News A Question About Ethics

[ronin47]

Let it be understood, this is not a hypothetical scenario. This unfortunately is something that did occur. It has also been a source of contemplation for me for years.

A Holocaust survivor gives an account of how she escaped imprisonment. She and a group of other Jewish people hid in the sewers of a German city as the SS police marched in the streets overhead. There was also a mother down there with them, a woman with an infant. The woman's baby began to cry. No matter what she did, this mother could not get her baby to stop crying. She must've known that if the baby continued to cry, it was only a matter of time before the Nazis heard it and they would all be discovered. So rather than risk the lives of everyone down there, she smothered her baby to death with a blanket and let its corpse float down the sewer.

Do you believe this woman was justified in doing what she did?

 

[anthony]

Would this by any chance have anything to do with this thread: [DLMURL]http://www.ptsdforum.org/c/threads/five-year-old-to-be-charged-with-murder.17884/[/DLMURL]

 

[Kintsugi]

I have heard and debated this story at least a half dozen times in the context of my Zionist youth movement.

She made the ethically correct choice. In terms of philosophies of ethics, I don't think there's any getting around that she served the greater good and therefore her actions were ethical.

Having said that, I feel like if my baby were going to be smothered, I may lose my will to live and any kind of logical sense of saving the lives of others. Of course, I certainly was not there.

Survival stories are devastating. Particularly young men who watched their mother, sisters, younger brothers taken in the other direction at the camps, to the showers while they went to labor.

 

[Deleted member 487]

That's not a very hard call to make. One dies or they all die. One clearly should be sacrificed.
I know I'd sure hate such a decision, especially if I were the one sacrificed.

 

[Abrasky]

I guess it would depend on the person. I don't believe in making people sacrifises. When one person becomes a sacrifice, then all ethics are lost I think.

 

[Kintsugi]

When one person becomes a sacrifice, then all ethics are lost I think.

This is quite a conundrum. I agree that once one person is sacrificed, morals become muddled. But I think that in terms of ethics, sacrificing one to save many is the ethical answer. Not the moral one. Morality is, to me, a set of values, whereas ethics is a set of logics. Which ethical practices you adhere to are varied, though.

Ronin, do you mind if we post other ethical questions or real-life ethics decisions on this thread?

 

[Smorck5]

Fear can cause people to do shocking things they themselves would be horrified by, but I don't think its fair to even debate her choice since we have no idea what living in that climate of fear and hate was like.

 

[ronin47]

Would this by any chance have anything to do with this thread: [DLMURL]http://www.ptsdforum.org/c/threads/five-year-old-to-be-charged-with-murder.17884/[/DLMURL]

Nope, I haven't even read that thread.

 

[ronin47]

Ronin, do you mind if we post other ethical questions or real-life ethics decisions on this thread?

Go for it

 

[Deleted member 487]

Maze, when you are in a situation as those people faced, I don't think ethics really matters to them. Ethics of killing a baby so others may live versus the ethics of murdering an entire race just because they live.

 

[Kintsugi]

I would add that the way Nazis were known to deal with crying babies was to throw them against a wall and break their skulls. Smothering my own baby would be better than that no matter how much it hurt, I guess. Unfortunately, it would not be the first time in the history of our people to kill our own children so that others didn't. Masada. They killed all the children then themselves so when the Romans came everyone was dead.

 

[Girl3]

Goebbels, his wife, and six kids were in the bunker with Hitler and he gave them all cyanide. Even the monsters will take killing their own child in as merciful a means as they can over someone else doing it brutally - but it doesn't spare you the trauma yourself - like abortion - it sets you up for PTSD.
The TV show MASH had the very scene described - Hawkeye was in a truck with Koreans hiding in the back. The woman's baby began crying and she smothered it - except in Hawkeye's recurrent nightmare it was a chicken she was killing. Until he finally realized that it was an infant - then his nightmare was over. Ah TV.