Would I Kill a Life to Save a Life

508 Words3 Pages
Would I kill a life to save a life. Would I take a life to save another one. To this famous moral dilemma it is difficult to give a simple answer. There are circumstances, which you can read for example in novels, where you wouldn’t hesitate to take someone’s life to save hundreds of innocent children, but how many people are confronted with such a decision in their life? In the following lines, I will try to explain who has the power in our society to take those decisions, in which circumstances it is okay to take the decision yourself, and why I find it so hard to take it myself. In our society, the decision to kill somebody to save someone else, wether it might be because the life is more important or the number of lives is higher, is given to public authorities like the army, the police, the secret service or the government. It is a decision with great responsibility which probably will weight heavily on you for the rest of your life. Taking for example the attacks on september 11th, the army had the order to shoot down every plane in sight of the the White House, taking into account the civil lives who would be harmed by that kind of action. Now there are some circumstances, where civil people, people like you and me, might be confronted with such ethical problems in everyday life. Everybody hopes to avoid this crucial decision but one has to be prepared for it in case it does happen. In those situations, most people would most likely avoid the decision and turn away from the problem. But let’s say you had to choose between the life of a grandmother and a bus full of children, you couldn’t possibly ignore the children. There are a greater number of children who have their whole life to live and a single grandmother, who anyway is going to die in a few years. The main problem in taking someone’s life to save someone else’s is that
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