What is the morality of taking antibiotics to kill bacteria? 🤔
The obvious response is that the bacteria are causing you harm, so you are just defending yourself, but this is as specious as it can be for multiple reasons.
Intent
When you get sick, the bacteria in your system are just going about their lives, oblivious to your existence, they don’t even know you are a thing. Therefore, any harm they may do to you is unintentional, it’s not out of malice or evil. Conversely, when you take antibiotics, you are making the conscious decision to murder billions, even trillions of bacteria.
Worth
Taking the antibiotics means you’re valuing your own life over the bacteria, but that means you think your own single, individual life has more value than that of billions of bacteria’s lives. It’s one thing to think like that if it’s your own life, but what if it’s someone else’s life? What if you’re a doctor who vows to protect life but you kill billions of bacteria to save a single human? What’s the morality in that? Where do you get off making that kind of judgement?
Hypocrisy
If the argument for taking antibiotics (or even just having an immune-system) is that it’s self-defense against a harmful life-form, then by that logic, everything in the world should be specifically and actively killing humans who are harmful to the whole planet. 😒
So again, what is the morality here? What are the ethics? Let he who is without sin… 🤔