As mentioned. The problem is not in the single scenario instance, where you sacrifice the few to save the many one time. The problem arises when you repeat the scenario several times. If you sacrifice the few to save the many twice, it's still not as much of a problem. But, if you sacrifice the few to save the many thousands of times, you wind up sacrificing your entire population as a consequence.
The flaw is that, when this utilitarian philosophy is repeated an indefinite number of times, you wind up sacrificing the many to save the few instead, those few usually being the decision makers who were choosing who was sacrificed.
It is only in very specific circumstances, such as sacrifice others in a very short time span but then it is just exploitaion, class war yadayada.
If you sacrifice 1 person to save 100 once, ad then in a long while you sacrifice 1 person to save 100 you get 198 people of net gain - putting aside various factors.
It is only in very specific circumstances, such as sacrifice others in a very short time span but then it is just exploitaion, class war yadayada.
If you sacrifice 1 person to save 100 once, ad then in a long while you sacrifice 1 person to save 100 you get 198 people of net gain - putting aside various factors.
The problem is, when you apply this to real world situations, you're not just literally killing people. The sacrifice comes in more forms than that. Say, for instance, taking everyone's right to do X thing that only 30% of the population does in order to benefit the 70%. The 30% are unhappy, the 70% are happy.
Repeat this scenario with another thing that a different overlap of 30% of the population does. Then, repeat it with another thing that yet another 30% of the population does. Suddenly, by sacrificing the few for the many only 3 times, you have created a suppressive burden on the entire population.
That's the form this scenario usually takes when applied to the real world... err... usually. Sometimes it also is literally killing, and in those cases doing it even once creates a culture of fear in the entire population who are all asking "could I be next?"
(Keeping it vague to avoid becoming distinctly political. I'm sure people can think of scenarios of the former, the latter is a case where I can drop specific names that some people here are likely aware of.)
whether its killing off one or a thousand, doesnt make a difference in my opinion. At least i dont feel it actually has any moral or karmic value in terms of which is "worse". Either way you're choosing one over the other and killing off a person. It really just depends on who you care for more and whether you can live with the consequences of your choice. I still feel like you're probably gonna go to hell or be punished in some way in the after life, if you're the religious type at least and believe in such things. I aint, so i can afford to be more selfish
The problem is, when you apply this to real world situations, you're not just literally killing people. The sacrifice comes in more forms than that. Say, for instance, taking everyone's right to do X thing that only 30% of the population does in order to benefit the 70%. The 30% are unhappy, the 70% are happy.
Repeat this scenario with another thing that a different overlap of 30% of the population does. Then, repeat it with another thing that yet another 30% of the population does. Suddenly, by sacrificing the few for the many only 3 times, you have created a suppressive burden on the entire population.
That's the form this scenario usually takes when applied to the real world... err... usually. Sometimes it also is literally killing, and in those cases doing it even once creates a culture of fear in the entire population who are all asking "could I be next?"
(Keeping it vague to avoid becoming distinctly political. I'm sure people can think of scenarios of the former, the latter is a case where I can drop specific names that some people here are likely aware of.)
That's actually a fair way of doing things.
The problem I see here is when this rhetoric is applied by the few to push their agendas against the many - such as the supposed "war on terrorism" in the US that led to no results against terrorism (proven by court investigation) but took away privacy from the many well enough. But that wasn't "sacrificing few for many", it was an ingeniune policy that was meant to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Many such instances that end up benefit the few against many are intended this way from the start.
A policy to protect people from themselves just doesn't count.
We see this theme coming up a lot in stories. One famous example of late would be The Last of Us, in which the game's final challenge in the scenario is whether to let the girl you've been escorting the entire game be killed and dissected to find out why she's immune to the zombie virus and potentially save all of humanity, or fight to save her and keep her alive.
In Star Trek, meanwhile, Spock would famously say "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" as though it were his mantra, pushing it as a standard of logic that it is preferable to sacrifice the few to benefit the many, and to do anything else is a decision couched in emotion.
