[Cherry_Lover]

Originally Posted by Flinch

Let me get this straight; is keeping someone alive to treat them not the same as keeping them alive?

Yes, but keeping them alive in a manner that reduces the chance of further casualties.

If someone is infected with smallpox, they are killed as soon as they are found and their bodies are incinerated. Why? Because no human has any antibodies for smallpox anymore, and it could cause a pandemic. Would you try and save that person, only to run the risk of exposing others, who would then expose more and cause a pandemic, or would you guarantee the lives of millions, if not billions by killing them?

Bollocks.

If someone is infected with a disease, they're put into quarantine until they either die or get better, especially one like smallpox which isn't always fatal (note that the only places where smallpox is handled have extreme precautions to guard against infection of the scientists involved and to prevent the possibility of transmission and likely have isolation wards for that purpose). To murder the person in cold blood 'just in case' would rightly be seen as the wrong thing to do, and any government who implemented such a policy would be sued to hell. Plus, it would encourage people to hide their symptoms, which would be way worse than just letting them live and trying your best to treat them whilst they're isolated.

You're perhaps right about the bodies, but that's another matter. Whilst they're alive, they'll get the best medical care possible, albeit in isolation so that they can't infect anyone else. Plus, it's hard to even know if someone is infected (until it's too late), and it's generally up to the people working in such places to report accidents if they think they may have infected themselves. If you made it policy to kill them if they were infected, everyone would keep quiet and you'd make things worse.

Spoiler for On HF:

Originally Posted by Arbitres

At least with sorrow is what I say for the first option. At least be humane is what I say for the second.

What are you talking about? Surely not murdering someone in cold blood is the 'humane' option, even if it's not the 'logical' option.

Or kill the one to save the many. I see no problem with killing one single person who is important to you, to save thousands. Because those thousands just so happen to be like you; and that'd be a much larger tragedy then simply you being the only one sad. The world is in need of much love, I won't deprive it of something it desperately needs.

Don't sugar coat it. It is a case of killing the 'weak' to save the 'strong' (although I don't mean that Sakura is mentally weak, merely that she's unable to protect herself). And the problem is that that philosophy allows for the killing of many innocent people 'just in case'. After all, you never know when someone might go on a killing spree. And, in my view, the world would be a much better place if we lined up the executives of every big business (especially investment banks...) up against a wall and shot the lot of them. Yeah' we'd lose a few good people, but we'd also lose a lot of bad ones. So it's worth it, right? They've certainly killed people, albeit indirectly, with their policies destroying the economy of the world to make themselves richer.

Regardless of how much you love someone. They don't equate to a hundred or even a thousand.

But to his knowledge Sakura hadn't done anything yet. Allowing people to be punished for what they might do is the foundation of virtually all authoritarianism and moralistic restrictions on freedom of speech, because it's easy to say "well, this person might become a terrorist, lock him up in Guantanemo Bay" or "well, this person likes Ilya, so they might end up abusing children, better lock him up just in case".