The Trolley Driver and the Loop Variant
The “Trolley Driver” and the “Transplant” are two philosophical cases that propose an ethic question; is it morally permissible to kill one to save five? The cases also look to solve what is morally permissible and what is not. The cases share many common similarities, but subtle differences that cause the “Trolley Driver” to be seen as morally permissible while the “Transplant” is not. The similarities between the cases are; if you intervene, only one person will die. If the trolley driver doesn’t intervene, five people will die. Most people will agree that it is morally permissible in the “Trolley Driver” case to kill the one person instead of killing the other five. Also, most people will agree that
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Using someone as a “mere means” is seen as morally impermissible because someone is being used as a tool to achieve an end goal. “Mere means” is a solution to this problem because it answers the reason why the “Trolley Problem” and why the “Transplant” cause people to perceive them differently. The “mere means” solution puts logic into answering the ethics question by giving reason to why it is morally permissible to kill the one person on the track vs the five men and why it isn’t morally permissible to kill the one person to save the other five. This is because using someone as a “mere means” is seen as morally impermissible. In the “Transplant” case if a perfectly healthy person walks in the doctor’s office and doesn’t leave because the doctor killed him and harvested his organs that would be using the person as a “mere means” to justify not letting the other five people die. Intervening in this situation would be using someone as a mere means. In the “Trolley Driver” case the people are already on the track and are already in danger. So it is permissible to intervene because no one would be used as a tool or “mere
In today’s medical field there is a profuse amount of room for ethical questioning concerning any procedure performed by a medical professional. According to the book Law & Ethics for Medical Careers, by Karen Judson and Carlene Harrison, ethics is defined as the standards of behavior, developed as a result of one’s concept of right and wrong (Judson, & Harrison, 2010). With that in mind, organ transplants for inmates has become a subject in which many people are asking questions as to whether it is morally right or wrong.
Most people would pull the lever to divert the train onto the tracks where only one person is working. To throw the switch in order to maximize well-being, saving five workers corresponds with the ethical example of utilitarianism. Utilitarians believe the most ethical course of action is the one that offers the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
In John Harris' "Survival Lottery", he introduces the idea that if organ transplants were to be perfected (100% success rate with no consequences) would it be morally wrong to implement a system in which two dying patients with organ failure could be saved by taking an innocent healthy person's life and transplanting their organs. Harris' system relies on the basic principle that two lives should be saved at the expense of one so that we may fulfill our obligation of saving the maximum amount of people that is possible. Such a system would raise a plethora of moral and ethical issues, as well as cause unrest in the population, but to dismiss such a beneficial system for saving lives would also be unethical. Thus, I have decided to attempt to
Another of the orphans would grow up to become G.E.M. Anscombe, while a third would invent the pop-top can. If the brain in the vat chooses the left side of the track, the trolley will definitely hit and kill a railmano n the left side of the track, "Leftie", and will hit and destroy ten beating hearts on the track that could (and would) have been transplanted into ten patients in the local hospital that will die without donor hearts. These are the only hearts available, and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows hearts. If the railman on the left side of the track lives, he too will kill five men, in fact the same five that the railmano n the right would kill. However, "Leftie" will kill the five as an unintended consequence of saving ten men: he will inadvertently kill the five men rushing the ten hearts to the local hospital for trans-
In Peter Singer’s essay “The Singer Solution to World Poverty”, published on September 5th, 1999 in The New York Times Magazine, Singer claims that the solution to world poverty is for Americans to donate excess income to aid organizations. His article consists of a gathering of exaggerated situations which he uses to engage readers, while also adequately supporting an argument of moral duty by comparing the hypothetical scenarios to Americans who do not donate. Singer exhibits an appeal to pathos to a substantial amount throughout his article. The provided situations set an outline for the reader to feel certain, appealing emotions.
Bob could have sacrificed his prized Bugatti by throwing the switch, but instead he chose to forfeit a child’s life. To most people what Bob did was wrong. Nevertheless, is what Bob did morally wrong? Lets look at what that car represented to Bob. To Bob that car
The final situation is a little bit more complicated because it is much like the previous case where you can save five or save one, except this has a certain twist to it. In this case, someone has a choice to do absolutely nothing and watch an out of control trolley speed down a hill and kill five people tied to the track. The other choice would be for the person to flip a switch to save the five, but they would be killing one other person that is tied to the other side of the track. This bystander situation is much like the first case where the Judge was going to frame an innocent person to save the five. In this case, all six people have the negative right to live and not be harmed. We can assume that they have done nothing wrong and that they are tied to the tracks for no apparent reason. For this reason, it goes back to the duties discussed earlier. Everyone has a negative duty not to harm other people. The
The leading premise claimed by Singer is a simple thought that provides clear direction or suggestion of one’s moral implication: "if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out" (Taylor, 2009). We can assume that no matter one's ethical views, wading into the water is nothing in comparison to the death of a child. The impact of Singer's argument relies on a carefully worded, yet agreeable set of claims that has a range of reasonable objections. Singer emphasizes the use of common sense in making judgments about moral and ethical choices and does this by daring the reader to question their own views of morality.
