A hysterical person is more likely capable of defending themselves. People find the idea of killing something defenseless a lot more troubling than one that can fight back. More guilt is involved. Strange.
This ties in with the theme of innocence/ignorance/purity/sinlessness (etc) as well. I think it's no accident that almost all baby animals are cute, fuzzy and harmless, and as people near adulthood, we're less forgiving to them. If babies were, say, harming us without an intention or knowledge that they're harming us (or of the consequences of what they do), we're more than willing to forgive them because on some levels we know that if the baby does not mean to harm us, there is no way he can orchestrate a full-scale and lethal assault against us, while adolescents and adults certainly can. In this way, intention does matter in morality- it matters a lot, because it speaks volumes of how dangerous a person is to us. A person who accidentally kills another is not punished as much as a premeditated murderer. It's almost Biblical, in a way, that knowledge of Good and Evil is related to the original Sin.
You're missing the entire point of a moral dilemma. We aren't here to speculate on whether the baby will scream or will not scream. We do not speculate on whether we can "fight off" the Nazis with our bare hands. We are under the strict assumption that the options are to: kill the baby and save many lives, or not kill the baby. By not killing the baby, we establish that the baby will cry, the Nazis will come, and we all die.
Could we be wrong? Absolutely, hence the dilemma. It is entirely possible that the baby would not cry, but this is irrelevant. You either do kill the baby or you do not.
No. You seem to have missed the entire point of my post. I did not speculate on that at all, or whether we can fight off Nazis. Actually my post asks why the person who puts the entire group at risk is a baby, and would the answers change if the person is a hysterical. screaming adult who is frightened because it's curious, in that way, that a lot of these dilemmas are always set up with a baby. In fact, another such dilemma comes to mind: you're a bystander who has the power to divert a runaway train that will crash into two locations. A
baby is in one and twenty adults are in another. Which way do you divert it. What does this fact illustrate about ourselves?
And if an answer must be provided here, no, I will take my chances with the Nazis instead of killing a baby, but the answer would be the same if it was an adult.