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Wed 23 Jun, 2010 09:30 am
You are the leader of a nation of 100 million citizens, with absolute power. You have been monitoring a situation that will certainly, according to all available information and months of careful and desperate analysis, lead to a calamity that will destroy around half your nation's population. The only action you can take that will reliably reduce the losses from this impending calamity requires you to sacrifice ten million of your citizens--men, women, and children--who would not likely have been greatly affected by the impending calamity. You must make this decision within a week to assuage the calamity, and the sooner the better.
What are your thoughts and what decision will you make? What sense of moral and/or ethical guilt do you feel? Do you trust the apparent certainty of your information or do you feel that there must be another solution?
@SammDickens,
Hi Samm,
We've all been through this very same question on another current thread - check it out! "The watchmen Dilemma".
You'll probably find it to be an exact duplicate of this one.
Have a great day samm.
Mark...
@SammDickens,
Samm phil wrote:
You are the leader of a nation of 100 million citizens, with absolute power. You have been monitoring a situation that will certainly, according to all available information and months of careful and desperate analysis, lead to a calamity that will destroy around half your nation's population. The only action you can take that will reliably reduce the losses from this impending calamity requires you to sacrifice ten million of your citizens--men, women, and children--who would not likely have been greatly affected by the impending calamity. You must make this decision within a week to assuage the calamity, and the sooner the better.
What are your thoughts and what decision will you make? What sense of moral and/or ethical guilt do you feel? Do you trust the apparent certainty of your information or do you feel that there must be another solution?
deja vu...i seem to have been there done that before...
hey, good to see you samm
@SammDickens,
Kill the ten million. Obviously if I have attained supreme power over a population I did not do it by showing morals. I have probably killed about as much attaining that supreme power.
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