Desert island discourse

Great Debates
1

Here I am, shipwrecked on a desert island.

Waits a little crossly for the applause, cheering, whistling and cries of “Not before time!” to die down

Not really. But let’s imagine. Also shipwrecked, and the sole survivor besides myself, is a small child, gender unimportant, well below the age of reason and utterly dependent upon me faut de mieux. It can be cute or ugly, according to your predilections; it shouldn’t matter which.

I have, to the best of my understanding, about six months to wait for rescue. In the meantime, I shall have to make shift to keep myself alive, but I can probably manage. Question is, do I have to keep the kid alive, or do I have the option to put it out of its (or my) misery? There’s no doubt that I can do it, and what’s more I can make it mercifully quick, and the poor thing certainly won’t know what’s coming except, possibly, for about the last half-second of consciousness.

Is the case altered at all if it will cost me significant labour to look after the child? If it will harm my health to do so? If it’s driving me crazy (informally)? If I might be able to get myself off the island quicker if I don’t have the child to look after? If I stand to lose money on the undertaking?

In addition to the above, what about if it’s my own son? If I actively took steps to keep him off the ship, but was circumvented? If I didn’t know he was there? If I brought him aboard of my own free will?

Discuss away.

2

I would feel a moral responsibility to protect the helpless in this case. What point in being human if you don’t?

3

AFAIK, you’re not legally obliged to offer sustenance to strangers, but the whole world will think you an utter bastard if you don’t (at least in the case of yourself and a helpless child on a desert island).

4

My own gut reaction is that I would hold myself in contempt if I did not do my utmost to keep this scrap of marginally-qualifying humanity alive until, at minimum, someone could take it off my hands. Still, gut reactions aren’t reasoned arguments. Are there any to be taken into consideration, pro or con? Or do I just act according to my whim?

5

Under US law, you don’t have the option of putting the child out of its misery, which would be murder.

If the child is unrelated to you, and you didn’t voluntarily assume a duty (“Please, mister, take care of my daughter… glub glub glub drown…”) then you have no legal obligation to care for the child, as a general principle. But that would mean letting the child die of thirst, not actively killing her.

If you’re out of reach of US law, then, obviously, you would look to the legal principles that covered where you were.

As a matter of humanity, of course, you’d be obligated to care for the child.

6

What are you looking for here? Any reasonable framework of morality would have you offer all reasonable assistance to the kid, but (AFAIK) the law recognises that compelling an individual to offer support to strangers might mean forcing him to sacrifice his own safety and/or wellbeing. You should help the kid, if you can, but you do so of your own volition.

7

Hmmm…interesting situation, I tend to agree, though, that you arre under a moral responsibility to care for it, if nto a legal one. But ‘putting it out of it’s misery’ can be illegal dependingo n where you are. Now, let’s add an addendum to the situation:

What if, somehow, youknew for sure that there was only enough water/food for one of you. You can either

a) keep it all yourself, let the kid die of dehydration/starvation
b) give it to the kid, sacrificing yourself nobally
c) keep it to yourself, but this time, you do put him out of his misery, to save him from suffering?
d) try as best you can so split the supplies, so each of you lasts longer than if you had none, but you both still die before rescue

Now, I know it’s pretty much impossible to know 100% for sure that you don’t have enough supplies to last till rescue, but somehow God gives you a visiopn, and you know that at elast one of you has to die. No matter what, at least one will die. What do you do?

For me, at least, b is a dumb option. Once you’re gone, the kid can’t fend for himself, so he will die anyways. In that respect, d seems dumb too, since why should both of us die? Now, a seems like the normal thing to do, but again, it can be hard to witness someone suffering like that, especially when you’re eating/drinking right in front of him and he’s wondering why he gets none. But then again, killing an innnocent child just so you can eat seems cruel, as well.

Myself? Well, I’d probably do d anyways, just because I don’t think I’d beleive that there was no way we could both not survive. But if for whatever reason, all logic was defied and I did know one of us had to die, I would go for a, and maybe give the kid a little, but not enough water, jsut so it looks like to him am trying. I don’t think I could bring myself to bash in a kid’s head with a rock, even if I knew in the long run it might be better.

8

Failure to do your utmost to keep both of you alive and whole would be to fail as a human being. An adult you could abandon to their own fate - a child you cannot. There is no other option.

9

This would be legal? Really? Let’s say I’m smack dab in the middle of America, and an avalanche killed off everyone at my ski resort except me and a child I’ve never met and have no blood relation to, while a blizzard is preventing help from arriving. If I had plenty of food and drink, but simply didn’t give the child any, and the child died from dehydration, I couldn’t be indicted for anything?

10

That’s a great line and a great summation.

