I thought it was self-evident. Killing someone innocent for the good of others is never acceptable; people are ends in themselves. This is a general precept in most ethical systems with the notable exception of Millian Utilitarianism. To be clear, I am not making an argument against justifiable self-defense, as that is almost always accepted as a different kind of situation.
Example: we allow people to be killed for the good of others as long as their death allows the survival of more people. This is the poster's argument distilled. As such, it would be morally justifiable to kill random people for their organs, as one person contains enough organs to keep dozens of people from dying. If you need a liver, and your neighbor needs a spleen, then there would be nothing wrong about abducting the first person you see, butchering them, and taking what you need.
This argument is essentially that we should allow people to be killed, harmed, maimed because the number of people it help would outnumber the number of people harmed. They are the same argument. They both treat people as means rather than ends.
There are many nations in the world where you can be brutally killed for being gay, or any number of other things which shows up in medical records. If we include imprisonment, the number rises. The cost isn't just "some people might get embarrassed". It's a lot more like "hundreds of thousands of people will be brutally murdered by others or their state".
>Killing someone innocent for the good of others is never acceptable
You make this trade off all the time by e.g. not giving all your money to charity.
Which I've said is unacceptable. If anyone dies as a consequence of this, it's not acceptable. That's my response to that argument. Their position is "the good outweighs the bad" and mine is that "the bad is not the sort of bad that can be counter-balanced", or more clearly "no, it does not".
> You make this trade off all the time by e.g. not giving all your money to charity.
This is a completely nonsensical, borderline facetious argument. This is equivalent to saying that by sleeping at night rather than going out to help the homeless, I'm killing people. Or that standing still and not acting is killing people. To kill is a violation of an individual's inherent right to life. It is the result of an action of an agent. It is not, however, a violation to someone's inherent right to life not to prevent their death insofar as I have not caused their death. For instance, if I have a life preserver, I have not killed you by keeping it for myself, but should I have taken it away from you, then I have.
Clearly there's a difference here. The active action of releasing a medical document is the proximate cause of the harm, therefore not allowable. The first event is strictly necessary for the second.
Me not donating money to prevent someone's rights being stripped is not the proximate cause of the wrong doing, therefore not subject to ethical calculus. There is no strict necessity given this lack of causality. The action which is subject to ethical calculus is the proximal cause of the deprivation of the individual's rights. That which is strictly necessary for the consequence is all that can be reasoned about.
Right, then you are just down some bizarre philosophical rabbit hole if you truly believe that.
Under this logic policing is unacceptable, vaccine research is unacceptable, driving a car is unacceptable, etc.. They all make trade-offs between number of deaths caused vs. some benefit (sometimes lives saved).
