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BoneKracker
Veteran
Joined: 14 Mar 2006
Posts: 1271
Location: U.S.A.
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 Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2012 5:24 am Post subject: |
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That's fine, but he made an appeal to authority; he described it as a long-standing tenet of civilization. It's not: it's a long-standing Abrahamic ideal, perpetuated in Western culture by Christianity. If he's not able to offer other rational justification, then it fails logically.
We make all kinds of important decisions under uncertainty, based of a high probability that we are right. We drive cars 65 mph down the highway based on a low probability of mechanically failure, and yet people die every year in accidents caused by it. We send Cosmonauts into space based on statistically-determined engineering safety margins, and sometimes they end up in a fireball. We sentence people to long terms in prison, based on the determination that they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Those are rational decision-making processes dealing with life and liberty, and we make them all the time. This decision, with which we take even more care, is no different, except that it butts up against a Christian prohibition against killing which is deeply seeded in our cultural mores.
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BonezTheGoon
Bodhisattva
Joined: 14 Jun 2002
Posts: 1374
Location: Albuquerque, NM -- birthplace of Microsoft and Gentoo
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| Posted: Wed Feb 08, 2012 3:48 pm Post subject: |
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| energyman76b wrote: | | But hey, if we use your standards, the chance that a man is convicted and killed, than shown to be innocent and then, after the judge and his co-conspirators put to death, shown to be guilty afterall is even smaller so my model is still better than yours, where the ones murdering innocents are getting away. |
OK, look man, you have to realize who is on what sides of which issues here. I am using reason, logic, and statistics in my thinking. So when you try and apply my approach of statistics to the scenario you are applying them TOO LATE, it doesn't even make sense anymore. The time to apply that thinking and logic is BEFORE you murder the "co-conspirators" as you call them.
The only reason I suggested that hypothetical scenario was to illustrate how the model you are suggesting can continue in a feedback loop upon itself, because it is born out of emotion. The emotional response doesn't allow for the sane boundary that mistakes happen and there is no reason to expand a single mistaken death into a mass killing.
I'm truly sorry if my hypothetical scenario and what it illustrates eludes you, I did my best and if you cannot grasp the concept still I've obviously failed in my attempt to illuminate it for you. That's all the effort I have for it right now though, maybe someone can come make it more clear for you.
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