Situation 1 - You are a switch operator at a railroad station. There are five workers on the track working. A run-away train is headed at them. There is nothing you can do to stop the train. The only to save the five workers is to pull the switch and divert the train to another track. On this track there is one worker. If you don’t divert the train and kill the single worker all five of the other workers will be killed. If you do divert the train the single worker will be killed but the other five will live.
Is it ethically permissable to divert the train? Is it ethically right to divert the train.
Situation 2 - You are a doctor of superior skill. You have so much skill that if you perform an organ transplant it is sure to be totally sucessful. You have five patients who all need organ transplants today or they will die. However, you don’t have the organs. Your assitance then tells you the lab results on another patient are back and the lab results are totally clear the patient is a perfect match for all five other patients. If you remove the patients organs he will die but the other five will live. If you don’t remove the organs the single patient will live but the other five will dies.
Is it ethically permissable to take the organs? Is it ethically right to take the organs?
I’m a little unclear on this. For one thing, what organ can be harvested from one person that will benefit five others. For another thing, what’s up with the potential donor? Is he otherwise fairly healthy? Are you asking if I would kill him (likely without his consent)? I believe that normal medical protocol is that you don’t go around killing random strangers for their organs.
Scenario 1: I’d let the train hit the five guys. Even though it’s more guys, I didn’t actively participate in their deaths, whereas the one guy would be killed by me through the process of diverting the train.
Scenario 2: I’d have to let the five people die. Let the chips fall where they may.
Fortunately for the five guys working on the track, railway station operators are not bound by the Hippocratic oath, the first line of which is “First, do no harm.” The one guy working without a buddy is toast.
Second case, it sucks for the five people, but the first guy is busy using his organs and needs them to survive. We aren’t in Larry Niven’s Known Space, so we don’t make a habit of breaking perfectly healthy people up for parts.
One half of me wants to sacrifice the few for the many. That is the logical answer.
The other half has to respect the rights of the single person to not be killed.
A lot of it depends on the situation. The train, I would be more willing to switch to the one guy. It is more impersonal. As the doctor, well, first of all, I swore an oath to not harm anyone, so that rules it out in the first place. But second of all, it is a much more personal interaction.
I don’t know what I’d choose, but they seem to be identical situations to me. In each case, you have the power to choose whether to save five people who will die at the cost of one innocent life. Ethilrist, can you elaborate some more on why you answered each one differently?
The railroad engineer has to choose which set of people to kill. There is a whole huge pile of questions buried behind the basic question of one or five: Why can’t they just step aside, if the train is far enough away that the engineer has time to make the decision? Are they chained to the tracks? Doesn’t the train have a horn or something to warn them with? Why’s the one guy out there working in what is obviously a horribly dangerous working situation alone? In fact, why are any of them out there if this kind of thing can happen? That all gets rolled up into the premise of the situation: the guy at the switch has a death-or-death decision to make. It’s not his job to keep people from dying. That’s out of his hands. It’s his job to decide who dies.
The doctor does not get to choose who dies. Whether or not the five die if they don’t get the organs is not his decision. Whether or not the one guy dies if he takes the organs out is. The doctor is also in an awful working situation. That’s one reason why they have the Oath.
A. Is this all the information that I have to choose from? These six people are total strangers to me? Do I have friends or antagonists among the workers? If the guy working alone also happened to be my after work beer drinking friend, then I let the five others not go. You have to stick up for your buddies. On the other hand, if the one solitary worker has been stealing my lunch out of the break room fridge, then it’s time to dance with the cow catcher. Work decisions are always complicated.
B. I go play golf and let my underlings decide these things. I’m a specialist.
Well, if you’re going to get all practical with this…
(I realize the folly of my first post, one man can donate many organs.) So the donor will probably donate a heart, a liver, two kidneys, and a cornea. Needing a new cornea is not life threatening. You can live indefinitely without kidneys provided you go on dialysis. There’s three lives saved right off the bat. So, kill one man to save two? Not such a great bargain then.
Okay, my last answer was badly worded. Let’s try this.
Does the engineer’s choice change if there are only two possible victims, one on each track? Yes. It becomes a straight coin toss.
Does the doctor’s choice change if there’s only one person who can benefit from the transplant? No, because of the Oath.
