This bigotted comment is not welcome here.
It was just a dumb comment. We should encourage substantive comments - even if we disagree with them. I don't want this place to turn into Reddit with knee-jerk SLAM journalism and low quality comments.
Is there a method that serves both ends?
Remember that neither extreme is a good place. Allowing link spam, doxxing comments, CP, etc... that isn't correct either.
I don't think we've figured out a good solution for this societal problem, but you offering a false choice of "pick and extreme" is not constructive.
As for the accusation. Just don't.
However, other non religious system (communist USSR, post-revolution France) did or still do the same: they did run experiments on convicts or war prisoners. We all benefit from the science gained.
The big question is whether the greater good as defined by a religion or non religious belief-system can offset the perceived negatives - but there are clearly positive too: the prisoners mentioned in the article were condemned to death already. By volunteering, one survived:
> As a reward for his services, the prisoner had his death sentence commuted to life as a galley slave
Down the thread, people mention China.
Personally, I trust China CCP and I believe it is trying to inflict as little hurt as possible while maximizing the greater good for the whole society.
It is sad the idea of a greater good now looks quaint.
They might even be doing good on net – but there's a whole lot of evil they could just cut out. It doesn't count as “for the greater good” if the evil doesn't cause or allow the good, which it blatantly doesn't; if anything, it prevents it.
It doesn't look quaint now and it didn't look quaint 2,000 years ago when Romans believed that going to war with anyone and everyone around them in order to unify everyone under Rome's banner was for "the greater good".
Justifying the stripping away of rights of individuals for society never results in a "greater good", and the reason that it won't, and not only that - can't, is because as soon as you justify stripping away an individual's rights, then you start looking at the stripping away of a group's rights, and before long you end up with an increasingly larger Venn diagram with an overlap of "groups that hinder society" and "extermination for the greater good".
No thank you. Keep your goddamned "greater good". We've tried it enough. "But that wasn't real <Communism / Socialism / Marxism / Right-wing Authoritarianism / Benevolent Dictatorship / etc.>!" has been and always will be the mantra, because there's always someone dumb enough to think they're smart enough to build the "perfect" society.
And they're all wrong.
Keep your goddamned 'Freedom to be ignorant' to yourself, the world does not need this export.
Pathetic.
Yeah that worked out well for the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик!
It managed to give the world the worst nuclear disaster ever seen! And also managed to keep an entire nation with vast resources so fucking poor that their supermarkets - lol, who am I kidding? There were no supermarkets in Soviet Russia. Hell, there were barely even markets... but they basically looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTGsUyv8IE
Keep your goddamned "Ridiculous idealism that will never work because it defies human nature" to yourself.
You will never, and I mean ever have a successful communist state. There's never been a single one, and never will be.
Rome never really justified her wars using a concept of the greater good. The Roman justification for all her wars was defense. To Roman eyes, the entire empire was conquered through a series of defensive wars.
How on Earth is that "insightful". Is that really an honest argument?
IMHO, the comment deserved to be removed more because it was thoughtless and dumb - even though I flagged it for being biggoted.
Also, given this was done by a pope, what were their crimes? Apostasy? Blasphemy? Homosexuality?
It is an idea of the greater good alright - one meant to excuse every atrocity. That is what most people want out of religion - an easy way to be always right.