A thought experiment: Suppose you somehow knew, with absolute certainty, that a century from now some event would destroy the Earth, wiping out all life as we know it. Suppose you somehow knew, with absolute certainty, of an action you could take that would prevent that extinction of life. Suppose, however, that the cost of that action was billions of human lives. To save the world, how many people could you justify killing?
Could you not justify killing billions to ensure that humanity and life in general survived? What moral stance, what other good, could you balance against the death of all? Indeed, the refusal to murder billions to prevent the death of all would be, in itself, the most vain and evil act in all of history.
This abstract thought experiment hinges on something that in the real world we never have: absolute certainty. There is no way in the real world that we could know with absolute certainty that killing billions now would save all life 100 years from now. Without that certainty, these kinds of kill-a-few-to-save-the-many thought experiments lose validity and don’t provide any moral guidance or insight for the real world.
However, these kinds of thought experiments do demonstrate how absolute certitude makes it easy for anyone, no matter how humane and compassionate, to calmly rationalize the deaths of billions. At the extremities of events and the associated moral choices, the ends do definitely justify the means.
As a corollary, ideas that claim to predict extreme events with great certainty create the justifications for associated extreme acts. These types of ideas turn abstract moral thought experiments into concrete realities on which people feel compelled to act.
Advocates of the concept of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) are very, very certain that a great destructive event is bearing down on the Earth. They reiterate incessantly that science has absolutely proven that this future harm will occur unless we take significant action today to head it off.
Their absolute certitude in CAGW raises the obvious question: To prevent such massive and unprecedented absolutely certain harm, how many millions of people would they be willing to kill today?
From that perspective, the pro-CAGW propaganda shock videos in which people who don’t believe in CAGW are casually and gorily murdered suddenly don’t seem so funny and edgy.
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