For more than fifty years I have held, embraced, reflected upon, struggled with – and I have had the privilege of helping others struggle with – a question: “Is it morally permissible?’ Given all that continues to unfold at the Executive and Congressional Levels of our Government I have found myself, once again, holding this question. In order to engage the question with you, gentle reader, I have decided to use two classic scenarios.
Scenario #1: A surgeon enters the hospital through the emergency room. A nurse rushes up and says: ‘Doctor!!! Two ambulances just pulled in. There are three people in one and two in the other. Each person is in critical condition. Two have damaged kidneys, one has a damaged heart, one a collapsed lung, and one a ruptured liver. If they do not get an immediate transplant they will die. Luckily a young man just walked in; he wants to donate blood in order to help. We can save ALL FIVE accident victims if we take the needed organs from the young, healthy man. Of course, he won’t survive but he will save the five.
A Question: Is it morally permissible for the surgeon to take this young man’s organs?
Scenario #2: An express train is speeding along. The engineer gets a warning signal that the brakes might be failing. The engineer looks up and there on the tracks ¼ mile ahead are five people walking on the tracks. They are walking away from the speeding train and are not aware that a train is rapidly approaching them from behind. The engineer also notices that there is a fork in the tracks ahead and that the train can be diverted to the side tracks. Walking on the side track is a person; this person is also not aware of the train. The engineer has to make a split-second decision. The engineer can continue on its current course and five people will likely be killed. The engineer can also redirect the train onto the side track and likely kill one person.
A Question: Is it morally permissible for the engineer to take the side track?
Gentle reader, what is your response to each question?
If you said ‘NO’ to the first question and ‘YES’ to the second, you are like thousands of others who responded to these two questions (the ‘thousands’ comes from the research done by moral psychologists). My sense is that you also quickly answered these questions – you gave the questions little thought. So, here are three additional questions: What determined your answer? What underlying/guiding principles guided you? What ‘facts’ influenced your answer?
What ‘makes sense’? In the train case it makes sense (think: it feels right) to kill one person in order to save five. In the hospital case it doesn’t make sense (think: it feels wrong) to kill one person to save five. Students in my Ethics Classes explained the hospital case by saying that it is illegal to commit intentional homicide – if you are a ‘responsible doctor.’ In our culture, this is what we have been raised to believe (this is probably true for the majority of cultures).
Our culture inscribed this in our minds when we were quite young (ask a three year old if it is wrong to kill another person and he/she will say it is).
Now apply this legal perspective to the train scenario. Here, we are willing to kill one person in order to save five. We are, it seems, willing to do something in the second scenario that we are not willing to do in the first. Why the mental twisting? Given our mental twisting, how challenging is it for us to articulate our reasons? We will explore this and other questions when we continue next time.
Searcher-Seeker 
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