To begin the lecture, Professor Michael Sandel gave the students a scenario. The scenario was as follows: there is a trolley car that has no breaks and is heading down track. At the end of this track are five workingmen and all would be killed if the trolley car ran into them. However, there is another track going off one side where there is only one worker that would also die if the trolley car hit him or her. So, he asked his students which option would be the better one, continue toward the five workers and kill them all, or spare their lives and turn the trolley car down the other track and kill the one worker. He took a poll by raised hands to see what option most of the students would chose. The majority of the students chose to turn the trolley car and kill the one worker rather than keep the trolley going straight and kill the five workers. Some students shared their thought processes in why they made that decision before the speaker moved on to the next scenario (The Moral Side of Murder”). The second scenario the speaker gave was still the same situation with the trolley car with no brakes and having the two options of tracks and still the …show more content…
In a different exam room, there is a perfectly healthy man, with all five healthy organs the other five need, and he is asleep. All one would have to do is sneak in and do something to him so one could get the organs needed. In this process, the one man would die, but the other five would live. The speaker also gave another similar option if the doctor needed to perform life saving surgery all day to save one man’s life, or spend the day trying to save the other five men. These two scenarios are very similar to the trolley car, but makes one think about the situation from a different perspective (“The Moral Side of
Kenneth Edelin was a 35 year old third year medical resident at the Boston City Hospital. This hospital was known for many poor coming into it. This was also a place for research. By this time research was still being conducted on fetuses and embryos. When a patient came to the hospital for an abortion she also signed a waiver for them to test on her. They called her “Alice Roe” and she was only 17 years old but had the consent of her mother to proceed with the abortion.This patient was estimated by the supervisor over the residents, Hugh Holtrop, to be about twenty-two weeks pregnant but the other residents Enrique Giminez and Steve Teich disagreed. They estimated that she was about twenty-four weeks pregnant. Edlein was put in charge of doing the
moral decisions, we will be analyzing why this scenario poses a dilemma, possible actions that
In general, we are morally permitted to turn the trolley in order to save five, but kill one. On the other hand, we are not permitted to transplant the organs of one healthy person in order to save five who will otherwise die. According to consequentialists, there is no moral difference between “Trolley” and “Transplant.” Consequentialists believe that “consequences are the only things of moral relevance” (Quinn 287). Actually, the consequences of both cases are either saving the lives of five or the life of one. However, our moral judgement leads that the case of “Trolley” is morally permitted, but “Transplant” isn’t permitted. Why do we think that they are different? I think that the difference between the two cases come from the doctrine
In the experiment, participants were told they were involved in a learning experiment, that they were to administer electrical shocks and that they should continue to the end of the experiment. Participants can receive little money, four dollar and fifty cents, as benefit. There were three roles were involved, participants performed the teachers that actually being studied; one investigator performed the students who would be punished by electrical shock; another investigator performed the strict role who gave the orders when participants wanted to give up. During the course of the experiment, each time the ‘student’ made a mistake the participant was ordered to administer ever-increasing electrical shocks. Participants were not in fact delivering electrical shocks. The student was kept out of sight of the participant’s view, so they believed they were hurting the student. And they were told that towards the end of...
The ‘Trolley Car Problem’ has sparked heated debates amongst numerous philosophical and jurisprudential minds for centuries. The ‘Trolley Car’ debate challenges one’s pre-conceived conceptions about morals, ethics and the intertwined relationship between law and morality. Many jurisprudential thinkers have thoroughly engaged with this debate and have consequentially put forward various ideologies in an attempt to answer the aforementioned problem. The purpose of this paper is to substantiate why the act of saving the young, innocent girl and resultantly killing the five prisoners is morally permissible. In justifying this choice, this paper will, first, broadly delve into the doctrine of utilitarianism, and more specifically focus on a branch
All too often they got encumbered in the thought of being the driver and how being the driver of that trolley would be such a heavy burden. For the most part they kept getting bogged down in the obvious point made about killing 5 people or killing 1 person. That is a distraction from what may be the truer point of the moral debate. The number of people is immaterial to the crux of the question. It comes down to is it moral to make the choice to take the right track and save 5 lives versus saving only 1, or moral to not make the choice.
In order to become a well rounded individual you must be aware of the moral problems in society and be able to evaluate them. Respectively, this class has allowed me to do so, through readings and videos, providing my own insight on many moral issues. This class has shown me there are many different interpretations to right and wrong, and hard evidence must be agued to be persuasive. Throughout the course of this class we looked into multiple philosophers such as Kant, Aristotle, and Sandel, a professor at Harvard.
