the other for some reason, and so she will feel guilt about the quality of her love for the child she didn't choose, or something along these lines.

But let's suppose she knows she's not choosing one over the other due to some deficit of love for either, or whatever. Should she still feel guilty? One might think she should feel guilty because she has brought about the death of a child she loves. But I think that this is a terrible thing, to think that she should be made to feel guilt on top of everything else under the circumstances.

Now, as far as Ripheus and his world go, the issue is generally over whether there are objective moral dilemmas at all. Of course there are subjective dilemmas where one doesn't know what to do. The existence of objective dilemmas involves a denial of something called "agglomeration" in deontic logic. Roughly, the idea is that from, "You ought to do x," and, "You ought to do ~x," you can infer, "You ought to do (x and ~x)," which means, "You ought to make it true that x and true that ~x," or, "You ought to make it true that (x and ~x)," which is a contradiction.

There is an argument over agglomeration so the deeper logical defense of the proposition, in the Ripheus setting, is this: in imperative logic, +A and +B = +(A and B). Any two commands can be represented as one command to do two things. Since erotetic logic encodes for the transcendental deduction of deontic logic from imperative logic, the imperative agglomeration carries over into the deontic context.

As far as Sophie goes, the issue adverts to this: Sophie actually doesn't know that what she says will decide which child will be killed. Not only could the Nazi kill the opposite child (to spite the mother somehow, suppose), or both regardless, or one a little later, or by sheer random free will neither, but even if he accords with the mother's "choice," this is by his actual choice. So yes, it is perversely unsympathetic towards her, to attribute a "moral remainder" or "moral residue" to her as if nevertheless these arithmetical or chemical analogies didn't have to follow the laws of division or admixture in turn. [And so the ultimate way the Form of Evil tries to warp a person is by infecting their sense of responsibility so that they begin to think of their inactions as negatively morally charged, due to irrevocable dilemmas, which starts to physically and spiritually subvert the person's free will from within itself. The negative charge hypothesis converts into a misalignment of the fundamental concepts of good and evil in a person's logical reasoning, namely it only goes through if the concept of evil is the basis of the concept of good, which is false. Therefore, this amounts to an interposition of the concept of evil and the concept of inaction such that evil seems to "exist as nonexistence," so to speak. Again, Armirex was not spinning his plan out of nothingness(!)...]