What would you do?
I’m going to provide you with two different situations. Don’t try and nitpick at the details or try and find a way around the circumstances, just accept it and base your decision off that. My mother posited this to me over Easter a few weeks back and I still find myself reflecting on them on them once in a while.
Situation 1:
You’re the conductor of a train riding out in the country. You suddenly see five people walking on the track ahead. You won’t be able to stop in time, and you can’t warn them in any way. It is then you notice a fork in the track ahead, but the problem is that there is one person walking on the other track. So you have to decide, stay on the current course and kill five people, or take the fork and kill one. What do you choose?
Think about it before reading Situation 2.
Situation 2:
You’re a doctor in a hospital looking after critically injured patients. There are five patients that need organ transplants or they will die very soon, each needing a different organ. The nurse runs in quickly to inform you that there are no organ donors available for any of the patients and there won’t be any in time to save any of them. However, she then informs you that a perfectly healthy young person just walked into the hospital and that if you get him and harvest his organs before he leaves the hospital in a few minutes you would be able to save all five patients, and each resulting in a full recovery. The only problem is that the donor would die in the process. Note that you will not be punished for either decision. What do you do? Can you justify killing the one healthy person to save the other five?
Thoughts:
Chances are in the first situation you had no qualms about choosing the track with only one person on it. However, if in the 2nd situation you found much harder to decide or immediately said it wouldn’t be right to kill the healthy young person, don’t worry you’re not alone. In fact, in many cultures throughout the world, when presented with similar situations, many had a problem with the 2nd situation and said it would be wrong to kill the one healthy individual. You could say it’s an almost trans-cultural phenomenon.
Why is this? Wherein does the difference lie? In both situations you can choose to sacrifice one person to save five. Yet most find the obvious logical choice in the second situation abhorant. What are your thoughts?
Maybe I’m just different, but in the first situation I chose to stay on the tracks and kill the 5 people. I thought about it in the same way as the medical situation (before reading it) – the lone person is like the innocent healthy person in that he/she has no reason to be run over, being on the unused portion of track. However, the 5 people walking on the useful portion of track are doing so at their own risk. Imagine trying to explain to a judge that you veered off course to hit a person, and your only defence is that you were trying to avoid 5 others that probably ran off anyway. Having said that, who knows what one would do in a split-second decision…
An interesting perspective Paul. So your perspective seems to be more of one where they were on the track so they were destined/fated to die and it would be unfair to take another’s life. That about right?
Yeah pretty much. It sounds cruel, but it’s the same situation as the medical one. Really what do numbers matter anyway when principles are at stake. Althouth I just thought of it some more, and in either situation, what if it wasn’t 5 people you were saving, what if it was 5 million? Would numbers start to justify something you knew was wrong THEN? I think that logic would point to saving the 5 million, but my principles/morals would still make me pause and think, and probably feel real shitty afterward, if not stop me altogether.
in terms of analyzing the difference between the 2 situations…it really comes down to the notion of an innocent life. It’s a powerful notion since it traverses cultures like Mike said. We all have a drive to minimize loss like in the first example, but not when it comes at a price. The price in the second medical situation is that the person who can save the individuals is not initially part of the situation. Whereas the people who are on the train track have put themselves in a possibly adverse situation. So, the medical situation puts us in the seat of being the life-or-death decision maker for that innocent healthy person. But in the train example, we can “justify” that the situation was beyond our control. Of course, then when it gets down to the reasoning behind the decision, it’s more personal to each person.
but i like how you said the “logical choice in the second situation is abhorant”. it think it’s a good example of how many things and decisions aren’t just based on logic itself. Logic and rationality would say, minimize loss. but there’s a strong set of beliefs that skew logic. i think it’s the belief system (values) that is common to different cultures, religions, etc.
ok that was long, i told you a long one was coming, i just had to study for my artsie course to put me in the mood!