[brc]

Unfortunately history tells us that the person who promises something for nothing to the people who want more will always get traction. It is very difficult for people to accept the reality of the world and many people spend hours creating fantasies about how, if they were in control, they could 'fix things' which is just code for controlling everyone else and arranging things the way they like it, and phooey to whatever anyone else wants.

You can't herd invididuals, as anyone who has tried to round up a group of cats knows. You either accept that individuals have the right to be individuals or you have to force people submit to your plans and forego their individual choices. Too many people come out of education nowadays thinking they could organise society, if just given a chance. But the truth is that society is a loose collection of individuals, and by nature can only be convinced, not coerced. You either believe in the fundamental human right to choose your own destiny, or you don't - there are no half measures.

[Jach]

I mostly agree with your point, but I want to ask a question: if you had the power to kill about 50,000 people of your choice, at the times you wanted, without any repercussions on you personally, do you think you could use this power to effect a much better world than we currently live in? Major choices that have huge consequences are increasingly being made by individuals, major choices that affect a lot of people for the better or worse. Remember Petrov Day.

[brc]

>if you had the power to kill about 50,000 people of your choice, at the times you wanted

What kind of question is that?

No, I wouldn't want to harm anyone. You definitively can't make things better by killing people. You can make things better by letting people get to work and build their lives and families in peace.

Kill anyone? I'm aghast at the way Gaddafi was treated, even though I thought he was an evil despot.

[Jach]

I ask it in the way those annoying moral dichotomy type of questions are asked. The goal is to see what you would actually do or believe, not to get your opinion why the situation would never happen or why the situation is Forbidden. I agree with you completely on the notion that killing people is wrong, I find it sick how he was killed and how his body was treated, however I recognize that, in the following toy scenario, killing is the optimal choice from the set of available choices {kill, do nothing}: an Oracle reveals to you that if you don't kill Mr. Bob within the next five minutes, 5 billion people are going to die; do you kill him?

Even Gandhi recognized the right outcome here, but I agree with him that in most real cases the set of choices usually contains something else, such as maiming or more generally "disabling" to include relatively harmless things like tackling. (Hence I still criticize soldiers who shoot-to-kill brainwashed and/or insane kids coming at them with a machete for not shooting them in the knees or somewhere easier to hit but less likely to kill.)

My original question is dependent on you believing that there exists some real situation where killing one or more people makes the world better, the classic (sorry to Godwin the topic) being to kill Hitler to save who knows how many lives (regardless of if the war still happened). Since you've said you don't believe that, I guess I got what I really wanted to know. I should have just framed it that way to begin with. I agree with you that too many people falsely believe they could fix things, I don't agree with you that a single person couldn't fix things given the right opportunities such as being able to kill the most damaging 50k people.

[tkahn6]

Sounds like the plot of Death Note.