not that i think abortion is indefensible, but the topic can lead to… arguments
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You are a psychopath and a shining beacon of fol
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Okay, while that’s a slightly counterintuitive response, it does fit with the whole there is nothing wrong with killing innocent people schtick you’ve got going on. Let’s see if you remain in touch with your inner-killer when it comes to the final scenario below.
Moral Secnario 2 of 2
It’s the same situation as in the previous scenario, except with one crucial difference: this time the surgeon deliberately poisoned his patients. He was badly overworked, had known he was named a beneficiary in his five patients’ wills, and it came over him one day to give them the chemical to kill them. Now he repents, and would save them if he could. If he does not save them, he will positively have murdered them.
Do these facts make it permissible for the surgeon to cut the backpacker up and distribute his parts to the five who need them (and again it should be assumed that the backpacker doesn’t consent to giving up his life to save five other people, that the lives of the five people will be saved if, and only if, the organs are transplanted, and that nobody will ever find out what the surgeon has done)?
Yes, it is morally permissible for the surgeon to operate
No, it is not morally permissible for the surgeon to operate
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I want the quiz maker to get concerned
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Yes
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why did the surgeon violate the hippocratic oath? are they stupid?
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Kill the boi
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True
Results Summary
- You passed
- There are no tensions in your responses
- Complication: it’s possible you’re an annoying nihilist
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real
Absolutely not? Like what this is just objective fact
B might just be slightly less virtuous, or it might be slightly less reprehensible. We have no guidance here
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im a winner
This activity is designed to explore our intuitions about a particular class of killings: namely, those that are also instances of “letting die”. The two killings featured in this activity fall into this class because the act by which the agent (i.e., the surgeon) kills takes time to cause death - time in which the agent can intervene but does not.
An interesting thing about this class of killings is that in particular circumstances it represents a challenge to what most people will take to be a moral rule that killing more people is worse than killing fewer people. In the two scenarios featured here, it is possible for the surgeon to avoid killing five people by killing a single other person (and using their organs to save the lives of the five people). However, according to the philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson, it is evident that he should do no such thing:
The surgeon must not operate on the young man. If he can find no other way of saving his five patients, he will now have to let them die - despite the fact that if he now lets them die, he will have killed them.
It seems, then, that the proposition that killing more people is morally worse than killing fewer people must be false. However, Thomson denies this, arguing instead that sometimes people will have to do what is morally worse, since it won’t be permitted for them to do what is morally better:
If the surgeon does not operate, so that he kills five, then it will later be true that he did something worse than he would have done if he had operated, killing only one - especially if his killing of the five was murder, committed out of a desire for money, and his killing of the one would have been, though misguided and wrongful, nevertheless a well-intentioned effort to save five lives. Taking this line would, of course, require saying that assessments of which acts are worse than which other acts do not by themselves settle the question what it is permissible for an agent to do.
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Dodging the issue in broad society often makes it worse, but I think in the case of Fortress of Lies dot com, it ends up being more productive to have a mutual understanding of “we’re not debating contentious topics here”. It’s difficult to moderate, it’s frustrating for the people involved (in a way that they would not be frustrated if the topic never came up in the first place), it often consumes entire threads and makes it difficult to have other conversations, etc.
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Can we NOT do ethical dilemmas thread again
TOO LATE
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STOP
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ONTO THE NEXY QUIZ
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More
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There is yet hope for your soul litten