A moral dilemma: Do the ends justify the means in extreme situations?

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The question we're asked this week brings up a very deep ethical, moral, and cultural question.

And it's about making the decision to sacrifice a few people to give a better life to millions. And this contrasts an interesting moral and ethical decision.

Because if you kill a few people so that the rest of the millions can live well, is the life of those few you killed worth less than the rest of the other people?

I think all lives have the same weight.

We are all living beings, we are human beings, we have the same value, whether we are poor or rich, because we all live on the same planet.

And we shouldn't have more or less importance than each other. So here we have an interesting ethical and cultural conflict.

Because according to some religions or some cultures, life must be preserved. It doesn't matter more if another person lives in Africa than if another lives in South America. We are all equal, we should all live.

Now, if it's an extreme situation, where of course we face a post-apocalyptic future, in which if we have, for example, a virus that is spreading and we need to kill those people, who are also human beings, but who are contaminated with the virus and that implies the survival of the planet, then we would have to eliminate the carriers of the virus for the good of the rest of humanity.

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Because we would even put our own lives at risk, our survival.

If, for example, they asked me in a situation like that, right now if I would sacrifice the lives of some people, I wouldn't.

But it's simply because I know that the destiny of this planet, right now, on this day of the year 2024, November 1st, our destiny of the planet is counted, it's marked.

The sun in thousands of years is going to consume this planet. That is, we are all going to die sooner or later. For the moment, they have not found the technology that allows us to save ourselves from that situation.

So if right now, today, they tell me that there is a pandemic, that there is something that is going to save a few people, I think that right now it would be quite cruel and I would not save those people.

I don't think I would do it honestly. This to be clearer indicates that I would sacrifice the lives of those people so that those of us who are alive right now can have greater life expectancy.

And logically I know that we are all going to die from this solar radiation that is going to happen.

But what if these people who are left alive, because I sacrificed a few lives, manage to find the solution to prevent the sun's radiation from saving us.

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Then we would have an option, we would have like a hope of life.

So it's a complicated situation.

Apart from that, well, there is another point of view.

What if we can't know what decision we're going to make if we're not under that enormous pressure? We would have to be put under that pressure and in that scenario to be able to evaluate our life and the lives of everyone else and how we feel and see how we are going to react in that situation to make that very important decision.

So it is very difficult to say or rather very easy to say that one is going to do this or that because we are not in this situation right now.

We are only in a hypothetical situation commenting on it in a blog and writing comments in a blog.

But it is very different the attitude that we would probably take if we were really subjected to this situation.

Because one thing is to write it down and think about it here and another thing is very different, being really subjected to such a difficult and complicated situation.