oyuki

Friday, December 09, 2005

That slippery moral slope

A post of DL's over at TMH Bacon Bits cooked this round off. So blame DL and the rubes who proposed the original idea.

It seems people in the state of Israel, in order to try and circumvent the religious bans on suicide and murder, are pondering automating euthanasia practices.

I have a hard question for the tribe of Levi in regards to this. How far remove do the creating hands of humans have to be from these machines to not be committing sin? In my imperfect understanding, it could be 70x7 times removed and someone is still tainted because of their act of commission in building the tool that leads to the tool that creates another tool which begets the killing tool.

It gets worse, what about the patient who is aware and mobile when one of these automated euthanasia machines is rolled in? Don't they have a moral obligation due to their faith to resist such machinations since these acts seek their death?


The scariest thought I have on this is simple. Expert system software tied to mobile euthanasia machines that have electric wheels, a TV camera eye, and a hypodermic armed arm. Just add a voice synthesizer and program just two words in.

"Euthanize! Must Euthanize!"

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It kind of makes you wonder what Sodom and Gomorra did to incur the wrath of God that we haven't been doing for years, and then some.

AndyJ

Anna said...

Well looking at Iran, don't think the Supreme Being is going to bump us off. We are doing a good enough job as is. :(