The trolley problem can be expanded to discuss a number of related ethical dilemmas, all referring to the conflicts inherent in utilitarianism and consequentialist ethics. The problem with the trolley driver scenario is that the driver is faced with a choice of whether to infringe on the rights of one man (the man on the tracks) or whether to allow the trolley to crash, thereby killing the five people on board. The driver is stuck between two equally unfortunate situations, and the issue calls into question whether it is more ethical to save five lives than it is to refrain from infringing on the life on an innocent man. Inherent to the problem is the fact that it is impossible to know whether the diversion of the trolley will in fact save the five lives.
The Trolley Problem is a scenario possessing two similar versions that begs the question of whether or not it is ethical to kill a person in order to save five. In both versions of this problem, there is a trolley approaching a track with people tied down. In the first version there are two tracks; the first with five people tied down and the other with one person tied down, as the train is approaching the five people. Beside the track there is a switch
“The principle of nonmaleficence states that we should act in ways that do not inflict evil or cause harm to others” (Morrison, 2011). Specifically, we should not cause preventable or intentional harm. The principle of nonmaleficence can be applied to transplant allocation because the modern array of medical interventions has the capacity to do good or harm, or both, thereby involving principles of nonmaleficence. An example of this would be the procurement of an organ though exploitation of payment to the
Would you put your own life at risk to save someone else? What if they had a low chance of survival, and it was likely that the both of you would die? Many people would say yes. Ultimately, one has to look at this situation through the lense of an ethics approach, and which one is best for the situation. The short story “Bread” by Margaret Atwood describes different ethical dilemmas in which the reader is given different scenarios in which they must make a choice that can only come by deciding what their ethics are. Five different ethical approaches are described in the article “A Framework for Thinking Ethically”, which describes the meaning of ethics and the different viewpoints surrounding the topic. Out of these different approaches highlighted in “A Framework for Thinking Ethically”, the utilitarian approach along with the virtue approach would be best for solving the dilemmas presented in “Bread”.
A man is riding an elephant down a road, the elephant will lean a direction and the rider tends to steer him there. Sometimes when the elephant doesn’t know where to go the man will choose the way, and sometimes when the rider won’t or can’t steer the elephant will choose the path. But at some point there comes a fork in the road, and the elephant refuses to go down either, having to choose, the rider analyzes his choices. Down one path is a brood of vipers, which could kill the elephant, but the man would live, and down the other is a pride of lions, which could kill the man, but not the elephant. The man has two bad choices to make, he needs the elephant to get him where he is going, but to spare the elephant he would end up dead. I used a metaphor penned by Jonathan Haidt in his book, “The Righteous Mind” as a basis for my own metaphor of a moral conundrum. He uses an elephant to describe our intuition and the rider to represent our reasoning. What to do with the chronic homeless is a question with no truly moral answer, people won’t agree
In this paper, I will explicate how a Utilitarian and a Kantian would understand the Trolley Problem and describe why I consider the Utilitarian approach to fare better in the case of the Trolley Problem. On one hand, a Utilitarian, a believer in the philosophy of Utilitarianism, believes that a morally admirable action is one that helps the maximum number of people. A Kantian, on the other hand, is a believer and follower of the Kantian ethics, which fundamentally preach that the correctness or wrongness of one’s actions depends on if one carries out one’s duty, and not on the consequences of one’s actions. In order to further understand the perspectives of these two philosophies, I will explain how they would comprehend the Trolley Problem, which is, essentially, a theoretical moral predicament where a trolley is speeding down a railway track and five people are tied to the track and a bystander has two options: either pull a lever, divert the train to an alternate railway track with one person on it and kill that one person and save five people, and thus intentionally commit homicide, or the bystander doesn’t pull the lever and lets five people die, therefore submissively allowing five deaths.
The last dilemma faced is whose life is of more value, those who use the bridge for transportation or those who use it for suicide. This is a dilemma because “the screen might create dangerous wind resistance and make the bridge structurally unstable,” which increases the risk of those who use the bridge for transportation (111). Although this risk is undoubtedly small, it still places a vastly larger amount of people in danger. This is known because there is an “average of 20 to 25 [deaths] per year” by suicide, yet a larger number of vehicles, which have the possibility of containing more than one passenger, pass over the bridge every minute ("Traffic/Toll Data" 1). The resulting dilemma is whether one should slightly increase the risk for millions of people in order to drastically decrease the risk for an individual. By Utilitarianism, you should choose the action that decreases the risk the most for the largest number of people, but due to not being able to truly quantify the risk, the decision remains unclear. An ethical dilemma does not have a distinct solution as no action is completely without an error in morality, in order to achieve a good outcome, it is essential to dissect the issue and identify the primary stakeholders.