In the Face of Death: Further Explanation
As we noted earlier, this activity is designed to shed some light on your moral
intuitions by looking at how you judge the behaviour of people who choose to take
a life because they (seemingly) believe that in the particular circumstances they
face, the act of killing is justified by its consequences. The first two scenarios
detailed events that actually happened. In the case of the ship-wrecked sailors, the (supposed) justification
for the killing of Richard Parker is that it was overwhelmingly likely he was going
to die anyway and that it was only by his death that his three shipmates had any
chance of surviving. In the case of the Warsaw doctor, the justification is different:
here (supposedly) what counts is that her act was motivated by a desire to make
the inevitable deaths of her young patients easier than they would have been otherwise.
The moral issues involved here are incredibly complex. Consider, for example, the
difference between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Roughly speaking,
the former looks at the effects of particular acts in determining rightness and
wrongness, whereas the latter looks at the effects of following particular rules.
A rule utilitarian might concede that in some of the scenarios described in this
activity it is likely that the taking of a life resulted in an increase in general
happiness, but nevertheless insist that it was wrong to take the life, since if
these sorts of acts were instantiated as rules for action the effect would be detrimental
in terms of the balance between happiness and unhappiness (perhaps, for example,
because of the likelihood that human life would begin to be seen as being only instrumentally
valuable).
Of course, it's also entirely possible to think that there is more to morality than
just the consequences of actions. Thus, for example, in their judgement in the case
brought against Thomas Dudley and Edward Stephens for the murder of Richard Parker,
the Queen's Bench Division under Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, spoke of duty and
sacrific:
To preserve one's life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest
and the highest duty to sacrifice it. War is full of instances in which it is a
man's duty not to live, but to die. The duty, in case of shipwreck, of a captain
to his crew, of the crew to the passengers, of soldiers to women and children, as
in the noble case of the Birkenhead; these duties impose on men the moral necessity,
not of the preservation, but of the sacrifice of their lives for others, from which
in no country, least of all, it is to be hoped, in England, will men ever shrink,
as indeed, they have not shrunk.
Similarly, Michael Nevins has suggested that Adina Blady Szwajger might have chosen
a more admirable course of action:
Given the leisure of hindsight and safety, it is easy to cast aspersions, but it's
also tempting to contrast her behavior with that of the martyred pediatrician, Janusz
Korczak who declined several opportunities to escape from the Warsaw ghetto in order
to accompany and comfort the two hundred orphans in his charge when they were transported
in cattle trains to their deaths at Treblinka. Surely that was an unparalleled act
of defiance and courage, a paradigm of "death with dignity", whatever that overused
expression may mean.
It is frequently objected about thought experiments such as the Trolley Problem that they are flawed, since people never
face absolutely stark moral choices in the real world. As it happens, this latter
claim isn't true, at least not straightforwardly so (consider, for example,
that health professionals continually have to make what are effectively moral judgements
about who it is worth trying to save and who it isn't (given the finite resources
with which they operate). But even if it were, it's still the case that stripped
down, stark moral dilemmas can tell us something about our moral reasoning. Thus,
for example, if you responded to all these scenarios that the taking of a life (or
lives) was justified, then it is pretty certain that whatever your views about the
intrinsic worth of particular human lives, you think this has to be weighed
up against other factors (such as the quality of life, or the general good). Equally,
if you think that none of the deaths in these scenarios were justified, it suggests
you are not straightforwardly consequentialist in your moral thinking: likely you
think there is more to morality than simply calculating the pros and cons of particular
acts.