So, with the given questions, the engineer is ethically bound to save as many people as possible. The doctor is bound to not use his skills to harm anybody. If he does the operation, he harms the donor. If he doesn’t do the operation, he harms nobody. The five guys die, but it’s not because of something he did. Which, unfortunately, sounds a lot like “I didn’t pull the cat’s tail; I just held it. The cat pulled.”
I like your way of thinking. If you throw the switch just after the first car has passed, you can kill all six in one swell foop. Probably everyone on the train as well. Screw 'em. I’ll bet they all were stealing your lunch. Serves 'em right.
The railroad engineer does not get to choose who dies. Whether or not the five die if the train isn’t diverted from a ‘live’ track is not his decision. Whether or not the one guy dies if the train is suddenly diverted onto what should be a safe track, is. The railroad engineer is actively choosing to harm the lone worker by throwing the switch. if he does nothing, it is not his fault that the train is a runaway.
both situations are the same. how can one be ethically bound to change the outcome of any given situation by changing it’s parameters to harm an innocent instead?
But isn’t the railroad engineer making a choice either way? The decision not to act is as much a choice as the decision to act. Calling it “active” doesn’t change anything as I see the problem. Of course now we’re left with the doctor problem and his active choice to “harvest” organs from a live person. There is where the problem becomes interesting.
I would let the train hit the five guys. That way, the train would hit the five guys intstead of just the one guy. It’ll be easier to get the one guy by himself later.
I wouldn’t take the organs out of the one guy. That way, five guys die instead of just the one guy. Actually, I guess I could take the organs out of the one guy and not put them in anyone. Then I’d get all six guys.
We are supposed to be killing the most guys here we can here, right?
actively going out to murder someone is illegal. actively standing by and doing nothing while someone dies is not illegal (IANAL), depending on where you are. especially if ‘doing something’ means putting someone (including yourself) at risk.
Situation #1, which, as a former railroader I have to say is not entirely realistic*, is cut and dried. The station operator has two options, one of which will do less harm than the other. Since the operator has the power to switch the train onto a track where only one person may die, rather than five, he should do so.
Situation #2 also seems cut and dried. IIRC the Hippocratic oath states “First do no harm”. This, as I understand it, precludes cutting up a healthy person to harvest their organs. Sucks to be the other five.
*Side note from a railroad geek: I worked for a small switching and terminal road for several years in the 70s and observed runaways at least four times when I was on duty. In two cases the runaways were diverted into sidings where the cars could pile up without running into a manned locomotive or derailing in a populated area. In one case the runaway was ‘caught’ by maneuvering a locomotive ahead of it, matching speed until they coupled together, then braking to a stop. In the last case, a trainload of molten blast furnace slag, deliberate derailing was considered too dangerous and a locomotive could not be run ahead of it. Heroic efforts were made (a yardmaster managed to board the unmanned runaway and apply the a couple of hand brakes) to slow it enough that it rolled to a stop when it finally reached a flat stretch of the main.
Track workers and other personnel working trackside ALWAYS have radios tuned to the train operating frequencies and would be warned away as a matter of course. In one case, however, the runaway was diverted into a track that butted up against a maintenence building. The cars ran off the end and demolished the building, in which one man was working, although no one was aware of this at the time the decision to divert was made. He miraculously escaped without injury.
These questions were presented in my Philosophy of Law class back in college, and I believe you’re right. If you change the track and kill the one you can be prosecuted for murder, whereas if you do nothing you can’t be.
The first question us usually presented with a second dilemna : there’s only one track with 5 workers, but you’re standing on a bridge above the tracks just beside a total stranger. If you push the stranger, he will fall from the bridge, and his body (he’s probably very heavy) will block the train, saving the life of the 5 workers.
The second dilemna is quite close to the “harvesting organ” issue (you have to personnally, directly kill someone to save the five other men), except that presented this way, both set up are similar.
Personnaly, I would divert the train and I wouldn’t harvest the organs. It might not be consistent from an intellectual point of view, but what you do (well…at least what I do) tends to be more related to what I feel than to what I think. Not a very useful answer, since it’s not really based on ethics.
By the way, I think people refering the the Hippocratic oath are doing the same mistake than people mentionning that diverting the train would be, legally speaking, a murder. The question isn’t about laws, regulations or oaths.
Rather than waste time playing with railroad switches, I’d be yelling “GET OFF THE TRACKS, YOU IDIOTS!”, probably laced with copious amounts of obscenity.
