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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

This isn't killing sometime to save a group, though. This is guilt by association. And it isn't even that (that's just the dishonest justification), it's just a shady hope that by detaining this fraudster's incident offspring, they can lure him back to China to arrest him. It's disgusting and reprehensible.

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I don't think the government thinks the kids are guilty, I think the parent is implying something even worse: that they'd be willing to essentially throw these innocent kids under a bus to arrest the parents.

No, I definitely got that (and apparently mistyped "innocent" as "incident"). The issue isn't that I object to "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few". I think that is appropriate in some situations. But this doesn't feel like that; arresting this guy won't go and help or save a bunch of people. It's just revenge, and they're throwing the likely-innocent kids under the bus to get it.

Again you have your individualist lens on and you are judging the situation purely based on that moral framework.

I don't think I am.

The idea of prioritizing collective good means that it's ok to sacrifice one (or more) people if even more people will benefit from that action by a certain threshold amount.

This... isn't that. Arresting this guy won't help or save a bunch of people. The government just wants revenge for his financial crimes, and they're unethically using his kids to try to get it.

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