Minority Report Abortion

anonymous:

while i admire your arguments and the world you seek to see become reality where no violence or crime is committed, it unfortunately won’t realistically happen because we are human and humans are flawed and fragile and pass down our previous world’s ideologies into the next one. i have a question for you: if you knew a certain unborn baby would unfortunately become a sociopath who would go on to brutally murder hundreds of people, no matter what you or anyone did, what would you feel and say?

cultureshift:

First, I disagree with your pessimistic outlook. We can absolutely change the world for the better. This is always accomplished by those who are crazy enough to believe they can, and I count myself among this group.

To answer your Minority Report hypothesis and its allusion to abortion, yes, I would kill this child. Why? It’s simple, really. There are only two instances where killing another human being is justified: in defense of yourself or in the defense of others. Since you stipulated that nothing could be done to change the outcome, killing this person before they could kill hundreds of others would be justified. Let me elaborate. When a police officer kills an assailant who is trying to kill him, he is exonerated. When a police officer kills an assailant who is trying to kill others, he is exonerated. Your scenario only extends the time horizon between when the assailant is killed to protect the lives of others. Killing a person in the process of shooting school children is no different than killing that same person in the womb if we knew what they were going to do and there was no way to stop them ahead of time. In fact, killing them prior to the crime would save even more lives.

Of course, your hypothesis is fantasy and has no basis for the killing of prenatal children in the real world. I only entertained answering it because it demonstrates the difference between killing for convenience (elective abortion) and killing out of absolute necessity (self defense and the defense of others). No one has the right to intentionally take an innocent life, therefore, here in the real world, no one should have the right to abort a child.