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> The government lined up 50 random people and executed them, to appease a foreign government that was holding 500x people captive. We're talking houses vs houses, not people vs people, but how is the morality different? Scape goat. Since it is property, the engineers probably assumed they'd be sued, and I bet they knew exactly what they were doing, and it was still cheaper than the alternative. I feel that the central thesis of your comment that the government is this faceless entity that has decided through force to violate lives and is thereby reprehensible to be something that's counter to the facts of the matter and the case at hand. From the article, it quickly becomes clear that they were trying to avoid catastrophic failure by diverting water to a historic food plain; > “If we don’t begin releasing now, the volume of uncontrolled water around the dams will be higher,” Colonel Lars Zetterstrom, the Corps’ Galveston district commander, was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be better to release the water through the gates directly into Buffalo Bayou.” The danger was that the water would flow uncontrolled into homes located upstream from the reservoir, crest the reservoir walls downstream, or crack a section of the Barker dam that was under repair. Had either dam failed, the Houston Chronicle later wrote, West Houston would have been left with “a week of corpses by the mile.” In one cases, the failure would have been sudden and would have killed an unforeseeably large number of people. In another, they could act to preserve lives, but damage property that can be later rebuilt. They chose the latter, and I believe this was the most moral and correct response to the situation at hand. Why aren't these people heroes for making this call? The Government in this case acted exactly as it should; as an entity that is meant to be representative of and beholden to its citizens and chose an action that preserved the lives of citizens over arbitrary property value that can be repaid through other means. There is no version of this scenario that plays out well for anyone at all, but the fact that they minimized harm while reducing the risk of catastrophic failure shows that the system does work as intended. After all, homes can be rebuilt, but as far as I can tell, people can't be brought back from the dead. |