crouching_sin | [Anon] [Text]

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[Anon] [Text]

Here's a question for you all. It's something that I read a while back, and I'm interested in your answers. Anonymous is fine, if you want.

There are five patients in a hospital. All of them are dying due to complications with various organs. All of them will die within the next day or so if they don't get an organ transplant. Magic won't save any of them, incidentally, if you were hoping to use that.

A young backpacker comes into the hospital or a checkup. He has no relatives, and he is in excellent health. As it happens, you, the surgeon on duty, notice that he is a perfect match for all five of the patients.

Assuming the backpacker does not give consent, is it morally permissible to cut him up and transfer the organs to the other patients? These are not organs that the backpacker can live without, so he'll die if you do.

I'm interested to hear what you think.

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This is a variant of the "runaway trolley" problem, isn't it? Five young children on the tracks with a runaway trolley bound straight towards them, and you have the possible option of pushing a single large man into the way, because his size will be enough to effectively stop the train. Yours has slightly different trappings, but it's effectively the same question — five saved for the sake of one lost, and is the morally correct answer the one that results in the greatest sum total of preserved lives, regardless of the means used to get there.

My question is, at what point did the surgeon on duty decide it was his right to play god?

That's correct. A student of philosophy, I see.

Don't doctors play God all the time, though? Patient lives hang in the balance every day and people live or die based on his actions or inactions.

Doctors are also charged to "first do no harm" as they make those decisions. And it's hard to justify murder under an ethical charge to do no harm.

True. The ambiguity is a bit more clear in your example... but it's interesting to see people react to the doctor example since doctors are generally held to be respected individuals in communities. So the response to the question is generally much more extreme.

It's obvious you're testing to see how people react, as opposed to advancing any particular side for yourself.

What is it you're trying to discover, exactly?

For one, knowing how people judge morality is amusing, if nothing else. It also helps when it comes to figuring out just what sort of thing a person will react badly to in the future. So it's just statistics, for now. I can't battle all the time.

You aren't concerned that it goes both ways?

There's a reason I'm on anonymous.

Anonymity isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Sometimes, but it's useful.

At least until you give away too many tells. Then its use ends up becoming moot.

That's true. But identities are easy to make.

And yet in the end, they're still only identities. Some things never change.

Of course. But masks are easily changed.

Meaning, you have no identity whatsoever save for whatever is most convenient at any given moment?

That's a sorry way to live.

I have my own identity, but I choose to bring it to bear on decisions as I choose. I've seen too many people destroyed by trying to fit their feelings where their feelings don't need to go.

And you think that perfect objectivity will get you further ahead in life?

It's gotten me further than most, though I admit that I don't know what other worlds are like.

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