If you had an idea about something and started telling that idea to other people and as a result of adopting that idea some of those people were injured or killed, are you in part morally culpable for their deaths?

This is not meant to be some esoteric discussion of metaphysics, but instead is a real question dealing with practical realities. Consider a man in a farming tribe. He convinces his fellow tribesman that if they sacrifice all their seed and cattle in a great holy fire to the gods that they will never starve again and will be blessed with food from the sky. They do so, and all die as a result. Was this witch doctor absolutely sincere? Did he truly believe he would free his brothers from hunger, or was he actually malicious and suicidal? In truth, one can never know in such circumstances what the motivation of somebody truly was, since we can not read their minds. However, do we really need to know what his motivations were to condemn him? The simple fact is that as a consequence of adopting his idea many people died, perhaps including many who never even had the oppurtinity to embrace or condemn his idea. Is it really any less wrong that someone killed many people for no reason at all versus killing for some reason? At least the malicious person must deal with a guilty conscious, the ignorant person acting on benevolence can always find solace in the fact that he *meant* well, no matter how many bodies he racks up.

Thus, we are morally culpable for the consequences of our actions *and* of our ideas. The reason why this is an important concept is because far more people have probably been killed by people promulgating bad ideas based on good intentions that have been killed by evil or malicious people. Yet very few of us fear the former, and most fear the latter. The most striking example of death based on ignorance + good intentions is malaria, which makes Rachel Carson the worst mass murderer to have ever walked the planet. If you don’t know who she is, she was the author of ‘Silent Spring’ which told the horror stories of thinning egg shells due to DDT. She virtually single handedly spring boarded the modern environmentalist movement and triggered a nationwide consensus of fear about pesticides, primarily DDT, which neither thinned egg shells nor caused cancer. What DDT did do however, was kill mosquitoes, and it did a damn good job of it. And what mosquitoes did was kill people, and they did a damn good job of that. During the height of DDT spraying the number of deaths due to malaria was around 10 – 100 per year *in the entire world* Today, that number, by best estimates, is probably around 1 million per year. Those are completely and wholly preventable deaths. Most of those victims are poor black children in Africa. While AIDS gets all the attention, it kills less than 1/100 the number of people that dysentery, diarrhea, and malaria do. Since DDT has been banned by the UN for nearly 30 years now, estimates of the deaths that banning has caused range between 30 million and 50 million deaths. That is nearly twice the number of people killed from battle during WWII. This is the single most egregious case of western hypocrisy and depraved indifference in the world today. It is the single worst cause of the most easily preventable deaths in the world. One million people every year. 30 – 50 million people total. Numbers that are completely incomprehensible. While Eastern Equestrian Encephalitis and Avian Bird Flue and West Nile virus scare us into mosquito nets and closed widows and face masks, those flying self replicating used needles, the most efficient pathogen transmitters to buzz the earth, enjoy a life free of fear and harm while mankind, their biggest victim, holster their only effective weapon out of completely twisted, misguided and anti-scientific hysteria.

You better get your head on straight, arm yourself with the proper tools to recognize poor logic and bad reasoning, and dethrone ‘good intentions’ as the ultimate moral justifier, replacing it with ‘good consequences’ because the people who will probably kill you don’t know they will and certainly don’t mean to.

Michael