Four Fingers

A doctor saves a terminally ill boy. He doesn't ask for money. He doesn't ask for fame. He does it because he believes in one holy ideal - Humanitarianism. In the background, classic music from the 17th century is playing. The mother quietly thanks the doctor, as tears fill her eyes. The boy's 6-year-old sister hands the doctor a basket of red apples.

This doctor, this great person, wishes the best for the family and finally leaves the apartement. Outside, it's rainy. The doctor walks away, and a warm feeling spreads inside him. Saving an innocent boy from a terrible illness - nothing is more admirable than this.

Meanwhile the kid grows up. He's eighteen and he joins the army. He meets a beautiful girl, humps her passionately. Leaves the army, joins a political movement. He's thrown to prision, where he writes a book.

Camera focuses on the book's title. Extreme close-up. Look again. It's Mein Kampf.

__________________
"Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest."

Charlatan

So the moral of this story is what? Don't do work unless you can get paid? Don't do anything good because it *might* result in something bad...

What a load of hogwash.

It is important, always, to do the right thing. Humanitarianism, while difficult at times, is a good thing. It isn't a populist lie.

It is an ideal to which we should continually strive.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

Four Fingers

My point is that doing the humanitarian thing can often be stupid, and bring only death and suffering for more people.

So if I am doing something and you're telling me to stop because it's hurting people, then you're being silly.

__________________
"Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest."

WhoaitsZ

......how can i put this is a none flame way?

this first paragraph here is nothing short of pathetic.

there are indeed a lot of shit crazy evil people in our world. thankfully, we, the none haters of people of race or what have you, outnumber them.

to turn down the chance to save someone because that person may be bad when he gets older is nothing short of extreme hypocrasy. one evil isn't cancelling out the other.

the second paragraph in the quote simply makes no sense whatsoever.

........

sigh

Four Fingers

Seriously, you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear. Let's focus.


Actions can be rated. Action A is good, or action A is bad. You should do A, or you shouldn't. And there's even grays in the middle.

There are different ways to rate an action. Fundamentalist Christians, for example, check whether the action complies with Christianity. If it does, then the action is good. If it doesn't, then the action is bad.

Another way to rate an action is humanitarianism. It says, if your action hurts people then it's bad. If it promotes human welfare then it's good.

Some rating system can be shown to be bad and illogical. Here, I attempt to show that Humanitarianism is a bad system for rating actions.


Suppose there's a terrorist cell in a house. And there are four innocent kids in that house too. The group is about to blow up London with an atomic bomb. We have a plane that fires a rocket on that house. It kills the terrorists, and the kids.

Humanitarians scream: "What a horrible act! Innocent children murdered brutally!"

They rate the action as bad. Of course, knowing the future in this hypothetical case, we can conclude that the action was in fact good.

Therefore, humanitarianism rated an action wrongly. Conclusion: Humanitarianism is a bad rating system.


But, we know that humanitarianism is very appealing. People enjoy being humanitarian. People vote for humanitarian. Another conclusion: Humanitarianism is populist.


Merge two conclusions. What do you get? Humanitarianism is a big fat, populist LIE.

__________________
"Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest."

Killconey

I'm listening, I'm focusing and I'm still not following you. Humanitarianism does indeed value human life over all, but the decision to kill the terrorists would be accepted as a last resort because it would ultimately save the most people.

Even if humanitarianism did denounce the bombing of the terrorists as being hasty and wrong, that still does not devalue the entire system. No system of human judgement is flawless.

The Hitler example also does not disprove humanitarianism because the doctor is not responsible for the actions of his patient. Human beings can often be random and unpredictable and its unfair to assume that one person can judge the heart and intent of another, especially when one of them is extremely young. A lot can happen in a few years.

Humanitarianism is a system of ideals and while they might not ever be realized, the striving for an ideal improves the world around us. Just because an ideal can't be realized in a certain situation does not reduce the value of the ideal.

__________________
Look out for numbers two and up and they'll look out for you.

filtherton

Humanitarianism or no, I think most people would agree that the lives of four children are worth less than the lives of the people of London.

If the authorities know that the terrorist are going to blow up London, they kill everyone in the house. If the authorities don't know about the bomb they negotiate. What's your point? Is this some sort of way-late Minority Report plug?

Using the same method to rate actions all the time is bound to get you into trouble, but that's no reason to write off a whole way of thinking.

If we really wanted to end human suffering, we'd introduce an extinction gene into the human race that if left untested would eventually wipe us out. That way no future hitler would slip through the cracks and no bomb wielding terrorist would kidnap children.

Loki

Originally i was going to post a huge long winded answer to this, but, well, i didnt.


But, just to use your initial example, Hitler did kill off millions of people, but was indirectly responsible for the nuclear age (the single greatest human technological achievement to date), for rocket technology, and many other technological innovations. The ramifications of world war II can be seen in so many millions of things today, that I can honestly say that the Axis (Hitler + Japan, mainly) drastically reshaped the world, for better and worse.

If i was the doctor there, and if i knew every single thing that hitler would ever do, and i had the opportunity to kill him, i would still try to save him with every resource available to me.

chavos

ah...proof by anecdote. the highest form of logic! /sarcasm

Tophat665

The law of unintended consequece, vis: "For every intended consequence you intend, there will be three that you didn't, and two will likely be bad," applies across the board, not just to people doing things out of the goodness of their hearts.

Now, given that sometimes it will backfire because of this law, altruism is, at its most cynical, a benign form of PR. Enlightened self interest and all that.

Now, if that doctor hadn't saved Hitler, how much larger would Idi Amin and Pol Pot loom in our minds? Stalin? We could have had a hot war instead of a cold one. The monsters are out there, and there's no telling when they'll get elected to run the place.

__________________
Light a man a fire, and he will be warm while it burns.
Set a man on fire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Johnny Rotten

Humanitarianism by definition only defines a positive act. It does not rank all behaviors. Your example also predisposes counteractive information unreachable by the target group at the time of the determining event. You cannot judge a person's reaction to an event by what that event unexepectedly causes.

Macheath

I don't find the premise of this thread the least bit convincing as an indictment of humanitarianism as a "populist lie". If Four Fingers gets hit by a car I should not bother to call an ambulance because he could be the next Hitler.

Anyway, instead of banging my head against a wall, I'm going to plug a movie instead:

<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290210/">Max (2002)</a>

onetime2

And what if that little boy grew up to cure cancer? Your argument is fundamentally flawed.

__________________
Strive to be more curious than ignorant.

CSflim

Make way for everyone's favourite popular mathematical statement:

A butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo, causes a tornado in California.

Chaos theory. Should this fact inspire you do run around with a flamethrower, attemping to exterminate all of the evil tornado acusing butterflies? No, of course not! Any mathematician will quickly inform you of your misunderstanding of the principle.

A butterfly will "prevent" a tornado just as often as it "causes" one. Hence killing butterflies will have precisely no effect on stopping tornados.

If you are faced with a situation of save boy who cannot pay for treatment, or leave him to rot, you can weigh up your options in statistical terms fairly easily:

The thought occurs to you "maybe I shouldn't save him, he may grow up to be a ruthless dictator"

Well how many people in the last few hundred years have actually been a ruthless dictator? A handful. How many peole have truned out to be normal members of society? A couple of billion.
Therefore the odds of this boy turning into a maniacal killer are infinitismal, so your decision to save the boy should not be impaired by this possibility.

__________________