Scenario :
You are in a village in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. You and your entire village of 16 people are hiding in some brush. Heavily armed enemy forces are marching along a path that runs near enough to your location that they are able to hear any significant noises.
Question:
Knowing that the enemy will kill everyone in your village if you are discovered, and also knowing that one of the 16 villagers is your sick infant child who currently has a very bad cough, will you smother and kill your child in order to keep it quiet, thus saving the other 15 villagers, or will you do nothing, knowing that your child will make noise, causing all of the 16 villagers to be discovered and killed?
Bonus Question:
If the child was not yours, but rather the child of another villager, would it change your decision?
6 comments:
Damn, that's the harshest one yet! Could I kill my daughter knowing that the alternative would be that she, and the rest of us, would die, anyway? Could I kill someone elses?
I suppose the answer is not mine, though I'd fully expect another of the villagers to try to smother her.
But, since noone can know for sure what the future will bring, I would not do any smothering, rather I'd hope and pray that our hiding place was good enough, the enemy had enough empathy, or God would give me the strength to fight back when we were discovered.
If they did find and kill us, at least I'd die knowing I did the right thing, instead of living with the consequences of my actions.
Damn, I guess I need to change my other answers to "I'd do nothing and hope that the train would derail before getting to those deaf maintenance people" Ugh.
Seeing how I don't have children, and never want any. This isn't that hard of a decision for me, thus as Spock says, the needs of the many out weight the needs of the few, or the one. I mean, yeah I'm sure this would be hard for any parent to make, kill a child to save the rest of the village, but if you don't kill the child, they it's dead anyways. So either way the kid will die, question is would I want to die. Likely the question would be no. Thus the kid would have to be smothered. If the parent tried to stop me, I'd have to smother him/her as well for being an idiot.
Ok, I choose neither. As a mother, I would die for my child! So this is what I would do. Knowing that the troops were coming, I would move myself away from the other and basically distract the troops as much as I could to bring the attention onto myself and away from the villagers. Yes, there is a possiblity that the troops would find the others but I would do everything that I could to bring the attention to myself!
So I choose to take myself out to save the others.
I could not kill my child to save others. I cannot imagine having the desire to live if my child was dead, especially if I killed him myself.
I would probably consider doing as g13 said - causing a distraction so the others might make it to safety.
If it was another person's child, I still don't think I could kill them.
Before I answer this one, let me point out that this happened on an episode of MASH. It was the one where Hawk-eye went crazy because the woman smothered her baby while they were all hiding on the bus. That being said, even though I have no children of my own, I could not kill a child. I would either wrap the child securely and hope that any cough would be muffled or give someone I trusted would not kill it (obviously not Wedge 'cause he'd probably throw the baby out the window to the awaiting enemy and run for cover)and make as much noise as possible somewhere else where I waited with a hole and a couple of guns and grenades...yes high explosives...
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