Your excellent comment would have been improved by instead saying “murdering 11 million in concentration camps” or better yet “beginning a war that led to over fifty million dead”.
My reference to historical events would have been slightly more complete? Referencing historical events isn’t important. I wasn’t even so much referencing the event as referencing that it always gets referenced. Hitler just happened to end up in the middle of a popular thought experiment.
Many consequentialist theories might have a special term in which it is bad (for people, to be sure) if a culture or a people is targeted and destroyed....
So? My point is that, even if you accept a given action is inherently bad, if it’s bad for anyone to do it, it may be worth while for you to do it. It only works out as Deontology if you assume that actions can only be bad if you’re the one doing them. More specific thought experiments can show that it only works if they’re only bad if you’re doing them right at this very moment.
Broadly speaking, when generalizing over consequentialism I wouldn’t focus on those murdered, but of those who died.
If it was just bad to die, no deontologist would argue that there’s anything wrong with killing one guy to keep him from killing another. I was assuming for the sake of argument. it was just murder that was bad.
My reference to historical events would have been slightly more complete? Referencing historical events isn’t important. I wasn’t even so much referencing the event as referencing that it always gets referenced. Hitler just happened to end up in the middle of a popular thought experiment.
So? My point is that, even if you accept a given action is inherently bad, if it’s bad for anyone to do it, it may be worth while for you to do it. It only works out as Deontology if you assume that actions can only be bad if you’re the one doing them. More specific thought experiments can show that it only works if they’re only bad if you’re doing them right at this very moment.
If it was just bad to die, no deontologist would argue that there’s anything wrong with killing one guy to keep him from killing another. I was assuming for the sake of argument. it was just murder that was bad.