[Morality is] the ultimate way of evaluating things… It is morally wrong to design better gas chambers.
Okay, that seems clear enough that I’d rather pursue that than try to get an answer to any of my previous questions, even if all we may have accomplished here is to trade Eugene’s evasiveness for Peter’s.
If you know that morality is the ultimate way of evaluating things, and you’re able to use that to evaluate a specific thing, I hope you are aware of how you performed that evaluation process. How did you get to the conclusion that it is morally wrong to design better gas chambers?
Execution techniques have improved over the ages. A guilliotine (sp?) is more compassionate than an axe, for example, since with an axe the executioner might need a few strokes, and the experience for the victim is pretty bad between the first stroke and the last. Now we use injections that are meant to be painless, and perhaps they actually are. In an environment where executions are going to happen anyway, it seems compassionate to make them happen better. Are you saying gas chambers, specifically, are different somehow, or are you saying that designing the guilliotine was morally wrong too and it would have been morally preferable to use an axe during the time guilliotines were used?
I’m pretty sure he means to refer to high-throughput gas chambers optimized for purposes of genocide, rather than individual gas chambers designed for occasional use.
He may or may not oppose the latter, but improving the former is likely to increase the number of murders committed.
Okay, that seems clear enough that I’d rather pursue that than try to get an answer to any of my previous questions, even if all we may have accomplished here is to trade Eugene’s evasiveness for Peter’s.
If you know that morality is the ultimate way of evaluating things, and you’re able to use that to evaluate a specific thing, I hope you are aware of how you performed that evaluation process. How did you get to the conclusion that it is morally wrong to design better gas chambers?
Execution techniques have improved over the ages. A guilliotine (sp?) is more compassionate than an axe, for example, since with an axe the executioner might need a few strokes, and the experience for the victim is pretty bad between the first stroke and the last. Now we use injections that are meant to be painless, and perhaps they actually are. In an environment where executions are going to happen anyway, it seems compassionate to make them happen better. Are you saying gas chambers, specifically, are different somehow, or are you saying that designing the guilliotine was morally wrong too and it would have been morally preferable to use an axe during the time guilliotines were used?
I’m pretty sure he means to refer to high-throughput gas chambers optimized for purposes of genocide, rather than individual gas chambers designed for occasional use.
He may or may not oppose the latter, but improving the former is likely to increase the number of murders committed.
Agreed, so I deleted my post to avoid wasting Peter’s time responding.