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I see no circumstances under which the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.
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?
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.
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.
That’s not how thought experiments work. You can’t resolve the trolly problem by just saying, “well what if there is a third track with no one on it! Ha!”
None of those situational tweaks apply in the scenario I proposed. The watcher can trivially save the dangler. They are not afraid of heights, and they are plenty strong enough. It costs them basically nothing to save the dangler. If you want to argue that there is still some risk, we can even make them tied into an anchor point by a climbing harness so it’s completely safe. To me that’s murder.
Even if I accept your argument that a 100% safe rescuer murders by idleness, it only applies theoretically. 99.99% of the time, it can't be proved in a court in the climbing example. What if the rescuer has phobia or some other type of mental issues that paralyzes them with inaction? Without supernatural knowledge of the rescuer's state of mind and intent of action, proving murder by neglect is not possible.
That doesn’t seem particularly relevant. It’s never possible to prove murder with 100% certainty, especially if you are admitting absurd mental states that are totally out of character for the murder. You could say the same thing about sudden hallucinations making murder with a gun actually manslaughter.
If a man walks out on the street with a knife to his own throat and talks about killing himself, are nearby people obligated to stop him? Assuming the man appears weak and otherwise incapable of harming anyone else except himself. In your argument everyone who stands by idly with the capacity to stop him is a murderer.
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