h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'If you could break it all down and put the the hundredth most deadly people deadly evil people on an island and say these people are going to get blown up and they'll be no more trouble ever; but out of the hundred 20 of them are completely innocent - I'd blow it up.' - Paul Tulip [Aspiring Alan Sugar employee]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctwo/programmes/?id=apprentice

Would you do what Paul would?

If we are talking the 80 being the "most evil" in the world and the 20 being joe averages, then yes I would do it as well.

Can you say

'Would you do what Paul would'

100 times very quickly

And the answer is no because they would only be replaced by other evil people ending up with similar outcomes.

The answer from me is also no... It wouldn't achieve anything, for every evil dicator mass murderer blah blah blah we can get rid of there'l be another ready to take their place And I for one woulnd't like to be judge and jurry decreeing waht is or is not 'ultimate evil;'

If you blow it up, are you not then a murderer, and the evil person for the next island?

I'll blow both of those Islands up and I'll raise you DNA genomic testing at birth and look for profiles and send the parents and all relatives off to a third Island...

Thats a tough one,the innocents have got to be suffering any way, but no, I wouldn't blow it up.
Your just as bad as them
There are loads to take the evil peoples place
It's got to be bad for the environment to just blow up an island

I'm not sure I believe in the old argument "If you kill evil person A then there will be another evil person to take their place". Perhaps it takes great talent to do evil just as it takes talent to do good things?

I wouldn't blow up the island. Even if only one person is innocent or, come to think of it, if not one person is innocent. I may think that killing them would be justified but maybe also they were just as convinced that their actions were justified - no matter how evil?

I wouldn't because if they're stuck on an island they're not going to be any more trouble, are they?

Not to mention they'd probably end up killing each other in extended ploys for power - it's be interesting to see what happened actually.

And what about the island? Surely there's an easier way of killing 100 people than blowing up and island

Didn't the Romans already do this? They rounded up all the bad people and put them on an Island off the coast of Europe. They helpfully built a wall on the island to keep the bad people away from the nice people in the North and then they left them to it.

See what happens?

Yeah, they eventually tried to take over the world and ended up 'blowing up' a handful of other islands.

The experiment was repeated with Australia. That led directly to Danni Minogue. It doesn't work. Trying to contain evil just leads to greater evil. "All I Wanna Do"

I dont think the question is really arround having 100 truly evil people on an island (or in a gass chamber) - (now wont that get some blood-pressure rising!) - its about the process that preceeds the presence of 100 truly evil people in once place.

Who decides that they're evil? How much is the margin of error? Who gets to judge them? Is that process infallible?

I dont know if its the laws or the just punnishments - but the path of justice itself that gets us all uncertain. My question would be how many wrongly accused or misjudged individuals would I be "murdering" - and how many truly evil murderers would really be getting justice for their actions.

Once day, when there's an infallible way to know the truth of someone's heart and actions, justice will be a clean sword that cuts clean - right now its like a serated lawnmower that does as much evil itself as good.

But hey - who's going to speak for the poor island and its local natural inhabitants - birds and the like?

Damn. And there was me hoping this was a thread about blowing up the island in the utterly pointless and dull 'Lost'.

In which case i would happily blow up the island, but only if it was guarnteed the screiptwriters and producers were on it first.

Or even better have them attempt to not blow up the island through some sort of convoluted dead man's switch arrangement.

What if the 'island' was landlocked in the Middle East and in order to kill a few thousand 'evil'* people you 'had to'** kill several hundred innocent people ... would you?



*as defined by a partisan and - by most standards - 'evil' government many miles away

**chose to...

Hmm, I haven't come across any landlocked islands full of evil people. Does Milton Keynes count?

I think the whole thing is based on the premise that if you apply the death penalty there will always be some who subsequently are found to be innocent. In which case, is the death penalty justifiable?

No.