Is there an amount of human suffering of strangers to avoid which you’d consent to have your wife and child tortured to death?
The hypothetical is being posed is what to me is an unsatisfactory degree of abstraction. How about a more concrete form?
You are fighting in the covert resistance against some appallingly oppressive regime. (Goodness knows the 20th century has enough examples to choose from.) You get the news that the regime is onto you and have your wife and child hostage. What do you do?
We may grok that scenario in decidedly different ways:
Maybe it would serve the wife and child best if I were successful in my resistance to some degree, to have a better bargaining situation? Maybe if I gave myself up, the regime would lose any incentive to keep the hostages alive? At that point we’d just be navigating the intricacies of such added details. Better to stick with the intent of the actions: Personally, I’d take the course of action most likely to preserve the wife and child’s well-being, but then I probably wouldn’t have grown into a role which exposes family to the regime as high-value bargaining chips.
The hypothetical is being posed is what to me is an unsatisfactory degree of abstraction. How about a more concrete form?
You are fighting in the covert resistance against some appallingly oppressive regime. (Goodness knows the 20th century has enough examples to choose from.) You get the news that the regime is onto you and have your wife and child hostage. What do you do?
We may grok that scenario in decidedly different ways:
Maybe it would serve the wife and child best if I were successful in my resistance to some degree, to have a better bargaining situation? Maybe if I gave myself up, the regime would lose any incentive to keep the hostages alive? At that point we’d just be navigating the intricacies of such added details. Better to stick with the intent of the actions: Personally, I’d take the course of action most likely to preserve the wife and child’s well-being, but then I probably wouldn’t have grown into a role which exposes family to the regime as high-value bargaining chips.