Scenario One: save the five, I’m a hero. yay! What do you mean there was a guy on the other line. He was meant to be with the five, wasn’t he guys?
Scenario Two: Whatever my superiors tell me to do. If they choose to save the five I’d make sure I was in the canteen surrounded by witnesses when the “donor” died so I would be in the clear for his untimely death.
A friend of mine is a doctor and she says that the Hippocratic oath is not used these days.
Scenario Two: Whatever my superiors tell me to do.
You would have been popular with a few dictators I could name …
For the train scenario, I’d let the train run as is. The five guys have 10 eyes and ears to notice the oncoming train and could jump out of the way if any one of them saw or heard it. The best chance to save all six is to allow the train to hurtle towards the group of five.
The doctor scenario is a no brainer. You get to keep your own organs as long as you’re still using them. A better debate might be a terminally ill donor and you can either prolong his life by a week or hasten his death to save five others.
That’s the whole point!
From the OP:
There’s nothing there about the patient being an organ donor, or volunteering to sacrifice himself.
Now I know why I don’t spend much time in GD…
Ahh the miracle of the constrained ethical dilemma. That illusive scenario where there is only one variable which will decide between life and death. Much like Kirk and the Kobiyashi Maru test, I do not accept the parameters of the “no-win” scenario.
The workers are chained to the tracks or something? Are they deaf and blind students on a work-study program? Send the train where it’s supposed to go - some siding where it won’t be at risk of crashing into an oncoming Acella train or something (oh wait! Maybe the siding leads up to an orphanage or somthing?). It’s up to the idiots working the tracks to get out of the way of the locomotive.
The answer should be as obvious as the impossibility of the scenareo. Five organ transplants, all need to be done today, all so rare that no organs can be found, except for one poor shmoe who happens to match all five? Assuming that this incredible situation actually happens, it might be more of an ethical challange if the magic doner was in a permenant vegitative state or something.
I’d divert the train, to save the five guys and kill the one.
Your second question is more complicated. If I were a guy who had gone to medical school and taken the oath I would be obligated to let the five guys die. However, you don’t say that.
You simply state that “Your a doctor of superior skill.” Since we are already in la-la hypothetical land, why can’t this mean that I just woke up one day as a doctor of superior skill? This would mean that I didn’t take any oath and don’t even have to worry about my medical insurance or such things. In this case, I would probably do it. Unless the organ donor owed me money, of course. 
Another question:
Same doctor, same scenario above, only this time, the potential organ donor is in the process of dying. Do you save his life, or do you let him die and then farm out the organs? (Remember, you rule as a doctor, and can definitely save his life).
I still say you save his life; at the same time, I say you throw the switch. There’s no ethical difference between inaction and action: in both cases, you’re making a choice of how to behave, and your choices have forseeable consequences.
I’m not sure I can explain why I’d choose this way, though. I do believe it has something to do with intent: in the train case, I save five lives (and one person dies as a result, whereas in the doctor case, I kill one person (and five people live as a result). It may also have to do with ownership: I can’t take something from one person and give it to another person if this removal results in the first person’s death.
Daniel
I like your addendum LHofD if the potential donor was dieing what do you do. Or what if two people are dieing only one can be saved and are both potential donors, but one has a donor card and the other has not, does this effect who you chose to save? Should it?
The original question wasn’t presented that way. This is a hypothetical question designed to elicit a response given an unchangeable set of circumstances.
Here’s my answer: The only choice here is how many people die. One can do nothing, thereby causing a greater number of people to die, or one can take action (throw the switch), thereby causing a smaller number of people (one) to die. There are no unknowns. Those are the only two possibilities. In that case, I choose to throw the switch so that the one rail worker is killed. I have not actively made a decision that leads to death – I have chose to alter an event in progress so that it results in less death.
Yep. We can’t kill people and cut out their organs just 'cause someone else needs them. I even reject the terminally ill donor scenario presented here. That’s a very slippery slope. We’re all terminally ill, so to speak. My life expectancy is probably significantly lower than yours 'cause I’m a two-pack-a-day smoker. That still doesn’t give you or anyone else the right to my organs (not that they’d want my lungs, I guess). If they’re not dead, or at least brain-dead, their organs are theirs and nobody has any say in the matter.
Tangential Ethics question – is it OK to post a well-known ethical dilemma with no citations, possibly leading people to think that you made it up?
Do we know in advance whether plowing a train into a group of workers will leave their organs intact? Because then we could solve multiple ethical dilemmas at the same time.
In scenario 1, I would quickly attempt to develop powerful telepathy skills in order to contact the giant squid lords of the deep, who could then ascend and rapidly intervene to stop the train before any of the workers were harmed.
In the second case, I would fold time and space in such a way that I could merely trace copies of the necessary transplant organs, using a tri-dimensional cellular pencil.
Hmmm…Even if sticking to the oath had unintended unethical consequences?
I would say personnally that the oath is only compelling in expected situation. If you dind’t realize what it could result in when you took it, then I think you’re not ethically compelled to follow it. Actualy, even if the consequences were realatively easy to figure out, but you were too dumb to figure them out, for instance.
Anyway, one can always change his mind over the course of one’s life, so I don’t think oaths should be taken that seriously. Let’s suppose that as a teenager, you joined some white supremacist group, and swore to abide by the values they stand for. Would you feel compelled to stick to it when you’re 30 and have totally changed your mind about racial issues? Of course, you could say that an oath which was unethical in the first place shouldn’t be considered as valid, but if you’re in a situation where respecting a mostly ethical oath has unethical consequences, wouldn’t you be in the same situation.
These are are some of the reasons why I just don’t like oaths (another reason, just out of my head : I would find perfectly ethical to swear something with the full knowledge that I do not intend to keep my word, if it results in a greater good in my own moral opinion.)
Anyway, people swear a lot of things without taking it seriously. For instance when they marry in a church, then divorce some years later. Or in your country, this ludicrous “alliegeance to the flag” thing, like 7 y.o. are going to understand what such words actually entails.
I refused to swear anything since I went past my teens. Not that I’ve often been asked to do so…
I didn’t mean to imply I created these situations. I thought they were well known enough that people wouldn’t think I wrote them, as if I posted a debate about the chicken and the egg.
Is the original author of this known?
It turns out that the one guy on the tracks has five viable organs which could save the lives of five patients, while the five other guys on the tracks are all heavy drinkers and smokers and their organs are not suitable for transport.
Don’t ask me how you know all this; it’s the mystery of the dilemma. Of course, in addition to the situation as described, hovering overhead in their invisible spaceship are a bunch of mind-reading aliens who have a compulsive need to balance things. Thus, if you manage to come up with a viable line of reasoning to decide one way or the other, they’ll use their advanced alien technology to restore parity, possibly by making one of the potential victims a future serial killer or cancer cure discoverer.
Personally, I maintain that shouting “Move, you dumbfucks!” would offer the most long-term satisfaction.
Maybe start with those who can’t differentiate between the dative and the nominative case.
What is this exercise supposed to demonstrate anyway? Are we supposed to be shocked at our inability to answer identically in both cases (if that is what we actually do)? Why? Clearly they aren’t identical situations (at least subjectively, for many people), or we would have no trouble answering the same for both.