Sunday, March 4, 2018

Would you rather save your child and let 200 random strangers die, or save the strangers but let your child die? Why?

I save my child. Every single day I “let” thousands of people die because I do not save them. That doesn’t mean I could save them but I still did nothing to try to stop them from dying and I do not think a second about them. However, my children are precious to me and I would do anything I could to save them that does not involve murdering another*. If I am in a position to save a person at no risk to anyone else other than myself I will try to save them but if I am asked to choose between one or more individuals, I refuse to employ an objective utilitarian calculus based on pure numbers. If I have to choose who to save it is based solely on their relationship to me. If the two groups are of no importance to me, I will choose the group that is easier for me to save. If saving them requires equal difficulty, my choice will be whichever group is to my right (because I am right-handed), even if that group is smaller in number. After all, the life of those 200 strangers you saved could include a child who grows up to be just like Hitler while the child would died would have grown up to be just like Gandhi and if you consciously saved Hitler and allowed Gandhi to die using a utilitarian calculus based on the greatest number of individuals to be saved, how could you live with yourself?
*Refusing to intervene to save someone is not murder in most cases. I have no legal duty to save the life of another person except for someone who is legally connected to me such as my child. In other words, my legal (as well as moral) duty is to save my child and not the 200 random strangers.

2 comments:

dhruv said...

Would your answer change if you were somehow legally obligated to those 200 people? Say you were a doctor who was in charge of those people?

Voice of Reason on the Internet said...

My thanks to your question. I have left my detailed answer in a new post.