Human life should be preserved as much as possible

I will go ahead and show how each example is either, not a part of reality or actually goes with my arguement better. "Imagine that a ship has sunk, and that a single lifeboat was launched prior to the sinking. In this lifeboat are 50 people. They have no information about when (or if) rescue will arrive. There is room for 10 more people in the lifeboat, but taking more will exceed the safety margins of the boat design and incur an unquantifiable risk of swamping." The laws of physics that apply in this situation are buoyancy and area. The life boat is not limited to 50 people by the laws of nature. It has a limit to how many pounds of weight it can hold, buoyancy [1]. And how many square feet of people it can hold, area. CON has said that there is room for 10 more people, so we can assume that there area for the people. And a single individual can look at the water line on the side of the boat to see if the boat can hold more weight. If the side of the boat is only an inch above the water, one would KNOW that the boat cannot hold more weight. If the side of the boat is a foot or two above the water, one would KNOW that the boat could hold some more weight and allow more people in. "If you are a woman with a child whose husband displays all the traits of a spouse killer, there is no way to reach a standard of almost absolute knowledge that he will try to kill you. Even though you know that if you leave him that is the time he is most likely to kill you, even though you know there is a trend towards murder-suicides in such cases which include the children, even though you know that if you make it out "half of the homicides of female spouses and partners were committed by men after separation from batterers", you still can't approach absolute knowledge." Your two options in these cases are not "stay and die" or "kill your husband." Infact, just about every source on what to do about domestic violence says to leave to a place where they can't get you and file charges and get a restraining order (1)(2). You can even get a new social security number to help protect yourself (3). That being said, that safest thing to do is to leave. If you choose to defend yourself, your only legal protection is if you kill in self defense during an actual attack, which poses more risks as in the heat of the moment, he may end up getting the gun. If you kill him 4 days after he hits you, then you can very likely go to jail. "Consider the history of the German invasion of Poland in 1939 [6]. Hitler's strategy was to make peace with Britain and France after capturing Poland. This failed as Britain was willing to declare war and France didn't have to act alone. However, if were are to look at this from the standpoint of our competing standards, Britain and France could only have done so under a reasonable belief standard, not a almost absolute knowledge standard." In war, the number of lives that could be lost can never be truely measured. How many lives would be lost if the Allies didn't enter the war could not be known, and how many lives would be lost if the Allies did enter the war could not be known. However, what could be done is to look at two options, go to war and not go to war. And try to find the cost of lives. If option A is go to war, and we know that it will cost X +/- A lives, and option B is don't go to war, and we know that it will cost Y +/- B lives. We can then choose the option that best preserves human life. So for example if going to war would cost 100,000 - 5,000,000 lives, and not going would cost 10,000,000 - 20,000,000, then we know that going will save more then not going, even if we don't know the exact numbers. But these would all be done before going and so they can never be accurate. So rather then applying this to the entire war effort, it should be applied to individual cases within the war, like should we try to take this town? Or should we bomb this factory? Or should we slow down our push to allow troops to rest and get resupplied? And even then, we don't know how many troops are going to fall to take a town, but we can still apply the weighing 2 options so that we can KNOW which option WILL cost more human lives. (1) http://www.soundvision.com... (2) http://lesbianlife.about.com... (3) http://www.socialsecurity.gov...