Is Russian Roulette ethical?
One bullet, six chances. Your turn.
Would it be more ethical if there were 12 chambers in the gun?
How about 100 chambers? Maybe 1 out of 100 chances would make it ethical? That’s a 1% mortality rate. If everyone agrees to take a turn with the roulette game, they say that the gods themselves will hand out fat $1 M checks to all who survive. Think of the good that could be done with that money! Wouldn’t the good outweigh the bad? Wouldn’t the end justify the means?
There’s more though. There’s 19 blanks plus that 1 live round in that 100 chamber gun. The blanks don’t kill you but at close range they cause serious injuries. Brain damage, heart damage, weeks of suffering.
Nobody actually collects a million, though, except the people selling the game.
And by the rules of the game, here’s a second half: if you play the game and survive, there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll personally have to force another group of people to play. It might be 20 chambers or 50, depending on your choices, but it will definitely include the people in your family first. You love them? They go first in line. Have them bring two or three people they spend their time with, too. Get them all in the room, force them to take their turn. If one of them work at a senior citizens home, put 10 live bullets in the chambers and 30 blanks.
If you have knowledge of which chamber is holding the bullets, so that you know your odds are far better than most, does that make it more ethical, or less?
Life is risk. Lightning, car wrecks, heart attacks — dangers everywhere. We babyproof our houses, put skid protection in bathtubs, grab bars in the shower for grandma. We may or may not wear bicycle helmets but we make sure our children do. We protect the vulnerable. Bicycle helmets seemed like a terrible imposition when I first got one, but I got used to it. A friend told me “he only people who wear bicycle helmets are the ones who have brains to protect.”
By the end of the day, the Thanksgiving rounds of Russian roulette will be over, and in a few days, the secondary games, and a few days after that, the tertiary games.
God educate America. God deprogram America. God vaccinate America. God enlighten America.
= new reply since forum marked as read
They were our last chance and now they're gone.
