Agreed that bullets can take life in morally justifiable ways.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to, but I’m pretty sure it’s something I didn’t say.
Your original comment implied an analogy between disassembling the team implementing TheChineseDave on the one hand, and a bullet in your brain. I replied that the implicit analogy fails, because disassembling the team implementing TheChineseDave frees up a bunch of people to live their lives, whereas a bullet in your brain does not do so.
What you seem to be saying is that yes, that’s true, but the analogy doesn’t fail because that difference between the two systems isn’t relevant to whatever point it is you were trying to make in the original comment.
Which may well be true… I’m not quite sure what point you were making, since you left that implicit as well.
My point was, “I don’t see any way in which it is not ‘killing’, and I think turning the question around makes this clearer.” A bullet in my brain doesn’t destroy most of my constituent parts (all of my constituent atoms are preserved, nearly all of my constituent molecules and cells are preserved), but destroys the organization. Destroying that organization is taking a life, whether the organization is made up of cells or people or bits, and I expect it to be morally relevant outside extremely unusual circumstances (making a backup and then immediately destroying it without any intervening experience is something I would have a hard time seeing as relevant, but I could perhaps be convinced).
The fact of the act of killing is what I was saying was preserved. I was not trying to make any claim about the total moral picture, which necessarily includes details not specified in the original framework. If the people were prisoners, then I agree that it’s not murder. If the people were employees, that’s an entirely different matter. If enthusiasts (maybe a group meets every other Tuesday to simulate TheChineseDave for a couple hours), it’s something else again. Any of these could reasonably be matched by a parallel construction in the bullet case; in particular, the prisoner case seems intuitive—we will kill someone who is holding others prisoner (if there is no other option) and not call it murder.
Agreed that bullets can take life in morally justifiable ways.
I’m not sure what you’re responding to, but I’m pretty sure it’s something I didn’t say.
Your original comment implied an analogy between disassembling the team implementing TheChineseDave on the one hand, and a bullet in your brain. I replied that the implicit analogy fails, because disassembling the team implementing TheChineseDave frees up a bunch of people to live their lives, whereas a bullet in your brain does not do so.
What you seem to be saying is that yes, that’s true, but the analogy doesn’t fail because that difference between the two systems isn’t relevant to whatever point it is you were trying to make in the original comment.
Which may well be true… I’m not quite sure what point you were making, since you left that implicit as well.
My point was, “I don’t see any way in which it is not ‘killing’, and I think turning the question around makes this clearer.” A bullet in my brain doesn’t destroy most of my constituent parts (all of my constituent atoms are preserved, nearly all of my constituent molecules and cells are preserved), but destroys the organization. Destroying that organization is taking a life, whether the organization is made up of cells or people or bits, and I expect it to be morally relevant outside extremely unusual circumstances (making a backup and then immediately destroying it without any intervening experience is something I would have a hard time seeing as relevant, but I could perhaps be convinced).
The fact of the act of killing is what I was saying was preserved. I was not trying to make any claim about the total moral picture, which necessarily includes details not specified in the original framework. If the people were prisoners, then I agree that it’s not murder. If the people were employees, that’s an entirely different matter. If enthusiasts (maybe a group meets every other Tuesday to simulate TheChineseDave for a couple hours), it’s something else again. Any of these could reasonably be matched by a parallel construction in the bullet case; in particular, the prisoner case seems intuitive—we will kill someone who is holding others prisoner (if there is no other option) and not call it murder.
Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
I’m glad it did, in fact, clarify!