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Nanani comments on The Trolley Problem in popular culture: Torchwood Series 3 - Less Wrong
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What if the children sacrificed are the ones who would expected to quickly die anyway? Young cancer patients, for instance, or any chld born with a defect that would have led to a very early death without modern medical care.
Their suffering would be diminished since it wouldn't last as long, and as a dark "plus", their parents were already facing the prospect of the child dying young.
I didn't see the show so I don't know if there was a caveat saying they had to be healthy children. Incidentally did the aliens describe the fate worse than death at all? Is it torture, or more like Borg-assimilation?
This criterion can't gather the required 10%.
Spoiler warning!
The children were being incorporated into the bodies of the aliens. In the words of the rather terse (and uber-creepy) alien ambassador:
They create chemicals. The chemicals ... are good. We feel ... good. The chemicals are good.
Basically, they were being used as prosthetic glands secreting a narcotic, which the aliens found pleasant. That's why they wanted them. The aliens were shooting up, children. Somehow the (original 1965) children were preserved in their adolescent state, presumably indefinitely, melded into the alien's monstrous bodies. The nature of their subjective experience was left undisclosed, but it is hard to imagine it was pleasant, nor that, being reduced to glands, that they had any sort of autonomy.
So yeah, being a cancer patient or otherwise unhealthy child did not appear to be any 'advantage', at least not from the perspective of the child, since presumably their suffering existence would only be extended forever. Hard to see how the parents would see this as a plus either.