However, utilitarian value is not the same as moral rights. Person A has a moral right to live. In order to determine whether the Survival Lottery is morally acceptable, we have to ascertain whether utilitarian value -- in this case, a higher number of living persons -- actually justifies the violation of person A's moral right to live.
Consider self-defense killing. Killing a person in self-defense is justifiable because the assailant is guilty of trying to violate the victim's right to live. Before anything related to an attempted killing, both persons (the not-yet assailant and the future victim) have a moral right to live. However, by trying to rob the victim of his life, the assailant's moral right to live is justifiably suspended until the victim's life is secured.
Persons Y and Z (organ patients) are in an unfair and tragic situation, true. They don't have malevolent intent to kill person A; they simply want viable organs from some source. Yet, the Survival Lottery is still just premeditated murder; it involves a pre-established plan to kill people in order to obtain organs. Despite the fact that their situation is unfair, it does not justify the killing of person A, because person A is innocent in this affair. Consider the following analogy.
A group of sociopathic criminals take control of a building and randomly take two people hostage at gunpoint. The hostages did nothing to deserve being captured; they were simply unlucky. Despite their efforts, the security guards are unable to rescue the hostages. To satisfy a dark need for control, the terrorists deliver an ultimatum: they will release the hostages unharmed only if either the security guards (or bystanders) will kill one person at random. Desperate to live, the hostages ask for someone to save them by killing some random person. The hostages don't have a malevolent intent to kill someone; they just want to be released. Does this situation give anyone there the moral right to kill someone?
In this analogy:
hostages = patients
criminals = organ diseases
security guards = doctors
one person at random = person A's group.
If acquiescing to the criminals' demand in order to save the hostages is morally wrong in this analogy, then acquiescing to the dire circumstances of organ disease by killing person A for organs should also be morally wrong.
While agreeing with this argument, I would like to give it more support with a rebuttal from a religious perspective. In class we claimed that taking medicine to prevent our death or prevent some disease that could cause our death was playing the role of God. Thus, the "saving" of two other lives while sacrificing a single life is not morally wrong - because, as it said, even very few religious people would refuse medicine because God had intended them to die at that certain point in their life.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with this claim is that taking medicine doesn't directly hurt anyone else. If I am in the hospital receiving open heart surgery after a tragic car accident, it's not like I'm forcing any living being to die in order to save me. Thus, the argument leaves many open doors to criticism from those who have strong faith. Many people, right or wrong, believe that everything happen for a reason. The manual killing of an innocent person is simply violating Person A's rights to his or her own body. Personally, it seems like we are putting ourselves in a position to where we want something bad to happen to us because we know that we will be saved because some innocent person will be sacrificed for the sake of us. And on top of that, from an economics perspective, it appears that there will be a whole lot less risk for doing things that could cause harm to our health.
In essence, the whole point of this was to show that The Survival Lottery's simple response to the religious argument of "playing God" is not enough to deem the killing of one person to save two morally right. However, those without a religious influence (the Utilitarian perspective) would see no problem with the survival lottery because we are simply conserving resources when we save a greater number of humans.