Here’s an ethical (note: not ethnic. I will probably make that mistake, so forgive me) question for you:
You are a surgeon working in a hospital. You are aware of 5 other patients in that hospital require organ donations, and they need these donations pretty soon (ie within the next day or two, or they will die).
You have a patient that’s just come in for an appendicitis.
Now, you have a choice, do you:
a) kill this new patient and harvest his organs and use them in an organ transplant? (Assume that the organs are a match, no complications in surgery etc and they won’t be hit by a bus as soon as they leave the hospital)
b) treat the man for what he came in for and allow the other 5 patients to die?
This probably isn’t an uncommon question, and probably are many variations on this, but it always bubbles down to “Do you let x amount of people die and kill one person? Or do you allow the one person to live and kill x amount of people?”
Car/trains/helicopters/fighter jets oncoming, organ transplant, hostage situations, you get the idea, there’s a lot you can change.
I’m not quite doing ethics in Philosophy (though if I did theology I would have), which disappoints me because epistemology is so much harder than I really wanted it to be. Ethics I’ve done briefly before, and theology I’m comfortable with (but I don’t like it that much). Not that I can do anything about it now.
I’ve always been interested in people’s response to that question. They always seem to try and find a way out (for reference, you can never have an easy way out), no one ever gives a straight answer to the question. Except me, but then again I don’t give a personal opinion on the answer, just “Utilitarianism: kill the man”.
When they do answer, it’s a numbers game: x people live and 1 dies. Seems fair enough. Apparently.
I’d have to let the x amount die. Even though more people would survive the Utilitarian way, I couldn’t justify murdering someone.
If the world turned to killing people to help the greater good, patients would be terrified of operations, wondering whether they’d ever wake up again. I think it would be a fair judgement to say that many would forego the operation and die of their maladies. By the time of their deaths, their illnessnes could have spread to their healthy organs so not only would they have died, but their organs would have been rendered unusable. Thus, not only does the one person with appendicitis die but the x amount of people lose out also.
Besides, things are never just as simple as killing a person – what happens if more than one of the x amount of people needed the same organ? How would someone choose which person to give it to? And if one could only save one of the x amount of people by killing one person with appendicitis, one might just as well allow the latter to live.
By: Omiya on March 31, 2008
at 9:35 am
I’d have to ask: would I want someone else to die in order that I could live? Would I be prepared to gain my physical life and lose my soul?
It’s not simply a numbers game. And murder is murder.
By: Madam Miaow on April 26, 2008
at 11:18 am
I see your points. But aren’t you murdering the x amount of people by not doing anything at all to help them, and the fact that it’s completely in your power to help them?
By: arcl on June 28, 2008
at 1:36 pm