Life and Death: A Moral Dilemma

What do you think about the thought experiment below?  Do you think the author successfully violates the moral principle from the first paragraph with the situation in the third?  If so, explain why.

“You are a doctor in a hospital’s emergency room when six accident victims are brought in.  All six are in danger of dying but one is much worse off than the others.  You can just barely save the person if you devote all of your resources to him and let the others die.  Alternatively, you can save the other five if you are willing to ignore the most seriously injured person.”

“It would seem that in this case you, the doctor, would be right to save the five and let the person with the terminal injuries die….  Next, consider the following case:”

“You have five patients in the hospital who are dying, each in need of a separate organ.  One needs a kidney, another a lung, a third a heart, and so forth.  You can save all five if you take a single healthy person and remove his heart, lungs, kidneys, and so forth, to distribute to these five patients.  Just such a healthy person is in room 306.  He is in the hospital for routine tests.  Having seen his test results, you know that he is perfectly healthy and of the right tissue compatibility.  If you do nothing, he will survive without incident; the other patients will die, however.  The other five patients can be saved only if the person in room 306 is cut up and his organs distributed.  In that case, there would be one dead but five saved.”

Pojman, Lois P., Ethical Theory, pp465-466 (Excerpted from The Nature of Morality, Harman, Gilbert, Oxford University Press,Inc;1977)

Why?

Your Feelings vs. Others' Rights

Do we have a moral obligation to act happy toward people even if we feel terrible, or are in a bad mood? By happiness, I don’t mean the bubbly, bouncy, person with the smile always plastered on his or her face.  I am thinking more along the lines of acting content and positive toward others regardless of how we feel.  What do you think?  Try to give reasons to justify your answers.

Interestingly, in a sub-discipline of philosophy called virtue ethics, happiness signifies living a (morally) good life, or flourishing in life, so happiness is not just an emotion in virtue ethics but rather a life.  Unfortunately, happiness has been reduced to mere emotion in modernity…but that is a topic for another post.

The idea for this question comes from a talk show host named Dennis Prager who devotes one hour each week to the topic of happiness.

A Major Philosopher

The Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711-1776), wrote a major work he titled “Treatise of Human Nature.” In it, he sought to reduce morality to a few laws upon which other observations could be made, much as Newton had done with physics. Hume’s primary thesis is principles of morality are subject to, or based upon, feeling and sentiment, not pure reason. He argued that it is the prospect of pleasure or pain that causes us to act and that reason can only inform us as to the morality of the means by which we secure those ends. He claimed, “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.” This resulted in two major ideas that influenced philosophy thereafter. First, that reason was in fact subordinate to emotion. And second, our moral judgments are derived from our passions and not from our reason.

Pojman, Louis P. Ethical Value Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Fourth Edition, (Wadsworth International: 2002), 405 – 406.

Put another way, do you ever reason that something is right and then act upon it, even though it FEELS wrong?  Hume would say it is not possible to act against your feelings even though you've determined something to be morally right or wrong by reason. I believe we are capable of acting against our feelings.   For instance, I doubt the firefighters of 9/11 who had young children FELT like rescuing complete strangers instead of securing their family.  However, they reasoned they had a moral obligation to fulfill their duty to their chosen profession and to the lives of those they committed to save when they entered that profession.

What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Please give examples to support your view.

Solipsism

Lately, I have taken much interest in a philosophical idea called Solipsism. It is the idea that one’s own mind is all that exists. This idea branches off into three categories: Epistemological solipsism, Metaphysical solipsism, and Methodological solipsism. According to the epistemological solipsism view, it is possible that an external world exists or that only the self exists. The metaphysical approach to solipsism is that the individual self of the person and that the outside world and other people are representations of that self having no independent existence. The last common approach is called methodological solipsism, which is the thesis that the individual self and its states are the starting point for philosophical construction.

After a lot of thought, I disagree with all three approaches to solipsism. To me, the possibility that to each individual, they are the only people that exist is somewhat logical. However, although all other human mind and emotions are inaccessible to each individual, I do not believe that it makes other humans not exist to the individual’s world, they are just not existent to their perspective.

Working Philosophy Definitions and Some Questions

1) Philosophy – (Greek, love of knowledge or wisdom) The study of the most general and abstract features of the world and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth, etc. In philosophy, the concepts with which we approach the world themselves become the topic of enquiry. A philosophy of a discipline such as history, physics, or law seeks not so much to solve historical, physical, or legal questions, as to study the concepts that structure such thinking, and to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions. In this sense philosophy is what happens when a practice becomes self-conscious.

"philosophy" The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Simon Blackburn. Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Los Angeles Public Library. 13 January 2010

2) Philosophy – the attempt to think rationally and critically about the most important questions. The theme is that philosophy is a rational and critical activity. Philosophizing in all forms seeks to think and to think hard about something. But about what? Here we have the variation. There are quite differing ideas about what philosophy should be rational and critical about. Still, even here philosophers have in common that they see themselves as addressing the really important questions, questions that are fundamental to everything.

• What do you think about these definitions?
• Do you prefer one over the other? 
• Do the definitions say anything about what we know and how we know it? 
• Think about the things we esteem as knowledge; how might these definitions relate to what we currently call knowledge? 
• Is it possible to have reliable knowledge of everything (including other beings) around us that is not based on empirical testing? 
• Can philosophy teach us reliable knowledge that is not empirical? 
• What do you think of philosophy OF a discipline such as history, science, or math? Would such a pursuit be more or less interesting than the discipline itself? Why or why not? Would such a pursuit answer different questions than the discipline itself? Do you think the discipline and the philosophy of the discipline overlap? How? 
• Do you think philosophers answer important questions? Do you think they answer the most important questions in life? What questions do you consider the most important questions in life?