Dying a hero, w/o the belief of afterlife

[vhawk01]

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This is a tough question for me. Because ultimately, I do believe that ultimately, everything's meaningless. Say you could go back in time and stop the Holocaust from happening. What good would it do? Most of the people that were killed would be dead by now anyway. And all of them would all be dead in 40 or 50 years anyway. All "saving them" would do at this point is to increase the population of the world through their descendents in already overpopulated areas.

And yet, if there were a bomb that was going to go off at a football stadium or something and kill 10,000 people, I feel like I'd have to stop it, even if it was a certainty that I'd die in the process. The guilt would be too terrible to bear and it would feel so generally "wrong" not to have helped.

Put in a different context though (say saving 10,000 Africans from starvation) and I'd feel much less stake in the outcome and would be much less likely to sacrifice myself to help. There really are a lot of arbitrary cutoffs here. Even if I could save 5,000 people by living in poverty vs. 2,500 by living in prosperity, I might not help.

Really, I think a lot of it does depend on your connections. My connection to the Sudanese < my connection to English-speaking Europeans < my connection to random Americans from across the country < my connection to people from the city I live in < my connection to personal acquaintances < my connection to my friends < my connection to my close family. Basically, you have to weigh all of those in order to decide how much guilt you're willing to live with to save your own life.

(Note: I did vote yes here, initially thinking of the OP as a 24-type scenario where you have to save people somewhat like you from an impending disaster. There are some instances in which I would refuse however.)

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What good would it do? Those people would have all lived and had fun and spent time with their loved ones and had children and went to ballgames and weddings and funerals. All of that is positive, in my opinion, so the good it would have done is obvious. There is no infinte "Yeah but then what?" chain at work here. That pleasure and happiness and joy that they were deprived always, forever, didn't happen.