[Buddha-l] Ethical Dilemmas

[lemmett at talk21.com]

>>Why always this urge to>>intervene? Let Mother Nature do her job.


>Careful not to jump to the other extreme. There is a difference between 
>having to do something as opposed to having something to do. Sila is one of 
>the tripod legs on which Buddhism stands, and shouldn't be neglected in the 
>name of observation-only samadhi (or some other name, such as Father 
>Nature). There is no compassion, no prajna, no Buddhism, without 
>responsibility.

What if a psychopath looking for victims told you to choose two names at random, say from a phonebook or something, one name at random or he would choose three at random himself? It seems obvious that the second option is best but this means that lives themselves can be equatable. 
So the way I look at this problem is that the best outcome is probably the least loss of life, though it may turn out otherwise. However the ethical value of choosing the option that is probably more valuable, is ambiguous with not intervening because of the evil in choosing to kill. And that that evil changes as it is contextualized, so that turning in people to the nazis is not quite the same. There is no right or wrong choice with something like the trains, blame or praise; it is up to whoever finds themselves in that situation to decide what sort of responsibility they want to act out. We did this is psyc class, my answer is probably not very Buddhist. That is all.