Posted by alexandra_k on March 2, 2005, at 3:28:56
In reply to Re: (2) One or Six???, posted by Gabbi-x-2 on March 2, 2005, at 3:03:47
> > If a child is drowning and you are an able swimmer you could stand on the bank and watch - after all you did not throw her into the water...
> I don't see the comparison, in theory you wouldn't be sacrificing a life to save the drowning child.
It was just supposed to illustrate that sometimes INACTION can be immoral. To encourage one to think about whether the INACTION in the train case was really blameless..
> I can't make the assumption that saving 6 is better than one, especially in the case of organ donation.It is based on the notion that all people have an EQUAL right to life. That each individual gets ONE 'vote' if you like... Thats what democracy is based on. Some people think ethics should be the same. That we are obliged to do that which brings about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Of course that is just the ideal. Some people buy the ideal, others do not. Even if you buy the ideal there is lots of arguing to be had over figuring out just what the 'greatest good' is...
>I too see it as 6 individual deaths,
Ok. I guess I see it as the death of 6 individuals.
>and as Jay said, just because one person has organs to donate doesn't obligate one to donate them.
No. That would require additional premises. The person in the case is down to donate after death, though. He chose to do this. We could argue about whether all of us are morally obliged to consent to the donation of our organs after death, but that is a seperate issue.
>It has nothing to do with my ascribing to a certain philosophical theory, if I do, it's coincidental.
Sure. I don't think that anyone ascribes to philosophical theories as taught. People invariably come up with their own ideosyncratic view (in an attempt to get around the problems) - but typically different 'kinds' of theories stumble over different 'kinds' of problems / hard cases.
>I don't really have the innate bias that saving human lives is automatically a good thing either, so that makes things more complicated.....
Indeed! You could believe that we should do whatever brings about the greatest good for the greatest number (ie be a utilitarian / consequentialist) and also hold that the greatest good is death! The absense of pain forever and ever amen. Going to heaven. Whatever. That would work...
If you buy into a certain theory as to how we determine what we should do (Kantian moral law vs consequentialism for example) then they tend to deliver results with respect to saying what we *should* and *should not* do. But then consequentialism delivers a different result depending on how you define the 'greatest good' for example. (Typically it is happiness - though that needs elaborating).
But to say are we morally obliged to be a Kantian or a Utilitarian is a metaethical question. One that I find much more interesting than just accepting one of the theories and arguing about what they deliver on certain cases. *Should* one be a Kantian or a Utilitarian?
A lot of people like to think ethics is relative. Right and wrong is relative to a society / culture or whatever. Surely there is some truth to that. But surely this is not the case all the time. The only universal moral accepted by all cultures (so far as we know) is 'torturing small children for fun is wrong'.
But surely discrimination on the basis of race is wrong - regardless of whether a culture condones it or not. When the culture condones it then they are just wrong.
So complete moral relativism may well be as counter-intuitive as the notion that there are objective moral facts (comperable to scientific facts) - it is just that we have yet to hit upon them.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:464571
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20050224/msgs/465330.html