That only applies if you’re defending people FROM the people you’re killing.
But killing INNOCENT people, to save other innocent people, even if it’s more, is still an evil act. It’s reducing morality to simple math, which is actually removing morality from the equation.
It’s called Pragmatic Villainy.
Pragmatic heroism*.
It’s not. Sorry, you’re straight up wrong. And I don’t know if you’re roleplaying or what, but if you actually believe what you are saying, you are a bad, and potentially even dangerous person.
Killing one innocent to save ten other innocents is morally just.
It’s simple math.
Take Avengers Infinity War. If you think Cap refusing to let Vision kill himself, to prevent Thanos from getting the Mind Stone was morally just, you’re wrong, lol. Because of Cap’s “we don’t trade lives” trillions died.
Morality is not math.
Look at it how you will.
You might see it as killing an innocent.
I see it as saving lives.
If all Undead can no longer feel any positive emotions then that makes Sylvanas even more damnable for raising more Undead when she knows exactly what it will do to them.
As a person with severe depression, I believe I understand some aspect of the Forsaken having muted positive emotions. If one considers pity positive, any way. I am more prone to nihilism than pessimism nowadays, but, within the setting, the High Elf Sylvanas does not exist any more, so at best I see pity for her to be wasted.
All that exists now is the Undead Sylvanas. For which I have no pity for. The two do not go together.
Whatever fondness people find for the Undead Sylvanas due to attributes from the High Elf Sylvanas is what I find to be strange.
You can still be damned even after saving lives, or intending to. Up to the Arbiter to decide in this setting.
Oh, I’m not defending Sylvanas at all. I was merely taking issue with your statement that not all undead’s souls were altered by them becoming undead. Even though that’s specifically stated to be the case. And other than Calia, who isn’t a normal undead, there are no examples of there being any exceptions in the lore.
It’s also not impossible for them to feel positive emotions. Just far more difficult.
Look, I know you liked this post. If you’re going to make a claim and ask me to present a citation, you should post your reference as well. I’m not going to take it as truth that anything is stated to be the case just because you state that it’s stated to be the case.
Though Carmageddon is or was an English teacher, could use a lesson from Deathisfinal in making citations.
That’s fair but…I don’t feel like looking it up. So I guess you beat me this time!
You are on a small boat cruise leaving a remote island getaway. On the way back you are shipwrecked. You end up back on the isolated island with 2 other survivors. You know another boat is scheduled to dock in 5 days. Before that time no other boats will be going past in these waters. None of you can survive 5 days without water. But you figure you could kill one other survivor and drink their blood to survive long enough.
Nobody offers to die. You yourself are too weak to kill either alone because you play WoW all day and never exercise. However you make friends with one of them and find he is an expert in close combat. The other guy is vegetarian and will interfere with anyone’s attempts to kill. Your new friend suggests killing the vegetarian guy. Do you work with your friend to kill and drink the other’s blood? Killing 1 to save 2?
You kill the man and eat him and drink his blood. After 5 days you get picked up but on the cruise back you get shipwrecked again. This time your friend is still alive, plus a fat man with a hat. Do you kill again? You two are pretty good friends by now and he looks like a fat juicy meal. You can keep the guy’s hat to protect you from the sun as a bonus. Next boat is in 5 days.
This time it’s a woman that picks you up. You get shipwrecked again with your good friend and her. There are no more boats at all so you are screwed. You end up hitting it off with the girl, so at least you won’t die a virgin. Your friend gets hungry and wants to eat her anyway but you manage to fight him off together.
After having sex she confesses she actually called for help with a hidden radio but was keeping secret. The mainland people you get in touch with are very helpful. They warn you though that there are known to be serial killer cannibals on these islands that sometimes stowaway on boats.
Nice story, I liked it. 
But a few questions:
1: How did the fact that there was cannibials about get be so widely known?
2: How is it that we keep getting shipwrecked? Is it awful luck? Terrible navigators? Dangerous waters?
3: How did I defeat my friend if I don’t exercise, and just play WoW all day, and my friend is an expert in close quarter combat?
There is probably a better version of this somewhere. Where if you don’t kill at the start you find out your "friend’ has a hidden radio himself or something, but I got tired after an hour of trying to construct it lol.
Here’s the issue with that example.
Thanos was already doing his thing with or without the Infinity Stones.
So basically the tradeoff was that if they’d denied him a stone, Thanos with five stones at the head of the universe’s largest army would have continued systematically, painfully, horrifically eradicating 50% of life across countless planets anyway, in all likelihood starting with Earth for denying him his one-shot cure-all to the perceived problem he was trying to solve.
See, the problem with making the pragmatic sacrifice of others’ lives is that you have to delude yourself into thinking you’re absolutely certain doing so will provide the desired payoff.
Except you can’t be certain of that. The only certainty you can have is that you killed those innocent people. Everything else is just hopeful speculation.
It’s why Arthas, Illidan and Sargeras are basically ego-driven narcissists for whom the “hard choice” and the “ultimate sacrifice” became their only default response to anything and everything. All three did terrible things thinking that because they thought of it, then clearly it must be the only way.
That’s the beauty of morality. There’s no hard and fast system. And they all have some flaws. Like, flat consequentialism like Jawah seems to like can be used to have a society where people just have their organs harvested by force. Sounds pretty gruesome to me.
Or listening to objective morality people who want to press their magic morals on you from the aether.
I could marry you!
You put it way better then I have every time i tried to point out the same thing with the Stratholm incident.
Arthas NEVER lost his free will. Sure he was being manipulated up the yin-yang, but that was someone merely exploiting the faults that everyone else had either missed or underestimated in Arthas’ own personlity.
Every act that he did up to the moment he eliminated Ner’zhul from his psyche was still one of his own choice. The razing of Stratholme was before he took up the sword. The patricide of his own father was Arthas acting out by his usual method… lashing out.
Arthas was a sociopath from the get-go. The main difference is that in his early life, he actually thought he wasn’t. His killing of his father is his final rejection of the constraints on his sociopathy.
It is to the consequentialists! I’m being literal: philosophers have long decried various systems of virtues ethics as being hopelessly culturally specific, so both main forms of philosophical ethics try to make morality universal. Deontology relies on logical inferences that are thought to be universal (c.f. categorical imperative), and consequentialists rely upon literal math: what is good is whatever produces the best outcome for the largest number of people.
A key difference is that motives are everything to deontologists, and more or less irrelevant to consequentialists (and yes, I am aware that I am massively oversimplifying).
Long story short: to one major branch of ethics, morality is nothing but math.
Thanks, Chidi.
I definitely take that as a compliment.