An interesting ethical debate about to arise on Wikipedia (or it will do when I wake up). Is a system which kills people by indifference as bad as a system which kills people deliberately? So choose:
- your economic system privileges individual choice above all else and people die by neglect, or near genocide when their lands are taken away from them by dubious economic transactions, or provocations produce revolt which justifies pacification
- You ship people off to the gulags, stage show trials and run purges with fatal consequences.
Now I was always taught that a sin of omission is as bad as a sin of commission...
Comments (1)
Dave,
This reminds me of Edwin Brock's powem,Five Ways to Kill a Man.
Giving away the punchline, as it were, after a number of more complex methods are described, the last stanza is:
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
Posted by Andrew Curry | July 23, 2010 9:12 AM
Posted on July 23, 2010 09:12