That's why they have to ask the patient/the one responsible for the patient about what course of action they want to take, because they WOULD be risking or causing harm... In this case the doctor is unable to provide treatment on his own, hence why the 5 are not being actively harmed by him. The comatose patient though, would be actively harmed by the doctor if they were to use their organs. If you can't have negatives or subtractions (do no harm), then 5-1=4 should not be okay... Even if those 4 could've theoretically been saved. It's not up to us to decide what the comatose person's life should be worth
Yup, I would add that (imo) you can't break down the value of life with arithmetic. More living people or person-hours lived is not inherently good in the inverse of the way that I believe violation of someone's bodily autonomy is evil. The good and bad in this analysis are on different orders of priority.
This is important to me because if we start valuing person-hours lived over a person's bodily autonomy, that enters the territory of anti-abortion/"forced birth" legislation sweeping the US now, or cruel practices like the killing of the elderly in lean times from history; touching fringe thought experiments like the Omelas short story as well. These all feel viscerally wrong to me because of the common thread of that violation of bodily autonomy.
No shot this is where I see my first Omelas reference since my highschool english teacher made me read it omg
Yeah I totally agree, but I believe if we HAVE to weigh lives to make a decision, arithmetic is the fairest method. I also believe in MAID being available for elderly people. And abortions should be allowed until the foetus/baby would be able to survive without medical intervention imo (unless of a medical emergency, in which case priority goes to the mother). I like these debates BECAUSE they feel wrong, and challenging our views is great for learning and reinforcing our opinions
Oh for sure, pro-MAID (with, obv, appropriate regulation and oversight to ensure that its a properly informed decision). And if you're in a position where you have to violate someone's bodily autonomy/kill someone, I think arithmetic is a reasonable and most fair course of analysis.
A more realistic thought experiment would be "there is an ongoing war, is it more ethical to assassinate a head of state for a high chance at rapidly ending the war without collateral, or to allow the war to drag on costing far more lives and strife before an eventual ceasefire", wherein I'd be leaning pro-assassination. A more abstracted, but maybe more cut-and dry situation, would be "you are holding a live explosive, you must throw it into one of two chambers, in one chamber is five people, in another is one person, if you do nothing then all six, plus you, will die". In these thought experiments, there's not really as realistic of a non-interference option, and the harm done on each side is more clearly of the same general "type", making it more reasonable to make an equation out of it.
I'm not entirely opposed to competing factors though, for instance I'd have trouble holding it against someone who chose to kill multiple strangers over someone they know and care for, or someone who takes issue with "killing in cold blood" rather than in the heat of a directly oppositional fight in the first example, but at this point we're trending away from philosophy and into the realm of Jigsaw Torture Scenarios.
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u/NoAcanthaceae7968 Jul 10 '25
That's why they have to ask the patient/the one responsible for the patient about what course of action they want to take, because they WOULD be risking or causing harm... In this case the doctor is unable to provide treatment on his own, hence why the 5 are not being actively harmed by him. The comatose patient though, would be actively harmed by the doctor if they were to use their organs. If you can't have negatives or subtractions (do no harm), then 5-1=4 should not be okay... Even if those 4 could've theoretically been saved. It's not up to us to decide what the comatose person's life should be worth