How am I supposed to know?

[insomniac17]

Immortal said:
@insomniac17, I think you're misinterpreting my problem. My main focus is not "finding the truth", the truth in terms of evidence is only useful here as part of an argument to support taxes/teaching evolution/whatever. And, actually, I rather disagree that I should look for the most logically consistent belief. I'd agree that, from what I've seen, libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism is very logically coherent. The thing is, though, that consistency is a very secondary priority for me compared to, say, preventing people's deaths. I'm afraid I'm willing to screw all consistency if I believe it would lead to fewer people dying.

My understanding was that you're not sure what you can trust and what you can't. Political biases exist everywhere, and they constantly skew data one way or the other. My answer is that if something is logically consistent, it is more likely to be true than something that is not. I hold consistency in such high regard because I do not believe that an arbitrary system can be correct, and I believe that an arbitrary system leads to a far worse society than a consistent one. An arbitrary system can be changed to enforce anything at all, and you can only claim it to be wrong based on yourn personal beliefs. 

You are willing to ignore anything in order to save lives. Let's look at the trolley problem. You're on a runaway train car, and there's no way to stop it. Tied to the tracks are five innocent people. If you do nothing, they will die. There is a switch that will let you move the cart onto a new track. If you do so, however, one person will be killed by the car. By your reasoning, I would assume that you would press the switch and kill one person rather than five. 

My problem with this, is that while you may end up with a lower net loss of life, you have decided that the life of that one person was worth less than the lives of five others. That value is subjective. For the family of that one person, he may have been worth far more than the other five. You have not created a net good, but shifted the hurt to another area. You have also asserted that you can decide who is worth more. What if that one person was on the verge of curing all cancer? Would that have been a net good for the world? Or what if someone else claimed that the life of one was worth more than the lives of five? Who's claim is more correct?

Yes, this scenario is purely hypothetical. But let's look at a more realistic one... Say, a terrorist group attacks the US. The US responds by going to war against said group in the hopes of preventing more US deaths. Along the way, many innocent citizens of the country in which the terrorist group resides are killed. This is explained as an acceptable sacrifice to prevent the deaths of more Americans. Do you claim that to be justified? 

How about this case; The US has constructed a horrible new bomb, the most destructive ever created. It now plans to employ these bombs in order to end the bloodiest conflict in the history of the world, and it prefers doing this as all estimates of a land invasion show a much larger loss of life than should these bombs be used. They end up being used, and the final number of casualties is indeed lower than the estimated cost of life of a land invasion. The effects last for decades after and some innocent people are forced to live with the result for the rest of their lives, but there are fewer overall casualties. Is this justified?