Old Ethical Dilema

[Slothy]

I do not think it is so simple. You are still condemning a life.

You're not condemning a life actually. Assuming the two possibilities detailed in the questions are the only ones, one person is condemned already. Your choice is whether you'll save four or let four die.

Just because you saved five lives doesn't take away that one was sacrificed. I see the logic of it, do not get me wrong, but I cannot agree with it. I think that both options are horrible. I refuse to accept that there is only one "moral" answer because I refuse to accept a utilitarian notion of justice or ethics.

Of course both choices are awful because someone dies either way. but you're looking at it as choosing to kill someone. This is incorrect since you have no choice in whether or not someone dies. The only choice you have to make is whether or not to save four people. And I can't see any argument for how, given what we know, choosing not to save four people isn't better than choosing to save one. You can talk about wanting to refuse to accept a utilitarian notion of ethics, but what you want to accept isn't really that relevant. You either save four people or you save one. We can sit around talking about the value of even a single human life until the cows come home, but with no other information, saving four is a better choice than saving one when either outcome is guaranteed.

At best, I can see that one choice is less problematic/more pragmatic than another, but I would not say that either choice is morally "right". Moreover, the question itself reduces a human life to simple mathematics to the point it is a stand-in for an abstract notion of life. Saying to save five at the sacrifice of one life is the only moral choice feels more like an absolution to the fact that someone was killed. It seems to take away from the gravity of the fact that someone had to die and the responsibility towards that life.

I don't see how acknowledging that saving four people instead of saving one is the better choice somehow takes away from the gravity of a single human death. A single death is still awful and always will be. But one death is preferable to five every time given no other information. And as much as you may find reducing the choice of how many people to save to simple mathematics appalling, it's far from the sort of thing that's unheard of in the real world.

It's very easy to pick the sacrifice one for the good of the many as the better option, but things are more complicated than that. What if that one person would go on to save many more lives and the others wouldn't?

I generally dislike things like this. Sure, it's interesting to consider the possibilities of the different choices we make, but such possibilities aren't relevant since they require a perfect knowledge of all potential futures to ever be relevant in the real world. Interesting things to think about, but if we spent all of our time thinking about what may or may not happen as a result of our immediate decisions we'd never make any. The person working the cash register at the grocery store might turn out to be the next Hitler. Doesn't mean I kill them on the off chance, and it would have no bearing on a decision to save them if a car were about to run them over.

Fact is, we'll never know things like that, so the only moral choice to be made is to preserve as many lives as possible. And it is the only moral choice because it is the least awful choice we can make.