3 year old starved to death by her parents
I do not mean to offend anyone here with this, but…
There are very few things that illicit an emotional reaction from me and this is one of them. People ask if I believe in the death penalty. Truthfully, I would volunteer to put the bullets in their heads myself. These two are complete, total, and 100% evil. They deserve to die.
There are very few things that illicit an emotional reaction from me and this is one of them. People ask if I believe in the death penalty. Truthfully, I would volunteer to put the bullets in their heads myself. These two are complete, total, and 100% evil. They deserve to die.
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She also appears to be in denial in this thread, judging by her comments from two weeks ago:
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/31...
>Posted by $ khalling 2 weeks, 2 days ago
KH wrote: "terminating support is not the same as murder. if there is a child sitting at my feet and I have plenty of food and I do not feed her, and she starves to death because of this, I am not committing murder. Even if I have fed her in the past.
My duty is first and foremost to myself."
>EF's response:
If it's your child, and you intentionally withhold food from her, you most certainly are committing murder. And any jury in this country would justly find you guilty.
[NB: see Foxnews article linked above in this thread]
>KH's reply:
yes, the jury would. Many laws are wrong, so what? . . . just because I have sex, does not mean I have contracted or made a moral obligation to support someone or become their slave.
>EF's response:
Sure it does, whether you wish to call your responbility to the effects of your actions "slavery" or not is irrelevant. And this is true whether or not the effects of your actions were unintentional, because an unexpected and undesired outcome — pregnancy — was forseeable and a possible outcome. You cannot say "I have no responsibility here because the effect was undesired on my part."
That would be an upshot of pure hedonism, not rational selfishness.
If you incur a debt intentionally or because you made an error in your financial transactions somewhere but knew that debt was a *possible* outcome in the deal, you still are responsible to repay the debt. You can't stiff your creditors by telling them, "I refuse to be your slave! I own myself, so I'm walking away from this debt."
I agree with you that the contexts are brutally complicated.
BTW, if Kira had a daughter, I am not aware of it. I have not read the book in several decades, I confess, but no synopsis I found refers to that. And just to say, it was dramatic fiction. If it were me and my daughter, I would remain even in the USSR to see that she got the best life possible. Different objective people have different objective values
As you note, context must be allowed. See khalling's note after yours. It is heart-wrenching, but aid workers specifically must inure themselves to such situations. More commonly, people who work in hospitals only have so much empathy to give or they would be emotionally drained in the first hour of any day. Hospitals in particular in our generation began hiring ethicists just because the issues are so complicated and consequential.
Consider this,
1. Letting a child starve, you have food but decline to give.
2. As above but it is your own child.
3. There are ten, or a hundred, or thousands of starving children.
4. you have no food but your neighbor has, do you use force to take it to give?
If context is not allowed then answers to all situations must be the same.
Ah, now I see, you say 'An action is moral or immoral depending on your values and the context'.
Quite so.
I am having a philosophical discussion. We are looking for logical consistency. there should not be confusion over right to use force to cause someone to act on what YOU consider best action.
You might need to see a shrink.
Their position, however, leaves room for the "duty" of the sister to feed the starving man from her own body in the end of The Grapes of Wrath, and by extension an argument can be made for slavery.
In "The Poisonwood Bible," there is a catastrophic event which has a mother helping her youngest child and her disabled child swim in dangerous water. at some point the mother lets go of the disabled child telling her to go back to shore very sternly. The disabled daughter grows up thinking that at that critical moment her mother did not choose her to survive. She eventually confronts her mother about this when she is grown and successful despite the handicap. Her mother is stunned that she felt this way all those years without asking her about that awful day. The mother's reasoning and choice was based on the fact that she knew the disabled daughter had tremendous will and keen problem solving. She knew that her daughter would be determined enough to have the best chance of the three of them to fight to survive the water. It is wrong for another individual to tell you what you must do in difficult moral dilemmas. That choice is yours alone and you must live with it and its consequences while someone else telling you your moral "duty" does not bear the consequences.
This is of course in the context of not deliberately harming another.
"Obligation" is an important word in Objectivist Ethics. It is the opposite of the anti-concept "duty" and a logical follow from final causation. "Man is confronted with a great many *musts*, but all of them are conditional..." -AR, Causality vs Duty, Philosophy Who Needs It
As for khalling's opinion's, she made it quite clear, explicitly, and as I recall verbatim, that starving a child to death could be her "egoistic" choice. She provided no context.
(That would be a denial of Objectivism. However, as I pointed out, Leonard Peikoff warned that these online discussions encourage rapid response without integration or context. So, khalling may have much more to say. But so far, she has said exactly what EconomicFreedom cited from the earlier discussion of abortion.)
That said, my own brief analysis follows.
She said, "I love you, son".... and let go.
They found her body about a quarter mile away, IIRC.
No, you're not obligated to live for your child. But, some of us think the word "obligation" is neither accurate nor appropriate...
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