you’re with 20 other people, including a baby who won’t stop crying, hiding from an approaching army. Under some simplified assumptions, if the baby keeps crying, the army will find and kill all of you, and if the baby stops, they probably won’t. If killing the baby is the only way to stop it, is it moral to do so? The consequentialist answer seemed obvious to both of us, even when he specified that the army would spare the baby’s life but kill the rest of you.
Throw the baby in the opposite direction to the one you’re headed in.
Is it a bad sign that I decided that before noticing the army wont kill the kid?
EDIT: that is, don’t kill the baby, denying the army any information; leave it, providing the army with misleading information. I realize that’s not the point of the hypothetical, but then what’s under discussion is how people’s reactions reveal their … IDK, autisticness or neurology or something.
(I’m not AS myself, but I’m apparently close enough that several people at several points in my life have suspected it, but not enough to be diagnosed with it.)
Side note: I’m not AS myself, AFAICT, but I’m apparently close enough to be diagnosed with it, but not enough
that anyone at any point in my life has suspected it. Well, I understand the psychiatrist(s) suspected it briefly, although not long enough to check for the symptoms I didn’t have.
Throw the baby in the opposite direction to the one you’re headed in.
Don’t deny the counterfactual. Or if you must, just do so explicitly. Answering with a response that violates the premises given is merely muddled thinking.
(In this case there is technically nothing that prevents you from throwing the baby but by the same rules the army is still going to find and kill you all. You achieve nothing except traumatizing the baby before it dies.)
Throw the baby in the opposite direction to the one you’re headed in.
It’s pretty hard to head in any particular direction while hiding at the same time, and it doesn’t take very unrealistic premises to suppose that throwing a baby will give away your cover.
Reading the quote in the parent prior to seeing the context made me think (or at least hope) that the subject was on the moral implications of a form of propulsion when stranded in a vacuum. (Looking at the context it turns out that obvious scenarios could be easily constructed such that the consequentialist implications were equivalent.)
Throw the baby in the opposite direction to the one you’re headed in.
Is it a bad sign that I decided that before noticing the army wont kill the kid?
EDIT: that is, don’t kill the baby, denying the army any information; leave it, providing the army with misleading information. I realize that’s not the point of the hypothetical, but then what’s under discussion is how people’s reactions reveal their … IDK, autisticness or neurology or something.
Side note: I’m not AS myself, AFAICT, but I’m apparently close enough to be diagnosed with it, but not enough that anyone at any point in my life has suspected it. Well, I understand the psychiatrist(s) suspected it briefly, although not long enough to check for the symptoms I didn’t have.
Don’t deny the counterfactual. Or if you must, just do so explicitly. Answering with a response that violates the premises given is merely muddled thinking.
(In this case there is technically nothing that prevents you from throwing the baby but by the same rules the army is still going to find and kill you all. You achieve nothing except traumatizing the baby before it dies.)
It’s pretty hard to head in any particular direction while hiding at the same time, and it doesn’t take very unrealistic premises to suppose that throwing a baby will give away your cover.
Reading the quote in the parent prior to seeing the context made me think (or at least hope) that the subject was on the moral implications of a form of propulsion when stranded in a vacuum. (Looking at the context it turns out that obvious scenarios could be easily constructed such that the consequentialist implications were equivalent.)