Ethical theory is not much use once you are dead.

All of the world religions disagree with you.

That you have been downvoted is very telling of the crowd that CS people are. We pretend to be all rational professionals on our high horses, decorated with degrees and what not..

And yet, when something manages to hit us on an emotional level we falter.

What Afforess said is a statement of fact and relevant to the discusssion. Thus it's a valid counterpoint.

You may not like it and you may not agree with it .. you may even discard sprituality as a whole .. but none of it makes the satement any less true.

I would recommend you to stop making such sweeping generalizations about "CS crowd" and educate yourself on deontological vs consequentialist ethics debate. Yes, religions are firmly in the deontological camp and it showed during the millenia of superstition, witchhunts and obstruction of scientific progress.

Btw, as far as I see the only one on the high horse in this comment thread is you.

It isn't actually a statement of fact though.

Not all religious sects have an afterlife and some, like Calvinists, believe in predestination, so nothing you do affects where you are going anyway.

edit - The position of respecting other beliefs as the number one priority is basically saying that it is better to let someone die than offend them. However from a religious perspective you wouldn't normally give a shit about offending other people's beliefs as other religions are generally regarded as heresy. There are exceptions, such as the Baha'i, but generally the idea of trying to respect all beliefs is largely a secular position.

Most of them do, however they disagree in a lot of different and often entirely contradictory ways.

So given the problem of doing something about a disaster, trying to keep all the different belief systems happy at the same time will just stop you from doing anything. You can't keep all the different belief systems happy when there isn't a disaster and lives to save, trying to do it when there is seems to be just setting yourself up to fail from the outset.

Also, given the context of disease, stopping it spreading is not a wholly altruistic act. This is about self-preservation as much as anything else and most of the world's religions are pretty clear on what you are allowed to do to others when the tribe is threatened. The religious reaction to this in many cases would be mass slaughter.

In all of my years on this planet, I have never seen religion benefit a corpse. The living may find comfort in it, but the dead are indifferent.

Not all, but many, yes, probably even most.