Adolf Hitler and a gorilla are drowning in a river. You can only save 1.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Which one is the fiscal conservative and which one is the social conservative? That will play a role.

Western Hitler is more fiscally conservative, while eastern Hitler is more socially conservative.

and the gorilla is SOCIAL LIBERAL, FISCLA CONSREVERVTVE!!!!

Like me lol

Now that's what I call a 'Red Tory'!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

This isn't the exact same question, but who would you save - A) Hitler or B) a person with an IQ score of 0-30?

For me, it's obviously the second person, at least knowing what Hitler is capable of. 

Is he capable of living a richer, more reflective, more human, more meaningful life with a broader range of thoughts and emotions.?  Sure.  but I don't care, because he is evil.  F*** him.

This is an excellent proxy question for 'so just how much of a eugenicist are you'?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Neither, apparently everyone has forgotten what happens in the future when the Apes are in charge.

I hate every ape I see
From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

On further consideration I'd probably save the gorilla.

Sorry, Antonio, but, while in almost any other hypothetical of this kind I'd agree with you, it's Hitler.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

On further consideration I'd probably save the gorilla.

Sorry, Antonio, but, while in almost any other hypothetical of this kind I'd agree with you, it's Hitler.

If you start making exceptions for Hitler, it's very easy to be tempted to make more. Past and present times are ripe with horrible people who did horrible things. Where do we draw the line, then? Surely, it can't be only Hitler, or someone should explain to the victims of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot why their tormentors weren't bad enough to deserve the same fate. And then, what about Franco, Suharto and the like? They killed a lot of people - not quite as many as those others, but is that really a relevant distinction? And why stop at tyrants? What about Tim McVeigh, Omar Mateen or the forever-unnamed people who bombed Piazza Fontana? What about Charles Manson? How many people does someone need to have killed to deserve being left to die? Isn't one enough? And hell, why stop at killers? Aren't some acts even worse than murder? What does Josef Fritzl deserve?

And yes, I realize it's a bit rich for me to make a slippery slope argument after I've rejected such arguments in other discussions (including with you). I just think this is the one right that can't tolerate any exception without eventually collapsing altogether. Also, as much as I like virtue ethics, I'm very suspicious of any moral reasoning that tends to divide humanity into "bad people" and "everybody else".

It’s less that I’m interested in adjudicating whether or when a bad person, even a really bad person, loses the right to life and more that I’m trying to be honest enough about my own motivations and tendencies as a moral agent to not falsely say I wouldn’t, in this situation, choose to save the gorilla.

I am agnostic on whether or not it is possible for a human to lose the moral right to life (which does come before and in situations like this supersede the right to life of non-human animals) through evil actions, and correspondingly even more agnostic on at what point exactly that happens (if it does happen). I thus cannot say which, between Hitler and the gorilla, would have more of an objective claim on my moral attention. All I can say is that I would choose the ape and hope I’d made the right decision.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

To be clear, my position is that there should be a universal default assumption, both by the individual and by the other people and structures surrounding the individual, that the proper course of action is to continue to live or to allow to continue to live. I think that this is the only morally responsible way to work out agnosticism on the question of whether it's possible to lose the right (or relinquish the duty) to live. I certainly don't advocate a system in which some third party or group of third parties sits in judgment and decides who lives and who dies; I try to be very consistently against the death penalty.

But I do also think that we all occasionally face decisions where we won't know for sure what the right thing to do is. And when situations like that arise, I think we can be forgiven for defaulting to a sort of vulgar moral sentimentalism.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Regardless where you guys stand...

I'd post the 'primate platoon' comic cover, but I see Ernest already did.