Fictional scenarios like the above repeat themselves again and again in fiction, often with it taken to the extreme of sacrificing the one to benefit all of humanity or even the entire survival of the world itself.
This is a trope we really could analyze to death. I have my thoughts on it, but I will put them in spoilers for you to read or not. Meanwhile, I will toss it to you guys for you to share your thoughts as well.
This trope harkens back to older days in which there is some form of ritual human sacrifice the hero has to rescue the sacrificial victim from. Our modern versions of it have turned it from an angry or avaricious cruel god or demented cult who's claiming the life, a clear evil that has to be fought back, to a far more morally difficult scenario of a medical disease that needs to be stopped or a non-sentient magical force that needs to be stabilized. This makes it a far more difficult question to answer, and also has the interesting side-consequence of pushing the trope into territory that is more relevant to the human experience.
On a macro-scale, do you sacrifice the one to the benefit of the many? It is a difficult question. Mr. Spock's logic would say "yes" every time, but often Captain Kirk would directly oppose this logic of Spock in order to do the right thing.
There's also a flaw in Mr. Spock's logic of the time that our society hadn't managed to grapple with and unveil until fairly recently. It is true that, in an isolated scenario, it makes logical sense to sacrifice the one to benefit the many. However, if you keep sacrificing the one over and over again throughout a large iteration of scenarios, suddenly you have created something akin to a death cult that will continuously oppress all of the individual "ones" in the group to supposedly benefit the "many." But, once all of those "many" have been sacrificed through repeated iterations of this scenario, you are not actually benefiting the "many" any more. So, you have to take a stand against this reasoning at some point, and it might as well be right at the beginning when the first "one" or "few" are about to be sacrificed on the alter of "benefiting the many."
There is, however, one scenario where this entire trope is turned on it's head. The heroic self-sacrifice is also an iteration of the one being sacrificed to save the many. However, we often see this version of it in an entirely different light. When it is an innocent who is chosen by others to be sacrificed, that's bad. However, when someone steps up to be the sacrifice on their own terms, it becomes heroic.
This is especially the case when the hero is fighting off a clear threat than means to destroy the people standing behind them. A hero might fight to single-handedly push back a hoard of enemies, knowing they are going to die. They might throw themselves on a grenade to save their comrades. They might volunteer to donate a kidney to save someone's life. Whatever the case, the difference of voluntarily stepping up to aid others is seen as heroic, where as forced sacrifice is... considerably less so. That way of viewing things brings into perspective the major moral issue that is being called into question whenever this trope comes up.
With these things in mind, it might even be an interesting thing in some writing to bring up these two types of sacrificing the few to the benefit of the many. The heroic self-sacrifice Vs. the brutal imposed sacrifice. This difference of choice really frames these ideas in two separate and very different lights that we just instinctively know are different at a primal level. In terms of writing a piece that calls these concepts into question, one could bring up both scenarios and even compare them to one another.
As for what statement you make with these two scenarios, that is entirely up to the individual author. And, I am certain the audience will have their own thoughts with such a deep topic, to which an author may want to be cautioned away from making too strong a statement on this issue. But, it is a tool to allow an author to better analyze the idea and force the audience to take a better look at it as well.
The whole world is in a state of actual war? I'm not saying that it will save people who are dying of hunger, diseases, or some other bullshit. I'm talking about ending a war between two countries, not a cold war, not a proxy war, but an actual war. A war that kills innocents with bullets, ballistic rockets, and so on.
To make it clear, I'm not saying I live in a unique, one-of-a-kind country. Sure there are more countries that wage wars currently. There are countries that have civil wars and so on. But it's not the whole world.
thats all well and good and maybe those dead few will benefit YOU and yours, but what about when YOU become "the few" or someone else you love? A majority of people dont really care about the many or the few unless it directly involves them. At most we say, "our thoughts and prayers to [Insert affected group here]" like that does anything at all and then go back to our daily lives.
