A dark hypothetical! Neat.

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Alright: Let's say some mad genius creates a machine. It's function is to provide unimaginable torture, both physical and psychological, to any number of people, from anywhere in the world, for as long as it takes to (very slowly, over days) kill the subject(s). Now, in which case would you judge the madman to be less moral: In one situation he hates a specific race of people, and causes the worst genocide the world has ever seen. In the other situation, all people are subjected to the device. I've asked three friends, and I've gotten three very different answers.

The error inherent in your question is that scales of immorality can be objectively compared regardless of the circumstances.

First of all, morality is a subjective, not an objective construct. What is immoral to one person may be perfectly acceptable to another. Accordingly we don't judge people according to their morality, but rather by weighing their behaviour againts objective standards.

In my conception of morality the difference between a serial murderer killing 10 people or 50 people, or a despot murdering millions is, frankly, immaterial. All of the acts are so extreme that comparison is meaningless.

Secondly, you have--by definition--exempted your subject from moral judgement. You have called him a madman. You have built into your question the presumption that the individual is subject to a mental disorder that leaves us open to conclude that he simply does not appreciate the nature and character of his actions. He may be no less culpable--that's a question for a court of competent jurisdiction--but the person who simply does not know the difference between right and wrong cannot be viewed as immoral.

I pretty much agree with visagrunt.

Out of curiosity though, in the second case is the perpetrator himself affected?

I'm sorry, I phrased that wrong. I used madman because most people would probably consider someone doing something like this insane, even if this isn't necessarily the case. The real question is to individuals: In which situation do YOU consider the creator a worse person. To Pyrite: No, the creator is not affected.

Even without the issue of sanity, there is no basis on which to compare these. Both acts are so egregious that comparison is meaningless.

I think he would be less moral if he just killed one particular group. Because in that case he is discriminating. If he killed everyone he is not discriminating.

I am assuming it is immoral to discriminate. But anyway if he kills everyone then he is insane obviously. But if he kills just a specific group his insanity is not obvious, so therefor he must be morally responsible.

Can you quantify Bad?

Can you objectively compare Bad-sub-1 to Bad-sub-2?

ruveyn

If he kills one race, it is because (in his racist mind) those people possess particular qualities he finds loathsome.
If he kills everyone, presumably it is humanity itself he detests. If that is the case, then his failure to also kill himself makes him a hypocrite.
As I can't stand hypocrisy, my opinion is that he is less moral when he kills everyone.

The situation is contrived, and either option is so herendous and egregious that they are morally indistinguishable.

The act is so egregious that whether you declare the perpetrator to be a "madman" or not- he is a madman, and thus cant be judged by any moral yardstick.



However the question would be a little less meaningless if you turned it on its head.

Make it about a sane person trying to save people,instead of about a crazy person out to kill people.

you're the captain of ship. You come upon a second ship thats sinking.

After you communicate with the captian of the sinking ship you realize that you can only rescue part of the crew in your small boat, and not all of the crew. So what do you do?

You only rescue the half of the crew who are of your own race.

And you let the half who are of another race drown.

Does that make you more moral. less moral, equally moral/immoral, to a captain who just ingnores the sinking ship and lets everyone on the sinking ship drown?

Stated that way the question is both a little less contrived, and a little more interesting.

Whether the creator is a "bad" person is irrelevant. That doesn't mean anything. His action is immoral, not his person. On the main question, I think the answer is easy. In one case, a random group of people selected from a common trait is annihilated; in the other, everyone is. I don't see how it can be better that no one survive, as opposed to most of the population, except a minority, no matter which minority or how well-defined it is.

This is a situation where loaded words like "genocide" or "race" blind us from the underlying truth (and I use the word "truth" advisedly). We come to automatically associate discrimination, especially racial discrimination, with something inherently bad that we forget the reasons why it is, and possibly become confused in our ethical conclusions.

I agree that it is a better question, but it would need some redrafting. It seems very arbitrary that people from one race can be saved, and not the other, or a mix of both. I know it doesn't really matter, in the end, but I don't think it is really satisfactory. The hypothesis should work more or less instinctively, I think.

In any case, the answer is the same: killing very many people is worst than killing fewer people

Maybe a better one:
A large asteroid is heading on the Earth. You are on a spaceship, and have a small capabity to redirect it. On its present course, it will hit just between of two equally populated cities, very near to one another, one inhabited by people of your race, one inhabited by people, and destroy both. You don't have a lot of time, so you can redirect it only by a small amount, just enough for it to destroy one of these two cities. (For a more interesting case, you could also destroy a small village near the city of the same race, but only if you redirect it. It doesn't change the result, but it is more interesting.)

Here, there is no meaningful difference between destroying one city or the other, but either choice is better than just letting both cities be destroyed.


In hypothetical cases involving absolute consequences, yes.