Is it acceptable to kill an imprudent pedestrian in order to avoid letting five severely injured people, whom you are rushing to the hospital, die?
SCENARIO 1: FAILURE TO RENDER ASSISTANCE TO A PERSON IN DANGER
You are dashing to hospital with, in your car, five people who have been seriously injured in an explosion. Every second counts! If you waste too much time, they will die.
All of a sudden, you see by the roadside the victim of a terrible accident, who is bleeding profusely.
You could save this person too, if you were to load her into your vehicle. If you fail to do this, the victim of this accident will certainly die. But if you do stop, you will waste time, and the five persons being rushed to hospital will die.
Should you stop even so?
SCENARIO 2: KILLING THE PEDESTRIAN
You are dashing to hospital with, in your car, five persons who have been severely injured in an explosion. Every second counts! If you waste too much time, they will die. But all of a sudden, you see in the middle of the road a pedestrian crossing in an imprudent fashion. If you brake you will skid and waste time, and the five persons being rushed to hospital will die. If you do not brake, you will kill the pedestrian. Should you brake even so?
1The hypothesis of the philosophers who invented or commented upon this experiment is that the majority of people will reckon that these two cases are not morally equivalent.
They will be more indulgent toward the driver who leaves a wounded person by the roadside to die than toward the one who kills a pedestrian, even though the consequences are exactly the same.
Is this difference in moral approach justified?
The philosophical debate surrounding the distinction between killing and letting die provides us with a few pointers for our attempt to answer this question.
2KILLING AND LETTING DIE
For some consequentialists, there is not a profound moral difference between killing and letting die. The outcome is the same in either case, since the victim dies.
Aretists (the friends of virtue ethics) and deontologists (the friends of Kant, among others) are not in agreement. For the aretist, you have to be a horrible individual to kill with your own hands (or with your own steering wheel), whereas anyone, or nearly anyone, can let a person die by way of calculation or through negligence without their being particularly morally repugnant.
3 Hence the harsh reaction toward someone who kills and the relative indulgence shown to someone who lets a person die.
But this explanation turns the moral distinction between killing and letting die into a psychological difference, which may pose a problem for those who take the two to be radically opposed.
It is on the basis of the criterion of intention that the deontologist distinguishes between killing and letting die. According to the deontologist, we cannot settle for evaluating an action in terms of its consequences without taking intentions into account. If we could do so, we would no longer be able to distinguish between killing someone by cutting him or her in half with a chainsaw, with the intention of punishing him or her (because he or she has not paid their debts, for example), and fleeing the scene of this horrible crime without attempting to bring succor to the victim, with the intention of saving one’s own life.
Intention possessing a central moral value for the deontologist, he will naturally ascribe such an importance to the distinction between killing and letting die, and reject the consequentialist’s skepticism regarding the question.
Yet there are cases in which we can readily see the difference between killing and letting die, but with greater difficulty discern the difference in intention.
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1. You are impatient to inherit from your uncle. You find him on his own and at home, lying in his bath, the victim of a heart attack. A doctor could still save him. You do not call a doctor. It is clear that, without killing your uncle, you are letting him die. It is also clear that you wish to get rid of him so that you can inherit.
2. You are impatient to inherit from your uncle. You crush him with your car. It is clear that you are not content to let him die. You are killing him. It is also clear that you wish to get rid of him so that you can inherit.
If the deontologist remains on the plane of intention, how can he distinguish between the first case, which is an example of letting someone die, and the second, which is an example of killing, since the intention informing the action is the same, namely, getting rid of the uncle in order to inherit?
More generally, that is to say, independently of consequentialist, aretist, or deontological explanations, we may wonder whether it is possible to save the moral distinction between killing and letting die in cases in which the effort required in order to not let someone die is negligible.
What moral difference would there be between killing a child and letting the child die, if we could save the child simply by clicking once on our computer?
5Even the deontologists and aretists would have to admit that, in such cases, the moral distinction between killing and letting die is nonexistent.
In order to persevere with the same line of argument, or, in other words, in order to show that the conflict between consequentialists, deontologists, and aretists over the distinction between killing and letting die could be transcended, we might venture the hypothesis that this conflict does not depend upon the principles involved but
upon the point of view adopted when describing the action.
In reality, when philosophers address the distinction between killing and letting die, they often adopt the agent’s perspective: ambulance drivers in a hurry, unscrupulous heirs, or doctors whose patients are suffering from terminal illnesses. From this point of view, the difference between killing and letting die does often appear glaringly obvious.
Yet if we put ourselves in the victim’s or the patient’s shoes, things look quite different: the pertinence of the distinction between killing and letting die becomes less obvious.
Thus, for the terminally ill patient who wishes to go on living, it matters little whether the doctors intervene actively in order to cause him to die or whether they let him die by terminating the care that was keeping him alive. The patient wants neither the one nor the other option. He judges both of them to be equally bad. From his point of view as a patient who does not want to die, the moral difference is nonexistent.
The same argument should apply to the case of a terminally ill person who
no longer wants to live. It matters little whether the doctors intervene actively in order to cause him to die or whether they let him die by curtailing the treatment that was keeping him alive. The patient
wants either option. He judges both of them to be equally good. From his point of view as a patient who no longer wishes to live, the moral difference is nonexistent.
6If the above hypothesis is correct, we might then wonder: if there is no moral difference for the patients, why should there be one for the doctors?
