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If you could painlessly kill half the world's population while also rewriting any memories and traces of the past so that they never existed, would you consider

If you could painlessly kill half the world's population while also rewriting any memories and traces of the past so that they never existed, would you consider this a morally neutral action?

praptak 6y ago
No, but I don't think it carries to not letting them be born. My stance on killing being wrong is that it destroys the freedom of an existing person to decide whether they want to continue to experience life.
teekert 6y ago
I never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations. How useless. Second, even though I don't think limiting population growth is a solution, but science is, Thanos should have calculated what the size of minimal gene pool for survival of a population was and went for that, much lower number that would have given him more bang for his (stupid) buck. In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Edit, perhaps this response is more towards the general sentiment in this thread, not op.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations Thanos’s reasoning makes even less sense when you consider he removed 50% of all life; removing half the fish and half the birds at the same time as removing half the people leaves you no better off even immediately post-snap
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    Also if Thanos had paid more attention in Graph theory class, he might have been able to do a better job of minimizing grief than just randomly killing half the vertices. He probably could have found sub graphs that were not very connected to other parts and eliminated them completely.
    - shirleyquirk 6y ago
      DeathStar considered more moral than Thanos
    - manicdee 6y ago
      To accomplish his stated goal in the MCU (as opposed to the goal of impressing his girlfriend), he should have gone for maximum grief, along with preserving those islands of isolation since those islands are more likely to be the cultures that don’t engage in the fantasy of unlimited exponential growth.
  - hoseja 6y ago
    Well in the comics he was supposedly just trying to impress Death, a much more reasonable motivation.
- comex 6y ago
  > In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Personally, I'm not on the "the world needs fewer people" bandwagon either. While I'm not an expert, I've heard that the world population is expected to level off around 2100 at around 10.9 billion, not that much higher than the current 7.8 billion. So we will never get to some Malthusian point where there isn't enough food to go around. Meanwhile, at a small scale, adding one person does marginally increase the cost of feeding everyone and marginally increase pollution, but that person will also contribute to society and the economy. When humanity someday goes to space, perhaps the population will start growing again, but if so, it will be precisely because there will be more resources for them. In other words, the effect on society of having kids seems to be pretty neutral in practice. Given that, I have no reason to oppose your desire to spread your genes, assuming that's what you meant. Personally, I don't care whether the ones living among the stars have my genes or somebody else's, but that's just me. I do think it would be nice to maximize the chance of humanity as a whole someday living among the stars, but increasing the population would not necessarily help with that.
- solveit 6y ago
  > I never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. This is a common thread in discussions of overpopulation. One particularly egregious example I've seen is where people object to immortality[1] based on overpopulation concerns. As in this case, killing literally everyone (after they reproduce) only gives you a couple of generations of breathing room. Exponential growth is really really unintuitive. [1] I didn't say it was a particularly realistic discussion
- manicdee 6y ago
  Just remember that rabbits kill themselves through starvation long before they invent boats to get to the next island full of resources to consume. Controlling population growth is a far preferable option to mass murder either by actively killing people Thanos-style, or passively killing people Malthus-denier style.
dmingod666 6y ago
If we started with the people who wanted to do this, we'll end up killing a lot less people overall.. :D
DubiousPusher 6y ago
No because this take assumes the crappy neural net in your head that creates grossly inaccurate models from which you draw conclusions is giving you something like a viable perspective on reality under which such a drastic action makes sense. In other words, it disregards neuropsychological humility.
comex 6y ago
I should say my view is closer to averagism when questions of utility start getting involved. But I believe utility is just one moral precept among others. Murder is disallowed no matter how much it might increase others' utility. And murder is murder regardless of pain, memories, or traces. On the other hand, choosing to have fewer or no children is easily justified. So is pursuing outcomes, such as education, that could cause people to choose to have fewer children on average.

