Is it acceptable to kill a person who is in good health in order to transplant his organs into five patients with a life-or-death need of them?
SCENARIO 1
A highly gifted surgeon, specializing in the transplanting of organs, is caring for five patients who risk imminent death if they do not undergo a transplant. The first needs a heart, the second a kidney, the third a liver, the fourth a stomach, and the fifth a spleen. They all have the same blood type, a very rare one. By chance, our surgeon happens upon the medical file of a young man in excellent health, who likewise has this blood type. It would not be difficult for the surgeon to inflict a gentle death upon him, and then to remove his organs and through them to save the lives of the five patients.
What should he do: cause the death of the young man or let the five others die?
1SCENARIO 2
The highly gifted surgeon is tired. He prescribes in error product X to five patients, the horrifyingly negative effects of which differ, however, from one patient to another. In two of them, it affects the kidneys, in another, the heart. In the fourth, it is the liver, in the fifth, the lungs.
On account of the surgeon’s fatal negligence, all five patients urgently need an organ transplant.
If the surgeon, who is directly responsible for their state, fails to find any organs to transplant, he will have killed five patients.
However, if he sacrifices the young man, he will only have killed one person.
Is that a sufficient reason to give the surgeon moral permission to sacrifice the young man?
Is it not less immoral to kill one person rather than five, taking everything else into account?
The hypothesis of the philosophers who invented these thought experiments is that most people will judge the surgeon to be committing a morally monstrous act, were he to sacrifice the young man along the lines of scenario 1. He should let his five patients die.
It would be just as monstrous, according to the philosophers, to sacrifice the young man along the lines of scenario 2.
It seems obvious to them that, if the surgeon fails to find any other solutions, he should let the five patients die. Given the surgeon’s personal responsibility for their plight, this would mean that he would have killed them. In other words, he should resign himself to having killed five persons when he could have killed only one.
But if killing is a far more serious thing than letting die, how can we come to the conclusion that it is better, morally, to kill five persons rather than just one?
Is that not absurd?
