Death of a Child vs Deatn of an Adult

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
It's about emotion over reason. Adults are designed to be protective and emotional about children.

The reality is, if the bread-winner dies, the whole family is in big trouble. If the baby dies, it's very bad for the baby, but not as bad for the rest of the family.

A bit short sighted. It's not only about emotion: Indeed, killing the bread-winner means short term trouble, but killing the children *can* mean the end of the social group (small scale - family, but is easily possible and IIRC has been tried on bigger scale) which loses its children.

[Cort Haus]

I wasn't talking about mass infanticide - rather the implications of a single accidental death.

[loinburger]

I'd say that death of a righteous adult (e.g., Ghandi) is more tragic than the death of an innocent child, and the death of an innocent child is more tragic than the death of a wicked adult (e.g., John Wayne Gacy), and that it's difficult to compare anything in between.

Dr. Strangelove
So I say to you, what goes on between a man and a dead juvenile goat is NOT a crime.

This too.

[Arrian]

Yet of course you are allowed (and often encouraged) to hit children if they do something you don't like. No one seems concerned over the fact that they are far smaller and weaker when it comes to allowing a 200 lbs. man to hit them with a belt.

I have to echo LotM on this. WTF? What country are you in? Or maybe a particularly backwards state? Because where I come from, this sort of attitude is not the norm, but rather is frowned upon (more than that, really).

Ogie,

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that. Damn.

-Arrian

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by rah
And No parent should ever have to bury one of their children.

And a 50 year old man has at least had a decent amount of life. A 17 year old hasn't.

Yup. One of the hardest things I have ever had to do was go to a funeral of a friend's 6 month old child. Seeing the baby laying there in the tiny casket, I just wanted to pick him up and hold him close and tell him that everything was going to be all right. Very emotional, very instinctual response to the situation.

I also watched my father pass away and felt sad, but didn't cry, because I felt that my father had lived a good long life, and death for him was a release from the ravages of Alzheimers.


D

[Sirotnikov]

Lets use Kant's law.

If all adults above 18 years old are killed - all the teenagers would still be there to continue the world.


If all youngsters beneath 18 years of age are killed - the world population would be drastically reduced, and the human race would be at a large amount of risk.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
Lets use Kant's law.

If half of the adults above 18 years old are killed and half of the youngsters 18 and below are killed, then there would still be plenty of children to keep the human race viable and there would be plenty of adults to impart their knowledge to the children (which is a better situation than a world with only adults or with only children). Therefore, when determining whether the death of a child or adult is worse, the correct answer is "the death of a child is worse than the death of an adult, and the death of half of an adult and half of a child is worse than the death of a child." Isn't the categorical imperative fun???

[VetLegion]

Wrong Siro. 18 year olds simply didn't have enough time to accumulate skills neccessary for continuation of civilization. They would probably revert to the stone age level or something.

Kids can always be replaced, so an adult with skills and knowledge is easily worth many children to the society.

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by loinburger

If half of the adults above 18 years old are killed and half of the youngsters 18 and below are killed, then there would still be plenty of children to keep the human race viable and there would be plenty of adults to impart their knowledge to the children (which is a better situation than a world with only adults or with only children). Therefore, when determining whether the death of a child or adult is worse, the correct answer is "the death of a child is worse than the death of an adult, and the death of half of an adult and half of a child is worse than the death of a child." Isn't the categorical imperative fun???

How do you apply the categorical imperative to "half" populations?

I thought the whole point is to pull an exaggeration that will prove one situation to be less acceptable than another. Meaning - it requires the test situation to be absolute: all adults are killed / all children are killed.

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by VetLegion
Wrong Siro. 18 year olds simply didn't have enough time to accumulate skills neccessary for continuation of civilization. They would probably revert to the stone age level or something.

Kids can always be replaced, so an adult with skills and knowledge is easily worth many children to the society.

Pfft.
Not true.

Plenty of 12-18 year olds have the abilities required to learn the skills to continue civilization. Obviously this will create a new elite, of educated children with high self control. A major shift in world structure - agreed. But possibly for the better.


If you kill all children, then many of the current adults simply won't have the abilities and energy to reproduce again and raise their children to matureness.

Only 18-30 year olds would stand a chance of seriously reproducing.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
How do you apply the categorical imperative to "half" populations?

The same way you apply it to full populations.

I thought the whole point is to pull an exaggeration that will prove one situation to be less acceptable than another. Meaning - it requires the test situation to be absolute: all adults are killed / all children are killed.

You've got a bifurcation fallacy built into your conception of the categorical imperative. A maxim needs to be universalizable, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a maxim needs to be a simple proposition (i.e., without conjunctions/disjunctions/exceptions and whatnot). "Never lie" is a (for the sake of argument) universalizable maxim, but there are alternatives other than "always lie" (such as "never lie, unless the truth causes more harm than a lie," or "never lie by commission, and always lie by ommission," or "never lie, except on Tuesdays"). In this case, you've started from the either-or case ("either a child dies or an adult dies") and attempted to universalize that ("either all children die or all adults die"). However, starting from the general case ("half of the population dies") there's no either-or mechanism built into the question, and when you derive the maxim that makes the most (or at least, more than the either-or maxims) sense ("half of the children die and half of the adults die") and apply it to the specific case ("half of the child dies and half of the adult dies") you get nonsense, which is as the case should be -- pretty much the only universalizable answer to the question "should an adult die or should a child die" is "I don't know." (The answer I posted earlier would only be universalizable if everybody had the same conception of the terms "righteous" and "wicked," which is unlikely to be the case.)

Human morality is far too complex to be summarized in supposedly universalizable maxims, particularly when there is little guarantee that my maxims are the same as your maxims ("Why did you lie to me???" "Because it's Tuesday"). They're great as rules of thumb, but little else.

[Cort Haus]

People keep twisting the OP.

The question is not about deaths of ALL people in an age range - it's about the death of one person.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
People keep twisting the OP.

I blame Kant.

[BeBMan]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
People keep twisting the OP.

The question is not about deaths of ALL people in an age range - it's about the death of one person.

Ok, then killing me is worse than killing someone else.

[BeBMan]

I have some time to kill

Originally posted by Cort Haus
The question is not about deaths of ALL people in an age range - it's about the death of one person.

Well, seriously - the OT spoke of one child vs. one adult, yes, but I understood it still as a general debate. Because IMO it wasn't about a specific child or adult, rather about the abstract child and adult which would represent the general "value" of being child or adult.

Anyway, enough with the hair splitting, and I blame Eli.