You can cure all cancer globally but 10 innocent people must die. Let me give you two scenarios:
Scenario A: You have what you think is a cure for cancer. (I know the details will get shaky, bear with me). You take 20 prisoners serving life without parole. All prisoners give their consent. You inject them with cancer cells. You have antidote #1 and antidote #2. You do not know which antidote is the cure. But you are fairly certain one of them will work. So you inject 10 prisoners with antidote #1 and 10 with antidote #2. 10 live and 10 die. Of the ten that die 10 million dollars is given to their families.
Scenario B: I have no way to make this example even halfway realistic. You can cure all cancer globally but in order to do so you have to pick 10 people at random to die. No families are rewarded and none of the 10 give their consent. But you cure all cancer globally.
It would need to start getting up to millions of people dieing randomly before it even starts to be questionable to cure all cancer for ever. Right now millions and millions of people die each year from cancer. Those people are chosen pretty much at random now.
I suspect in each case I can get more than ten volunteers, so I’d be fine doing it.
Unless you literally mean in B that a random number generator picks the ten people from the entire world’s population and not volunteers. In that case, B is ethically more ambiguous. Were you to tell me I never would know which ten people I’d caused the deaths of, they just drop dead of unknown causes, I think I’d do it as it increases overall human welfare. Personally I’d have a much harder time doing it if I had to know which ten people died, but I’d grit my teeth and go for it.
In that case, 10 dead strangers is ultimately the same difference to me either way, however I feel like rewarding the families seems unfair to all the other people who have ever died of cancer, or any other way for that matter, without any such renumeration, especially in such a ridiculously large amount. I would consider the 10 sacrifices the proverbial eggshells to the “cancer cure omelette.”
Plus, I’m doubtful of the veracity of the medical science described in Scenario A; I’m pretty sure you can’t actually induce cancer in such a manner, and even if you could, or accomplish it in some other way, my above reasoning still stands.
In incredibly small, yet nonzero ways I already contribute to the deaths of random, mostly foreign people for much less noble reasons. I want cheap oil for my car, my country goes to war for that. I want cheap clothing, and accept that underpaid garment workers in foreign countries will die in fires to provide me with that. I want cheap produce and know that the tradeoff is heatstroke and carcinogen exposure for the people who pick it. I want to upgrade my electronics, even though I know that some of the companies who claim to be recycling my old ones responsibly are sending them to the third world where the toxic metallic components will be processed by children. Why not kill a few strangers for something that actually might have some merit?
Prisoners or rewards don’t matter here, consent does. They are allowed to sacrifice themselves for this cause (or other, such as the reward). So option A, no problem.
The second one is a variation of there is a train traveling on a track that will hit and kill a number of people, you can switch the track but doing so it will hit and kill one person (who would otherwise not get hit). Which I don’t have a good answer for.
If you had to kill the 1,000 cutest kids in the world manually, that’s still preferable by far than cancer. It’s mind blowing that people chose to keep cancer around.
It’s not those ten random people’s fault people get cancer. If you want to cure cancer, do it the right way with science, medical research, and time. The WRONG way to do it is by waving a magic wand the basically involves murdering 10 innocent people.
At least people dying of cancer aren’t being murdered. They’re are merely dying before there time due to the unpredictable nature of this world we live in.
Besides, how do we know that cancer and disease don’t serve a necessary function that allows humankind live in perpetuity?
Now, what if a specific genetic marker is found that predisposes people to cancer? As in, no one without this marker gets cancer despite their lifestyle, although some persons with this gene complex never encounter the trigger for a cancer.
Now, would you be okay with execution or enforced sterilization for the (large) percentage of the world’s population with this genetic marker? By removing it from the gene pool we can eliminate cancer within a generation.
I actually had this thought. That millions of people are now still alive and using resources.
However, on the other hand, their resource consumption is arguably less since they aren’t taking up beds in hospitals, using the energy to actually treat their disease, so it might be negligible at the end of the day.
I also see a lot of “cancer is random and innocent people die anyway” remarks, but what about obvious cancer causing problems like smoking? Does this just give people a free reign to smoke since now the number one reason to NOT smoke has been eliminated?
ETA: I have no doubts that someone, at sometime, created a “All cancer is gone…how does the world change” thread, but it’s an interesting thought on the effect it would have on hospitals, nuclear energy (radiation? Bring it on), smoking industry etc.
If you kill ten people that is a loss of maybe 500 years of life. If you cure cancer that is an addition of tens of millions of years of life per year. Both scenarios a and b are acceptable.