Haven’t seen the movie. The reason I consider the passenger a coward is because after denying the pilot the ability to end his life, the passenger then leaves.
Um, no.
If you can’t bring yourself to give someone the means to end their suffering by their own hand, then you provide what care you can, up to and including staying with them and holding their hand while they die. To do otherwise is selfish and cruel.
Me, if I had reason to believe that rescue was coming, I would do my absolute best to talk him out of it. I would render first aid and do everything I could to reduce/relieve his pain. If that wasn’t possible, and death was likely (abdominal wound causing peritonitis, severe anemia and hypothermia, multiple burns/crush injuries causing shock), I would give him the gun. If I thought he wouldn’t be able to do it, I hope I’d have the guts to do it for him.
But there is no way in hell I’d leave another human being to die alone in cold, agony, and fear.
Let’s remember that at the time the young, Catholic (no mercy killing allowed) teens/men were also needing to deal with other dead/dying/injured people. It wasn’t just one mortally injured person in the immediate area.
It’s far too easy to armchair-quarterback this scenario seated in warm and well-fed safety with ample ease in which to contemplate the situation. Not so easy for a young adult having just survived an airplane crash, surrounded by other traumatized, injured, dying, or dead friends and relatives with the cold and the dark closing in.
To me, people who hide behind dogma in order to avoid having to do anything to prevent suffering when they otherwise claim to abhor it are cowards and shitheads.
There was no option for “Take the handgun and leave the guy to die - I’m going to need every bullet later when I make my move to be King of the Wreck!”
Again, I’m stunned at the number of people who claim they will just kill the guy. For each and every one of you, I honestly think that being in the same situation you would make the exact same decision that Canessa did. You’re cold, freezing, disoriented, people are screaming and moaning about you. 10 minutes ago you were warm in a plane, now you’re faced with dead friends and family.
And so… you’re first decision is to start killing the injured?
I gather that Catholics are very deeply imbued with the tenet that suicide / mercy killing, or anything that smacks of same in the slightest = extremely wrong and wicked, and never to be countenanced or enabled. Thoughts prompted, of one of Block’s Matt Scudder thrillers, in which a friend of Scudder’s has terminal cancer, and requests him to get hold of a gun for her, to provide a way out “just in case”. Scudder asks for help in this, of his good friend Mick, a “heavy-duty” career criminal who among other things, has committed a good many murders. Mick was raised strongly Catholic, and remains believing-but-not-practicing (he reckons himself the world’s worst Catholic, almost certainly bound for eternity in hell); hating the idea of doing anything to abet suicide, at however many removes, he is very uneasy about Scudder’s request.
With this sort of mind-set about this particular matter, the reaction and response on the part of the plane passenger is IMO understandable; the guy didn’t handle the situation well, in whatever way things might be viewed – but anathemising him for “hiding behind dogma” seems overly harsh. I’m with Broomstick in considering it appropriate to make allowances for less-than-stellar behaviour on the part of someone young, heavily indoctrinated, and in a traumatic and terrifying situation.
Wasn’t there a team member who was badly injured and they kept him alive throughout the ordeal?
Personally I respect those who stick to their ‘dogma’ even in times of great crisis.
First of all, I didn’t know we were supposed to act like we were part of the crash. In that situation, I don’t know what the hell I would do. But the OP asked us what the correct course of action is and it is always to relieve suffering.
Second, there’s a big difference between what I feel is right and what the guy did in the movie. My morals come from the desire to relieve suffering, and so anyone who doesn’t do that is a shithead in my book. I have no qualms about my morality, it would have been to make sure that the guy doesn’t die a slow painful death. The passenger who refused to help out the pilot, in this case, presumably is for the relief of suffering, he’s just too much of a coward or an intellectual simpleton to do anything to help out, so that makes him a hypocrite.
Third, its not about not handling the situation well, its about being too cowardly, stupid, or a religious fanatic to be able to find a reconciliation for your two conflicting beliefs.
This is what I would consider a way out: The passenger decides at that moment that his religion is not about relieving suffering, that it isn’t even about affecting other human lives at all, but it is solely about following dogma unerringly no matter what. That would make him not a giant hypocrite.
After what he did, in my eyes, he cannot ever consider himself a good person (because that would have meant he’d actually do something about suffering). His only recourse at that point, which he presumably doesn’t take, is to consider himself a follower of dogma. No more pretending like you’re a good person, nice, interested in helping people if all that can be easily ignored when one sentence in a thousand year old book tells you otherwise
Yes, but the scenario wasn’t describing a situation where everybody was warm and comfortable, it was quite clear it was about the immediate aftermath of a very well-documented plane crash in the Andes mountains.
The dogma says that suicide is a mortal sin. Those who commit mortal sins without proper confession/forgiveness go to hell. Suffering for a few hours/days on Earth is nothing compared to suffering for all eternity in hell. I think even you can see that such a person believes they are minimizing the total suffering by doing nothing.
And that’s not even what happened here - hell, the pilot himself was also Catholic*, right? If Catholicism is such an inflexible dogmatic shield that it leaves its adherents little more than mindless automatons, why was the pilot putting his eternal soul in peril by asking this of the passenger, thereby committing suicide in another manner?