11

The reasoned rationale for the helpless infant’s presumed claim on me for succour and sustenance (if it has one), any circumstances short of guaranteed death for myself that might excuse me failing to provide such, that sort of thing.

bouv’s scenario about the food and drink makes sense, given one rider: Having stated the extreme youth of the infant, it probably requires disproportionate effort to prepare food for it - disproportionate to the amount eaten, I mean. I can get by on coconut meat and raw shellfish for an appreciable time, as an adult in tolerable good health and a useful percentage of body fat, but the kid can’t. It’s quite feasible that I’d have to work twice as hard to feed it as well as myself.

Regardless of the legal position on euthanasia, in this particular instance I’d call it spineless to let a babe die slowly of thirst, btw. I think the least I would owe it in humanity’s name would be a quick and painless end - and I say this out of no love of the prospect of actually doing so (especially looking at the photo on my desk of my two sons).

Addendum: For those who argue that I should care for the child, imagine that while being otherwise unable to help, you have the power to prevent me killing it. Do you exercise that power?

12

I’m unaware of any law imposing such a duty.

13

Bricker, you might know this. I recall a case about three or four men who were marooned on a lifeboat, and they decided that someone must be killed to provide food for the others. While one slept, someone clobbered him and the others ate him.

If I recall the story correctly, the remaining men were convicted of manslaughter, and the judge ruled that it would not have been illegal to kill one man so that the others might live, the problem was that they did it while the man slept. I believe there was something about the ruling that if the men had drawn lots, there would have been no way that the other men would be punished.

I know I’m probably not getting this right, but is there some legal principle stemming from this that might be relevent to the OP’s case?

14

Frankly I don’t find these “lifeboat scenarios” to be useful tools for framing moral problems, but I think **JC **summed up exactly what my response would be to this one.

15

Unless the baby needs to nurse, I don’t see why you’d need any particular extra effort to prepare food for her. If she can’t chew, just chew the food yourself and give her the pre-chewed food. This is done all over the world and is common mammalian behavior. The baby will think it’s normal.

And small children don’t require very much food compared to the caloric requirements of a active healthy adult. A situation where you’d both starve if you fed her, but you’d live if you starved her would be extremely unlikely. Just cut your rations by 10-20%. If the food situation is so dire that a 20% cut in rations is likely to kill you then you are likely to starve to death anyway.

And lastly, are you a man, are you a human being, or a mechanism for converting food into shit? Why bother converting oxygen to CO2, why bother going on? When you die, you’re gone forever. You only get one shot at life. If you’re gonna be a shitheel, why bother? Why not just put yourself out of your misery right now, and save the rest of us the trouble? So what if by killing a baby you got to breathe for a few more years? Is it really that important? You’re gonna be dead for exactly as long as you’d be dead if you’d have saved her: forever. You’ve got nothing to lose by acting like a human being instead of an insect.

16

Unless the baby needs to nurse, I don’t see why you’d need any particular extra effort to prepare food for her. If she can’t chew, just chew the food yourself and give her the pre-chewed food. This is done all over the world and is common mammalian behavior. The baby will think it’s normal.

And small children don’t require very much food compared to the caloric requirements of a active healthy adult. A situation where you’d both starve if you fed her, but you’d live if you starved her would be extremely unlikely. Just cut your rations by 10-20%. If the food situation is so dire that a 20% cut in rations is likely to kill you then you are likely to starve to death anyway.

And lastly, are you a man, are you a human being, or a mechanism for converting food into shit? Why bother converting oxygen to CO2, why bother going on? When you die, you’re gone forever. You only get one shot at life. If you’re gonna be a shitheel, why bother? Why not just put yourself out of your misery right now, and save the rest of us the trouble? So what if by killing a baby you got to breathe for a few more years? Is it really that important? You’re gonna be dead for exactly as long as you’d be dead if you’d have saved her: forever. You’ve got nothing to lose by acting like a human being instead of an insect.

17

So am I. It just seems that there should be some crime being committed here. Time for a GQ thread, I think.

18

Two famous examples of this, The Queen Vs Dudley & Stevens and United States v. Holmes

Details here as part of an essay about the whole kill-one-to-save-many issue.

19

I attended a talk by an anthro prof who had collected all the lifeboat cannibalism reports he could find. In virtually all cases, the survivors reported drawing lots to select the eatee(s). By a truly remarkable coincidence, said eatees turned out to be either the youngest and weakest member of the group, or of a different ethnic group than the majority.

20

unoffended smile

Well, I’ve already made my position clear, as you’ll have seen when you read this thread. I was after a reasoned discussion of the issues. It seems like one possible answer is: you should certainly do this, or you are a shitheel, an insect, one who deserves to die before the rest of humanity do the job for me. I find this more of a piece of rhetoric than a logical argument. I hope you see why.

Who knows what I mean to do with the rest of my years? What of my dependents elsewhere when I return to civilisation? Why do you write the rest of my life off as of no consequence?