Wasn’t that why Saddam Hussain was bumped off, to save people?Then ISIS etc filled the void.

But morally , anyone that does more bad than good in life would surely be better off getting wiped out.

This is the Pauline principle, which argues that you cannot do evil acts and expect good results. It differs from the Principle of Double Effect (Thomas Aquinas) in that the latter deals more with doing good things which have some bad effects as well as the good, such as putting a sick animal to sleep. Part of the problem will be how do you forecast the outcome? How would you have known that murdering Hitler in his youth would have prevented the rise of Nazism? Maybe it wouldn't have; Hitler was the figurehead of Nazism but he wasn't its sole cause. How do you know that Hitler was the one you needed to murder and not any of the thousands of other potential future Nazi leaders? Murder them all? Then you're in the same position as Herod when he massacred the innocents in the hope of getting the infant Christ.

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They don't, they come from the point of view that you can't do something that breaks God's Law even if you do so with the intention of getting good results. You can't kill someone, even if you *think* there's a good reason to, because it isn't up to you who lives and who doesn't: it's up to God. If that person then chooses to something evil that is because he has gone against the Law, and it isn't your "fault" for failing to bump him off beforehand. You couldn't have known what he might or might not do. After all, as far as the WWI soldier was concerned, he will not have known whether the young Hitler would go on to be a despot or win the Nobel Peace Price. He could only do what was right in the circumstances before him based on the beliefs he held.

Many more complicated situations in the modern world can't be analysed as simply and give rise to debate as to what is "right", and we can reject earlier moral values surprisingly rapidly. Look at how homosexuals were treated even say 70 years ago, for example.

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I can see how something, which is criminally wrong (discrimination/persecution against a particular group), makes deciding whether the morality of whether it is right or wrong slightly easier.

However I'm not sure how that stands with countries where the opposite is true ie discrimination/persecution is actively encouraged due to the law? Is that morally right for those countries or does it all come back down to the individual to decide if it is morally right for them based on their own personal morals?

Edited by johnno42000 (12 Aug 2018 2.35pm)

'Lies to the masses as are like fly's to mollasses...they want more and more and more'

Cheap, but I ended up as being immoral in the quiz

'Lies to the masses as are like fly's to mollasses...they want more and more and more'

I'd like to think I know right from wrong but there must be people who think what I think is right is wrong and what I think is wrong is right.

'Lies to the masses as are like fly's to mollasses...they want more and more and more'