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When your next relative is terminal in the hospital, I want you to spend every single dime you can beg, borrow or steal in a fruitless attempt to extend their life until you have zero possessions left. You wouldn't want to murder an innocent, would you? You wouldn't put your personal belongings and finances above a human life would you?
There's millions of scenarios, mercy killings, long-term comas, brain death. Your buddy falls while climbing and you have to cut the rope so you both don't die. Your buddy sustains third-degree burns over 90% of his body and will surely die in extreme agony within days. Best let him scream, you wouldn't want to murder an innocent! Your grandfather is trying to starve himself to death because he's taking way too long to die, so you hold him down and force-feed his withered form so you can be a heckin decent human bean. Wouldn't want a murder on your conscience!
This "hurr durr gotcha murder" is ridiculous and childish. The sort of thing people think right up until they actually have to make one of these calls for themselves.
On average, we will all, by your lights, murder most of our families until we in turn are murdered by them. Is this a useful way to think morally about life and family?
You seem to have a very strange, non-standard definition of murder here.
Choosing not to actively prolong someone else's life is different than choosing to intentionally end a life. Your hypothetical situation here would not be murder.
Wait, did he already fall, or am I cutting it to cause him to fall? Your scenario here is very confusing. The specifics of the scenario drastically change whether or not it would be murder.
I fully support letting doctors give him the best morphine available to numb the pain until his death. But still no murder required.
Not choosing to force someone to continue living != murder. This really isn't all that complicated. Your definitions of murder are, frankly put, real fuckin' weird.
Two people I heard from in person, off the internet:
Having a baby with Down's syndrome is probably fine, and it's a sin to kill it. But there are situations that medical science allowed and which it perpetuates, which are basically black holes of suffering, and which society should not subsidize.
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Almost none of your examples actually work. Most of them get intentionality the wrong way 'round. There is obviously a huge conceptual chasm between an affirmative requirement to take extreme measures to save a life and a far more minimal requirement that one not murder. Perhaps you're just confused about what 'murder' is? Or maybe about what "in order to live" means?
This is the only one that actually gets there. It's actually my favorite example. You can dial it up/down very well to push at people's intuitions. On one extreme is where you're actually going to die if you don't cut the rope. You can dial this down to just some risk of dying. You can dial it down further to just some risk of harm (maybe it's cutting off circulation to your foot, and you might lose your foot.... or maybe it's just threatening to give you rope burn; are you justified in cutting the rope then?). This is a good example that poses some tough questions, but yeah, almost none of your other examples work at all.
The burns example where your buddy is in horrible pain and bound to die soon is another one that works. You can play with it by having him be actively begging for death or just screaming wordlessly.
It’s also not clear to me that action vs inaction is a super bright line. I would certainly consider someone a murderer who stared down passively as someone else slowly lost their grip on the top of a cliff when the watcher could have reached down to save them at any point.
It doesn't meet the criteria stated above:
That may not be the only category in which some folks think something is acceptable, but it is the criteria stated that I'm comparing to for purposes of this sub-thread.
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Oh? But what if the cliff is unstable and the potential rescuer is maybe not strong enough to lift the other person? Say, a 100 pound woman and a 300 pound man hanging off the cliff?
Or even if the situation is reversed, but the man has a fear of heights. And so on. Inaction as murder or even hostile intent is a hard sell.
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