[onelifecrisis]

Originally Posted by Aramike

Your intent was to allow a murder to occur because you are unable to reconcile the ethical difference between "murder" and "killing".

<snip>

Umm, no, this is not "petty" semantics. The word "murder" and the word "killing" mean very different things, and can have a great bearing upon the ethics and morality of a given scenario.

If you don't want your points to be contested due to what you are calling "petty semantics", please just use the proper words to express your thoughts.

I looked up "murder" and it means an unlawful killing, as opposed to "killing" which of course means any killing lawful or otherwise. So you're right in saying that I used the wrong word. However, since since the killing in question would, as you know, be legal in your country and in mine, it is self-evident that "killing" is what I meant, so pointing it out is petty. Besides, you've already stated that the law has nothing to do with ethics and so the distinction is moot anyway.

I already pointed out (in the post you quoted) that I'm happy to change my statement to use the word "killing" instead of "murder". I assume you did read all of my post before hitting the quote button, yes? In which case, after taking the nonsense out of your reply, we are left with:

Originally Posted by Aramike

Your intent was to allow a murder to occur. Therefore you have made a choice (which defines a form of proactivity) to expressely allow an evil act, and as such has assisted the completion of that act.

This gave me pause for thought, and made me realise that the point I made about duty has three possibilities rather than two, those being: the duty to try to prevent harm by any means, the duty to try to prevent harm by non-harmful means only, and the lack of any such duty.

But I digress.

"Your intent was to allow a murder to occur"

No... unless the murderer was asking for my permission? In which case it's safe to say that I would deny it. But this next part is very interesting:

"a choice defines a form of proactivity"

This is a head-bender for me, so I'll let you do the hard work for me:

Originally Posted by Aramike

your argument faces a paradox which renders it existentially invalid: if you're saving the lives in Croatia, you'd not be saving lives in Zimbabwe. Because that violates logical reasonability and would create an infinate feedback loop preventing any and all morality, it just doesn't work.

Heh, thanks.
Tis strange that you wouldn't discuss any of these things in PM, though.
By the way, do you realise that you just agreed with Letum? He wasn't saying he should go and spend his life trying to do as much good as possible. He was saying that SB's post implied that he should and was therefore nonsense.