Rslvd: It is Moraly Permisable to Kill one Innocent Person to Save the Lives of More Innocent People

My Name is Hasan Mahdi and I am a new Debater. I realzie That this is an old topic but i would like to Try against someone..Oh and everyone in TX dont copy me... "It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong." I agree to this quote by Jeremy Bentham which leads me to affirm the resolution: It is morally permissible to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people. Now I will state my definitions in order to clarify the resolution. Moral: pertaining to or relating to the conscience or moral sense or to the general principles of right conduct. Permissible: allowed or permitted Save: to rescue somebody or something More: indicate a greater number of something These definitions are from Black's Law 2nd Edition and Encarta Dictionary: English Before starting I would first like to make the resolution a little bit simpler to comprehend by implying my previously stated definitions. Here is the same resolution, but just simplified to ensure understanding. It is right and allowed to kill one innocent person in order to rescue a larger number of innocent people. Another thing I would like to say is that the negative is choosing not to take any action. By not taking any action the negative is allowing more people to die which is immoral. Now I will state my value. My value is the quality of life. Life should be and is upheld higher than any other value in a society. An ideal society will always try and preserve the most lives possible by any means necessary, and it is the action and intention of saving these people which deems the action moral. My criterion to uphold this value is utility. Utility means the greatest happiness or good for the greatest number of people. This is the philosophy used by Jeremy Bentham. In this case saving more people would give more happiness or good to the greater amount of people. In any given society one does more good when they are happy. It is to say that by allowing more people to be happy then more people are doing more good in a society. The more good being done in a society allow the society to prosper. And this generation of good people doing good things will set a follow able example to the others in it including the newer generation. To further prove my point I propose the following contentions. Contention one: Good events that occur, or positive consequences: In an ideal society, human life is held above everything else. The quest to preserve human life is one that all men have fought for ever since the man has been alive. A)More innocent people are saved. Saving innocent lives can not be deemed immoral even though the act done to save them can be argued immoral. Every action has a reaction. One must first see the outcome of the action before deeming the action immoral. A good example of this would be when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs over the military bases in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end World War Two. Yes they did target military bases and killed soldiers whom can be considered not innocent but the bomb also killed an enormous amount of Japanese citizens. Unlike the U.S., Japan was not a democracy, so the citizens did not choose to attack the U.S. This means that the citizens were innocent. So yes the U.S. did kill many innocent people but doing so they saved what could have been the death of millions. Another example is during World War II when the British general was able to interpret codes from there enemy, the Germans. The Germans were using a method of coding messages called Enigma. After interpreting an intercepted message Britain realized that the Germans were planning to bomb a city in Britain. The general, Winston Churchill, had to choices. One he could tell the city to evacuate, but then the Germans would know that the Britain had decoded their secret messages and then the Germen would do more attacks killing millions of unexpecting people while only saving a small town. The other choice was to allow the Germans to bomb the city, and then Churchill would be able to interpret future, bigger, attacks and ambush the Germans and save millions of British. Of course in both of his choices innocent lives were going to die. Here Churchill had to choose between losing a small city or losing 100's of cities. Lose either 1000 people or loose a million people. Churchill realized that the only moral way to do this was to lose the 1 town rather than the 100's of towns. Churchill saw that there would be grievances in both options but he had to allow the larger group to live in order to allow the country to survive. We should be able to do the same. If a group of strangers was brought upon you along with a psycho killer who said either you kill one of these people or I kill all of them your only choice would be to kill one person. Other wise the whole population of these people will be destroyed rather than just 1 of them. B) More rights are preserved. All people have the unalienable right to live. In both cases there will be deaths so rights will be violated. In the negative case more people are dying so more rights are being terminated, whereas in the affirmative case less people are dying thus preserving more rights. In the negative case the negative is decided not allow the larger group of people to survive thus pretty much killing them. Abraham Lincoln once said that "action and inaction are both conscious choices and are equally praiseworthy or blameworthy if their outcomes are the same." Inaction is the cause of the death of a larger group of people, thus inaction is immoral. Contention 2: Deciding the morality of something depends highly on the situation. To decide if something is moral or immoral one must first understand what is going on. If a person just killed an innocent person to rob them or hurt them then yes that would be immoral. But if some one killed an innocent person because by doing so he could save 15 or twenty innocent people, then it would be moral. The negative can argue that it is immoral to kill anyone at all but the negative should realize that it is letting MORE people die. This is the same as killing that larger amount of people. So doesn't that mean that the negative is committing many immoral acts that they themselves are calling immoral? Doesn't this make the negative hypocrites? A hypocrite is somebody who pretends to have admirable principles, beliefs, or feelings but behaves otherwise Contention 3: Society must accept the risk of killing the innocent Many things society does in the name of the general welfare result unavoidably in premature death to some innocent and blameless people. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a society being able to function otherwise. At times, whatever move is made puts lives at risk. Many things that were used and intended to save people did kill some as a tradeoff. An example of these is the airbag. The airbag was created in an effort to protect and preserve human life during an impact. Of course the airbag wasn't perfect when it first came out. Inevitably it killed a few innocent people, but because these innocent people were killed, future, safer, models of the airbag could be built; thus killing innocent people to save innocent people. It is obvious that society has accepted the airbag, despite its losses, by making it a law to have one. Also the airbag has killed innocent people but it has saved more so they didn't deem it unusable, or when related to this case, immoral. Another example of these types of things is shots or immunizations. These immunizations were created to prevent and heal illnesses but did affect a few negatively. Because these affected a few negatively these immunizations were fixed and made to save more people. This just comes to show that it is moral to kill one innocent person to save the lives of more innocent people. I am now open for CX.