You and your wife/girlfriend want to have a baby. Unfortunately, NASA has determined that in 10 months, an asteroid will hit the Earth and everyone will die. There's no way to deflect, destroy, or otherwise counteract the asteroid. Everyone's gonna die in 10 months. Would you consider it murder to conceive and give birth to a child, knowing that soon after it's born it would be killed, along with everyone else?
[spoiler]I'm not talking about murder in the legal sense. This is more of a question of whether this would be right or wrong. This isn't a circuitous abortion debate. This is just a thought experiment.[/spoiler]
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Winyにより編集済み: 7/3/2013 6:50:00 PMIndirect murder, I'd say. You are willingly causing this child to die. EDIT: Then again, don't all parents acknowledge that their children will die? *Gasp* [b]ALL PARENTS ARE INDIRECT MURDERERS.[/b]
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Either way, the child is never going to be capable of conscious thought or have any comprehension of the world around them. The difference between the two situations from the child's perspective is too small to bother worrying about. I can't see how the mother would want to spend the last 10 months of her life growing a child which is going to be summarily vapourised along with herself.
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No. Even though you did have that child when s/he's going to die withing a month. It's a death by something you can't control. That's like saying would it be murder if you have a child knowing s/he's going to die from old age. As long as you had nothing to do with it, it's not murder.
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Well you are putting someone in a situation that guarantees their death. I guess you could look at it as sending a soldier into a suicide mission. It's not really murder per se. It's still not right though.
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To qualify as murder you have to want the other person to be dead. Accidental deaths are considered manslaughter.
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No. As others have pointed out, when you're birthed you're essentially guaranteed to die of natural causes. That is of course, unless someone else intervenes and does it themselves. If there is no way to stop this asteroid, then it is far from murder.
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There's not much I know for sure about my future, but I do know that one day, I will die. This is true for all humans, and everyone knows this (at least everyone old enough to be parents). With this in mind, your suggestion makes every human in history murders. In a broad sense, I think you could define murder as depriving someone of their future. By this definition, your actions are [i]giving[/i] a child a future, although a short one. In this case, the end of the child's life is ended by the asteroid, a natural disaster far outside of the parents control, just like death by old age is outside their control. With this in mind, my conclusion would be [b]no[/b].