We were having one of those "fun" conversations at work and this moral dilemma was proposed: It's a widely known fact that people feel especially guilty about their first kill. They remember the face more, the details, etc. As time goes on and more kills are racked up, this guilt mostly goes away as they have become routinized. So the question posed was, "Since you know you're going to feel guilty over the first person you kill, would you rather that first person be an innocent or someone who truly deserved it?"
I chose the innocent because, as a member of some sort of death squad (the scenario that precipitated this question), I know I'm gonna be doing a lot of killing and I'd much rather have nightmares about having killed someone who was an innocent than feel guilty about murdering a molester, rapist, thug, whatever. By the time you've killed hundreds of people or more, you'll stop feeling guilt at all but that first one will remain so I said I'd rather be able to justify the guilt than to feel bad that I feel bad for doing something which could almost be rationalized as just.
How about you? :-)
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