should we kill healthy people for their organs?

If Bill is a perfectly healthy man with no friends or family, and his organs could save 5 people... Should we kill him and sacrifice the one to save five?

Imagine you are on a train hurtling down a track. On the track in front of you there are five people tied. You have a choice to divert the train down a different branch where there is only one person tied... What do you do?

It would seem that diverting the train would be the obvious choice, but then why is Bill any different?

nzlockie: Philosophical sub-issue. Is Bill's inaction really responsible for the deaths of those 5 people? Or could somebody else be donating those organs? Does that mean Bill has any duty of responsibility towards those 5 people at all?

admin: Yes I think these are the important questions.

The flaw I find with the initial premise is that Bill is not responsible for the deaths of these other people. In the Train scenario and also in another scenario where a Kidnapper gives a group of people the option of sacrificing one for execution to save five - is that in those scenarios, the deaths are all linked to the survivors.

I think that if we were to be truely unified, a "hive" mentality, like the Borg, then this philosophical issue would be far easier resolved.
The fact that despite our vocal support to unity, community and working together for the greater good, humans still have a limit on how far that extends.

What if we changed the wording of the initial premise and said, "Should Bill allow himself to be killed so that his organs can be harvested and save the other 5?"? (Awkward question mark protocol there! Not sure what the correct thing to do was!)

nzlockie: (Usually you don't need punctuation to end a sentence if a quote ends with punctuation, which would include your second question mark - even if the containing sentence is also a question, or worth exclaiming etc. Or maybe it's changed, that's just how I learnt it at school)

Interesting flaw. I would actually disagree with you. In my ethical view, we actually do need to look out for others even if we do not cause their suffering, because we have this thing called compassion, which is kind of like an automatic duty of responsibility to everybody. It's the whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" story. So I don't personally believe this can be dismissed as easily as "he didn't cause it". The question for me really is whether I accept the utilitarian calculation that five lives are worth more than one. I would say it's pretty certain Bill bears some responsibility for any outcome, though, because compassion inherently means even his inaction causes an impact.

That being said, we are not the Borg. The utilitarian calculation there is thus not one everybody would automatically accept, and probably for good reason. The assumption of all utilitarianism is that what makes us most satisfied is what's most ethical for us to do, but I don't really accept that this is true, nor that it's sufficiently measurable to be quantified like a 5:1 ratio. But then what else can Bob do to resolve the issue? It's a pretty difficult question.