Quote:
Originally Posted by masque de Z
The day you decide a person has no right to fight to regain their health in the name of plausibly (but not 100% securely) saving more down the road is the day you declare your society is weak and not worth saving, unprepared to fight and win while declaring its allegiance to the one most important core value of western civilization, the faith in the power of the individual human spirit.
Even if you knew you would contain the situation the future is not written but your actions will be irreversible.
You most certainly can find an island to sacrifice and move there thousands instead and feed them in isolation. It is a better alternative.
If you want to play a utility theory game you better realize which exactly is the greatest utility and maybe it is not the most people but something else that makes living important and worthy.
Brave people die only once. Cowards die every day. We are not cowards. We will stick around and fight and fail and then come back and make 2020 a great year!
Obviously with coronavirus this would never happen, the mortality rate is no where near required. With a 100% fatality virus that was as infectious as the coronavirus, moving the people to an island would be ... catastrophic. There is no way you could handle it without spreading the disease. You couldn't even build a wall around them without spreading it. Maybe if this arises there is nothing you can do and the world ends for humans.
If in my city arises a virus that has an infection rate of 1.5, 2 weeks of non-symptoms while being contagious, and a mortality rate of 1.0, I would want my city to get nuked. Either I die from the nuke or I die from the virus, the only difference is that with the nuke other people get to live.
Whats the alternative? They build a wall around us or isolate us on and island and we die from the virus? We resort to cannibalism when the food runs out? There is a breakdown of law and order and unheard of atrocities are committed without any means of stopping them? And all this just so that someone doesn't have to make a hard decision? Seems worse to me.