That aside, where do you live where thats the case? Tho i guess that statement of yours could be true for anywhere with shit leaders. If people had killed Hitler earlier then millions would also have been saved. If Obama had been killed at least a good couple thousands would've been saved....the dude did love his drone strikes from what i heard.
thats all well and good and maybe those dead few will benefit YOU and yours, but what about when YOU become "the few" or someone else you love? A majority of people dont really care about the many or the few unless it directly involves them. At most we say, "our thoughts and prayers to [Insert affected group here]" like that does anything at all and then go back to our daily lives.
That aside, where do you live where thats the case? Tho i guess that statement of yours could be true for anywhere with shit leaders. If people had killed Hitler earlier then millions would also have been saved. If Obama had been killed at least a good couple thousands would've been saved....the dude did love his drone strikes from what i heard.
I won't become a dictator, so I don't really care. And a question, when have dictators become good people who deserve to live? There are exceptions to the rule, but you know, why gamble? As for your question, I live in Russia. And I would repeat what I said to Trashy. When I said you can save at least a million innocent lives, I wasn't even talking about those who die as a result of shit politics. I'm talking about an actual war.
The whole world is in a state of actual war? I'm not saying that it will save people who are dying of hunger, diseases, or some other bullshit. I'm talking about ending a war between two countries, not a cold war, not a proxy war, but an actual war. A war that kills innocents with bullets, ballistic rockets, and so on.
To make it clear, I'm not saying I live in a unique, one-of-a-kind country. Sure there are more countries that wage wars currently. There are countries that have civil wars and so on. But it's not the whole world.
I was speaking of literal child slaves working in shit conditions for peanuts for the sake of the "civilized" countries, who are no less innocent than those dying in a war.
While I do feel bad for the people suffering from wars due to dumb dictators, but the truth is, the whole world would benefit if only some hundreds people disappeared. Not the whole world, but most of it anyway.
That's actually a fair way of doing things.
The problem I see here is when this rhetoric is applied by the few to push their agendas against the many - such as the supposed "war on terrorism" in the US that led to no results against terrorism (proven by court investigation) but took away privacy from the many well enough. But that wasn't "sacrificing few for many", it was an ingeniune policy that was meant to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Many such instances that end up benefit the few against many are intended this way from the start.
A policy to protect people from themselves just doesn't count.
Right. How about this scenario. Water is diverted from a rural area to the city, thus depriving the people living in that rural area of drinking water. This actually happened near where I live.
You know, the french had spoilt it for us because now that the 1% will know how to NOT get their heads chopped off.
By promoting shits like this. Let's sacrifice the lower caste to save everyone else and the majority who don't think they will be affected voted for their own death.
Spoiler, once they ascended, these 1% are no longer human.
The 40K one is a child abusing corpse that created the most racist empire mankind has ever got to offer and is on forced life support where he is fed souls while serving as a lighthouse/ all-you-can-eat buffet sign to the xenos.
So true.
PS: What I meant is the one between Kiritsugu's dilemma and the Dune Emperor's sacrifice. Though, this made me remember Lelouch's master plan with his sacrifice required by the end of everything.
Right. How about this scenario. Water is diverted from a rural area to the city, thus depriving the people living in that rural area of drinking water. This actually happened near where I live.
I don’t agree with the Last of Us ending because there is no proof they would have been able to make a cure. I guarantees in science. The idea of killing a live sample to try 1 time made 0 sense to me.
As for Spock’s line, there are two circumstances to consider.
1. Are the “few” innocent who do no harm?
2. Are the “few” a ruling elite class that do harm?
In the case of circumstance 1, I can only agree if it’s voluntary from the few. If someone doesn’t want to sacrifice themselves then it’s morally wrong no matter how many people benefit.
If it’s circumstance 2, where it’s a dictator/political party who harms anyone who gets in their way and puts them in jail or censors people, forces them to do things that give them a heart attack or etc… yes, their deaths are justified. In that case however, the sacrifice isn’t on their end but on the end of those standing up to evil.