What happened is that Canessa reacted like 99%+ of humanity would when faced with this situation - he didn’t start killing the wounded. Faith or dogma or whatever didn’t have anything to do with his decision, simple decency and hope did.
For a stubbed toe…maybe I could restrain myself from killing him.
But for someone obviously in agony with zero chance of survival, killing him is the ONLY compassionate choice. Put the poor guy out of his misery. And the poor woman too broken to be removed from the seat, also in agony? Yeah. I think putting a bullet in her brain was better for her than the 12 hours of agony (and I do mean agony) that preceded her certain miserable death.
Even in better circumstances, their deaths were certain. Medical help, even if it were coming (and they knew it wasn’t) would not have helped.
Yes, someone should have stepped up. I would not put him in the position of having his last desperate act be suicide.
[sub]been a while since I saw the film. I remember her screaming in pain for about 12 hours before she passed, but I could be wrong[/sub]
I guess you don’t know or don’t understand that Catholicism is not always against suffering - indeed, some aspects of it celebrate suffering and claim suffering in this life will be rewarded in the next. I can’t speak for the young man in question, but I could see a devout Catholic rationalizing that a few hours of agony on Earth is more than balanced by an eternity in heaven as a reward for obeying the commands of God.
In such a case the person isn’t a “coward”, a “simpleton”, or a “hypocrite” even if he is operating under a different morality than you are.
This isn’t some scenario from the Far Side Hospital for Injured Horses where daily rounds are conducted with a high powered rifle. If after a horrific accident in which others are killed and badly injured, rescue is hours or more away, and I’m in good enough shape to do something, I am going to try to help the others around me.
And if I encounter a man who is:
trapped
mortally injured
in agonizing pain
freezing AND
begging me to give him the means to take his own life
I would do one of the following things after offering to do everything I could to make him as comfortable as possible:
give him the gun
give him the gun and offer to pull the trigger myself in the hopes that I would be more able to make it a clean, painless death.
You see, I’m not a Catholic. I’m not any sort of Christian. I don’t believe that suicide is a mortal sin, and I don’t believe in eternal damnation or any other kind of damnation. I believe that there are situations when extending life is not a gift or a joy but a cruelty, and one of those situations is when a person is in intractable pain and chooses to die rather than endure more agony. I believe that people are just as deserving of compassion as animals, and that their decision is paramount.
This is not an instance of “killing the injured”, and it’s disingenous to say so. Had he, hypothetically, been in the same circumstances and begged not to die, I would do everything in my power to keep him alive and everything short of harming him to reduce his pain.
Certainly in the chaos after a catastrophe like this there will be points when you simply cannot help another person. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to make it worse. Here’s the moral calculus to me:
BEST: Give the man the gun/offer to kill him yourself (and I’m okay with people disagreeing)
BETTER: Ease his suffering - pain, fear, cold, emotional anguish - as best you can, understanding that you may have to leave him to help others and ensure your own survival, but that you will check on him, talk to him, and come back to him when you can.
.
.
GOOD through BAD: a bunch of other options
.
.
WORSE: Refuse his request, do nothing to help him, and leave him to die alone, freezing, and in agony.
WORST: torture him while he dies.
If a person chooses to endure that kind of suffering because they believe it will be rewarded in the next life, I’m not going to quibble with them. If they choose to endure killing thirst because they believe it makes them a better person, well, okay. It’s not my call. If they decided to suffer severe hunger in the hopes that God will love them more, I’ll shake my head, but I won’t go past that.
It’s when they make that choice for another person that I have an issue. If a man is crying for water because he is parched with thirst, you don’t refuse to give him any water because you believe he’ll be a better person without it. If a man is starving to death, you don’t refuse to push a plate of food towards him because you think God loves a starving man better. And if a person is in so much pain that they beg for the means to end their life, abandoning them without any help at all - even if it’s just the promise to return as soon as you can - is the act of a coward, a hypocrite, a sadist, or a simpleton.
If your plane crashes on a mountain in the Andes, anyone without a head injury is going to understand that the soonest they might be spotted is hours, and rescue would be going on a day or more. In that time, the pilot might or might not die of his injuries, but he would suffer agonizing, intractable pain. He would go into hypothermia, which is its own kind of hell. It’s already so bad, he’s begging for death. Even if you believe there is no such thing as ‘a fate worse than death’, that death is never the preferable choice, it’s not your call to make for him.
And a thought occurred to me:
What if he wasn’t in that much pain? What if he was just scared of being in pain and having no way out? What if all he wanted was the option?
When Oregon approved the law allowing physician-assisted suicide, there were several patients with incurable illnesses and untreatable pain who put in all the paperwork and got all the approvals necessary but then never went through with the suicide. They actually died of their illnesses. It was just that knowing they had an option to escape made it possible to endure what they went through.
What if the pilot, on being given the gun and knowing if it got too bad he could kill himself, managed to hang on until he died of his wounds and/or hypothermia?
I’d ask the pilot whether he was really, really sure he wanted to die. Then I’d pick up the gun and shoot him. I’m thinking that a gun may be very advantageous to me, so after the pilot’s death I’d take it with me. But I wouldn’t like the idea of removing it from the pilot’s death grip. So I’d shoot him, verify that he’s dead, and pocket the gun.