If you could painlessly kill half the world's population while also rewriting any memories and traces of the past so that they never existed, would you consider this a morally neutral action?

praptak 6y ago

No, but I don't think it carries to not letting them be born. My stance on killing being wrong is that it destroys the freedom of an existing person to decide whether they want to continue to experience life.

teekert 6y ago

I never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations. How useless. Second, even though I don't think limiting population growth is a solution, but science is, Thanos should have calculated what the size of minimal gene pool for survival of a population was and went for that, much lower number that would have given him more bang for his (stupid) buck. In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Edit, perhaps this response is more towards the general sentiment in this thread, not op.

goatinaboat 6y ago
never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. Killing 50% has you back where your started in 1-2 generations Thanos’s reasoning makes even less sense when you consider he removed 50% of all life; removing half the fish and half the birds at the same time as removing half the people leaves you no better off even immediately post-snap
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  Also if Thanos had paid more attention in Graph theory class, he might have been able to do a better job of minimizing grief than just randomly killing half the vertices. He probably could have found sub graphs that were not very connected to other parts and eliminated them completely.
  - shirleyquirk 6y ago
    DeathStar considered more moral than Thanos
  - manicdee 6y ago
    To accomplish his stated goal in the MCU (as opposed to the goal of impressing his girlfriend), he should have gone for maximum grief, along with preserving those islands of isolation since those islands are more likely to be the cultures that don’t engage in the fantasy of unlimited exponential growth.
- hoseja 6y ago
  Well in the comics he was supposedly just trying to impress Death, a much more reasonable motivation.
comex 6y ago
> In any case, I resent the idea that we should stop or limit procreation. All you others can do that, but my of spring will live among the stars and I will maximize my chances of it getting there. And don't even get started on selective procreation, it has been tried. Personally, I'm not on the "the world needs fewer people" bandwagon either. While I'm not an expert, I've heard that the world population is expected to level off around 2100 at around 10.9 billion, not that much higher than the current 7.8 billion. So we will never get to some Malthusian point where there isn't enough food to go around. Meanwhile, at a small scale, adding one person does marginally increase the cost of feeding everyone and marginally increase pollution, but that person will also contribute to society and the economy. When humanity someday goes to space, perhaps the population will start growing again, but if so, it will be precisely because there will be more resources for them. In other words, the effect on society of having kids seems to be pretty neutral in practice. Given that, I have no reason to oppose your desire to spread your genes, assuming that's what you meant. Personally, I don't care whether the ones living among the stars have my genes or somebody else's, but that's just me. I do think it would be nice to maximize the chance of humanity as a whole someday living among the stars, but increasing the population would not necessarily help with that.
solveit 6y ago
> I never understood that Thanos reasoning, clearly he underestimates exponential growth. This is a common thread in discussions of overpopulation. One particularly egregious example I've seen is where people object to immortality[1] based on overpopulation concerns. As in this case, killing literally everyone (after they reproduce) only gives you a couple of generations of breathing room. Exponential growth is really really unintuitive. [1] I didn't say it was a particularly realistic discussion
manicdee 6y ago
Just remember that rabbits kill themselves through starvation long before they invent boats to get to the next island full of resources to consume. Controlling population growth is a far preferable option to mass murder either by actively killing people Thanos-style, or passively killing people Malthus-denier style.

dmingod666 6y ago

If we started with the people who wanted to do this, we'll end up killing a lot less people overall.. :D

DubiousPusher 6y ago

No because this take assumes the crappy neural net in your head that creates grossly inaccurate models from which you draw conclusions is giving you something like a viable perspective on reality under which such a drastic action makes sense. In other words, it disregards neuropsychological humility.

comex 6y ago

I should say my view is closer to averagism when questions of utility start getting involved. But I believe utility is just one moral precept among others. Murder is disallowed no matter how much it might increase others' utility. And murder is murder regardless of pain, memories, or traces. On the other hand, choosing to have fewer or no children is easily justified. So is pursuing outcomes, such as education, that could cause people to choose to have fewer children on average.