In life, situations arrive that force us to make tough choices. Sometimes those choices are not what we feel are compassionate or morally right. We make these decisions to save ourselves. These are decisions of self-preservation, and they override compassion. Tadeusz Borowski depicts these choices in his book This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. He shows that when people are put in the choice of doing what’s right or preserving their life, one is preferred over the other. Would they rather save their selves or just watch others be sent to their death. In the novel, the narrator wrestles with his decisions and like Borowski suffers from them.
Therefore, making one decision can have a huge impact on others. This is why it is important to think of the consequences that could occur before you make any decision. Both the soldier and Ronnie face challenges to make the decision whether they should be loyal to their leader or friend, or whether they should do the opposite. They later regret the decision they make and face the consequences that come along with it. Ronnie goes through an emotional state from lying to the sergeant, and the soldier feels guilty for killing Gregory. This is why you should think of others before you make any decision, and be loyal to those who you trust and think are right.
Determining the moral difference between killing and letting die has been a constant debate between many philosophers, with the basis of arguments cemented through the explanation of theoretical cases. However, as Winston Nesbitt states, the ethical theory that one holds determines their personal stance on the issue, and thus although to some extent individual morality is based on and developed by common societal grounds, it is not always clear what is morally correct on the whole. (NESBITT). This is evident in the example of John Lad’s case where the comparison is presented between killing someone by pushing them into river when you know they cannot swim verses not rescuing someone who is drowning in a river even if you are capable of doing so, thus letting them die. (LADD) Most would agree in this case that the behaviour in the first scenario would be notably morally worse than in the second. Nesbitt, however, believes that this is an inaccurate conclusion as we have only come to it due to the assumption that there are differences in motives, such that we are inclined to associate a malicious motive with the case of killing, while maybe only fear or indifference with the case of failing to save. Typical acts of ki...
As a result, in making wise choices, you are able to receive positive and negative outcomes in life. The defective outcome of any accident may conclude; injuries, the loss of a loved one, or even a flashback of a horrible memories. By jeopardizing all three teenagers lives, the positive outcome has been that nobody was injured and everyone agreed to settle the accident in a calm and mannerly way. “ You become more friendly with all of them, and you realize that you are much more connected to them, particularly to the driver, than possible in perhaps any other way.” (Paragraph 4, Sentence 7) The closer the driver and the victim became, the more friendly it got and t...
However, in this case, the decision of flipping the switch to divert the path of the trolley still satisfies both of Thomson’s condi...
Ethics plays a very important role in one social system and basically on how the people will make their actions or decide on a particular thing on whether it is the right or the wrong thing. Ethical consideration is very important. It helps a person or a group of person understands whether the actions are right or wrong. Ethics is a very critical factor most especially when considering where the ethical standards are to applied. Aside from it, weighing results of actions or decision is also another major concern because of the fact that a person has critically analyze whose side is needed to satisfied. There are instances that moral obligations are also considered, in which moral is defined as a universal accepted personal human behavior that allows a person to decide whether an action or decision is good or bad.
He presents a few hypothetical stories and one real one to get the students to think this question through. In one of the illustrations used the professor asks how many in the audience would actually push a “fat man” over a bridge onto the tracks below to stop a runaway trolley from killing five workers who were on the tracks in the way of the unstoppable trolley. I was surprised to see that a few hands actually went up. The argument of a student that had raised their hand in hypothetical agreement to pushing the man over the bridge, for the greater good, was that five other lives would be saved for the life of this one. Opposing views, of which whom I agreed with, were that by pushing the “fat man” over the bridge you were actually choosing and making a conscious decision to take a life; who are we to decide whose life is more valuable than
The experiment’s original intent was to determine if society would simply obey to authority when put under pressure by an authoritative figure. Milgram put a twist on the experiment asking the age-old question of, “if the Germans during WWII were simply obeying to authority when carrying out the Holocaust or were they all acting on their own”(Blass). The test subject, or teacher, would administer electric shocks to the learner, a paid actor, when the learner incorrectly answered the word pairings. The teacher thought the learner was receiving electric shocks when in reality the learner was not receiving any shocks. An instructor, the authoritative figure, was sitting behind the teacher reassuring the teacher that the shocks may be painful but would not inflict permanent damage. Throughout the experiment, the teacher can be seen looking back towards the instructor for permission on whether to continue or stop (ABC).The teacher instructed the learner to continue even when the learner cried out in pain and begged for the experiment to stop (ABC). Sixty-five percent of the time, the teacher continued until he administered the ...