Bernie Madoff did give a lot of money to charity…

The murder-one-person-to-save-5 scenario has an obvious answer: you don’t do it. It’s against the law (in the train scenario you’re absolved of any complicity in how the train and people got there). What’s more it’s impractical, one person can’t just murder a person and do 5 transplants by themself…you’d need a team of doctors and nurses. Lastly, this scenario isn’t just hypothetical because there are thousands of people right this moment on waiting lists for organ transplants and simultaneously there are a lot of “healthy unsuspecting individuals” around them!

“Let me go with one last scenario for you Daniel – and this was in the class. You’re in a hospital, there are 5 people in the emergency room on their deathbed, all needing different organ transplants. One needs a heart, one needs a liver, etc. Anyways, all the organs can be taken from one individual. And there happens to be one healthy unsuspecting individual sitting in the lobby. If you don’t get the organs from that one individual, all 5 will perish. Scenario A: would you take the life of that individual to save the other 5 lives? Scenario B: if your mom was one of the 5 individuals, would you take the life of that one individual to save the 4 + your mom?”

(1) Yes: presumably no one killed.

(2) No: presumably the railroad worker is 18+ years old and the young child is <10 so w/o additional information preserve life years.

(3) Yes: same as (2)

(4) Yes: same as (2) but not b/c of failure to perform work (incompetence is not penalized by death)

(5) No: w/o more information the expected life years of the two people is likely more than the one person

(6) No: the child is likely to have more life years than me

(7) Yes: the expected life years of the laureate (and those affected by her cure) exceed those of me, my family, et al.

But, back to the topic at hand. I couldn’t think of all the scenarios in detail so I had to just make some up. You’re totally right on the last scenario. It wasn’t tight leaving too many outs. I wish I had tightened it up because you blew through my scenarios with ease. So in your answers, you show that: (a) you’re willing to make a decision that impacts life, (b) you’ll save your mom over anyone random – how can I argue with that, (c) between multiple random people and one random person, you’ll save the multiple people based on numbers, (d) culpability does come into play to some degree.

Let me go with one last scenario for you Daniel – and this was in the class. You’re in a hospital, there are 5 people in the emergency room on their deathbed, all needing different organ transplants. One needs a heart, one needs a liver, etc. Anyways, all the organs can be taken from one individual. And there happens to be one healthy unsuspecting individual sitting in the lobby. If you don’t get the organs from that one individual, all 5 will perish. Scenario A: would you take the life of that individual to save the other 5 lives? Scenario B: if your mom was one of the 5 individuals, would you take the life of that one individual to save the 4 + your mom?

What I rejected about the last Scenario is the part about knowing Mr. Noble was going to discover his cure for cancer the following day and the follow up that if he died it would take 50 years to come up with the discovery.

There’s no way to know that since it breaks what I consider to be basic rules about the predictability of the future. You simply cant know that something like that would happen. It’s a flaw in the logic of this scenario. So this scenario could never happen; so I would never find myself in it.

The last scenario has a very different assumption tied to it that the others don’t have. That is we are being told a part of the outcome of our decision in the scenario.

A better Scenario would be that Mr. Noble already knows the cure for cancer but hasn’t had the chance to tell anyone yet. If this were the case, would I press the button?

(But I’ll warn you…if you didn’t like the way I side-stepped the last scenario, you’re gonna hate this part…)

Unfortunately this scenario still isn’t possible since I would certainly care for the man who has discovered the cure for cancer. And since everyone I care for is on the Main track, including therefore Mr. Noble, he can’t be on the Alternate track as well! Scenario debunked again! (Yes, I was a pain in the ass in philosophy class sometimes…!)

But I totally agree with you about not making a choice. The band “Rush” says it best in one of their songs, “If you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

-Sparling