US officials threatened James Foley's family with criminal charges if they raised ransom money to free him

At some level, I’m not sure that there IS any way to deliver that message that won’t be “unsympathetic.” The US government has to be concerned with the likely future victims enabled by funding these terrorists, in exactly the way that the family doesn’t. But there isn’t much of a way to sugarcoat “we’d rather see your son dead than to see you successfully exchange money for his life.” If it was my family, I might well try to pay ransom. But rationally, that IS a selfish act.

As a practical, political measure, I can’t imagine the US prosecuting parents for attempting to ransom their son. But I could see them informing any potential donors that they could be prosecuted for funding terrorists.

I don’t have children either. I fully expect that if and when I do, I will feel like you do - that I would do anything to protect them, even if, from my current vantage point or that of any unrelated human being, I would consider that action evil (I’m sure in practice their is an upper bound, but yeah).

However, I am also smart enough to see that that kind of thinking invariably leads to a world I don’t want to live in. Doesn’t matter what your moral philosophy is - Buddhist doctrines of nonattachment, Abraham/Isaac, Jesus and “Anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” Kant’s categorical imperative, the various forms of utilitarianism - in the end, if everyone starts sacrificing others to save their own interests, we’re all doomed. So I choose to precommit myself now (by supporting laws, contracts, whatever, that enforce this dispassionately) to be bound to not do something stupid at a future moment in my life when I already know I would tend to do the wrong thing.

Taken to its logical extreme - suppose I were a billionaire, and ISIS kidnapped my child and asked for a huge ransom. Maybe they want to use it to buy old Russian nukes. I will even say, now, that anyone with knowledge of where the drop was going to take place has a moral responsibility (whether or not they have legal authority) to stop me, up to and including killing me. And I want to live in a world where ISIS already knows that this is general policy, that no one will ever be permitted to pay their ransom. Because we’ve already seen that not paying ransoms give more than an order of magnitude improvement in chances of not getting kidnapped (see US/Europe dichotomy), which I expect is still better than the chance of getting someone back once kidnapped.

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Actually, most of the European countries have a policy of ponying up and their citizens are generally returned. Like @Boundegar said, this is more about making money for them.

Actually, quite a lot - but that has driven kidnappings, too:

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The right way to go about it is to sell weapons to terrorists as a condition of freeing hostages, then diverting the proceeds from those weapon sales to other terrorists just for kicks.

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That’s part of the evidence that we need to value everyone, not just our kin, or we will continue wrecking the world for everyone, including our kin.

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Just what I’ve read about the FBI, who got tired of kidnapping for ransom schemes and people giving huge amounts of money to kidnappers and usually getting only a corpse back if anything. Then the kidnappers would use the money to fund more kidnappings. Now if you get kidnapped in the US, the feds get involved immediately and they drop the hammer hard. As a result, kidnapping for ransom is extremely rare in the US.

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Well said. The entire ethics of “I would do anything for my children” is revolting to the extreme. Sacrificing everything to save your kids is one thing, but murdering someone else’s kid while you are at it is simply repulsive.

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How the hell can you pretend that that is an example of the trolley problem? You are actively choosing to drive, knowing that you are personally funding terrorism, and the killing of children.

The trolley problem is specifically where making a choice will cause other deaths. You don’t get to cite that to try and ease your mind saying “well, that’s the status quo, sucks but there’s not much we can do about it.” It’s a completely different scenario.

You don’t get to fault other people funding terrorism to save their child, when you can’t even be bothered to change your fucking commute to stop funding terrorism.

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I know it’s easy for me to say this in my comfortable home, but if I were in James Foley’s position, and I found out that my family had put themselves in jail for raising millions of dollars to fund a terrorist organization in a futile effort to free me, I’d be horrified and furious.

I’m inclined to agree. In the context of my family, YOUR family is going into the Volcano. WE are going down to Olive Garden for some bread sticks.

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You’d also be alive, to fume and yell at your jailed loved ones.

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It’s nice for you that you can approach the murder of loved ones with the icy rationality of a spreadsheet, but not everybody shares that ability or inclination. You’re not wrong in a absolute moral-calculus sense, and I’d like to think that if I had to, say, choose between saving a loved one and a million strangers that I’d opt to prevent the megacide. It’s not necessarily your argument that most people are reacting to; it’s your superior, condescending, heartless attitude.

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You are kinda missing the point. There are many passive facets of everyday life (in 1st world countries) that indirectly contribute to the suffering of others.

If you have a job that is possible to get to without burning any fossil fuels, I applaud you. I live in the midwestern USA, there is a lot of urban sprawl here. The job I was able to get was 2 cities away.

I suppose in a very facile sense you are correct, I could have chosen destitution, over having a job. So in that sense I suppose it was an active choice to drive.

Even so their remains a distinct difference between the suffering caused by being a user of fossil fuels, and the much more direct action of handing thousands of dollars to a particular radical group with a very specific agenda that explicitly includes ethnic cleansing.

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As a kid I would watch Star Trek with my family. My parents approved of that show because of the deep moral quandaries it posed and the lessons that went along with it.

I’m not the first person in this thread to quote Spock: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

I realize he is the definition of cold logic, so here is my emotional reasoning:

Let’s say I did pay the ransom to bring my child home. It would never be like it was before. Both me and my child would have to live with the guilt that to save them I had caused the death of many other innocents. It would ruin our quality of life. It’s not something I want on my conscience, let alone guilt I am prepared to force a loved one to live with.

If I am going to cause anyone’s death, it would be in taking up arms against those who did the kidnapping. That’s much preferable to colluding with them.

It’s not about being cold, on the contrary, it’s about striving to care about, and understand, people the world over. I don’t need to be bonded by the ties of family, to care about someone, to empathize with their suffering, To care for others, it’s enough to know that we are all human, and experience emotions in a similar way.

I can’t prevent all suffering everywhere, but by not funding a terrorist organization, I know at least I am not disproportionately causing the pain and death of others.

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Perhaps we can toss Cheney in there if they all agree to just behave a bit.

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What if they raised a modest amount and gave it to a fellow with a certain set of skills?

Not necessarily. The amount ISIL asked Foley’s employers for was $132 million. The people they contacted said they didn’t take the ransom seriously – an amount like that was meant to be impossible in the time given to pay. That’s my point, it would have been likely futile anyway.

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ISIS/ISIL/IS is NOT a criminal gang primarily in it for the money like Somali pirates. They are true believers intent on forcing a xenophobic medieval existence on all they can control.

I agree, that’s definitely the impression I’ve gotten. That’s why their ‘ransom’ demands are outrageous and intentionally impossible. They don’t want to trade people for cash. They want media attention, and they will slice as many throats as possible to stay on the front page and scare people with their knives and threats.