Suppose your the driver of a trolley car and your car is going down the track at 60mph. At the end of the track you notice 5 workers working on the track, you try to stop but your breaks don't work. You feel desperate because you know that if you crash into these 5 workers they will all die. So you feel helpless until you notice that onto the right there is a side track with one worker, working on the track. Your steering wheel works so you can turn onto the right track killing the one and sparing the five.
What is the right thing to do?
Would you kill the one and save the five, or kill the five and save the one?
Is it right to kill one if you can spare five? Is this a solid reason?
Or...
Does this mentality justify genocide? To avoid whipeing out one race you kill the other...
Now take this example:
This time you're not the driver, you are an on looker. You are looking over the bridge seeing the trolley, you see the trolley heading towards the five people. You really feel helpless. Until you notice next to you a really fat man... and you could give him a shove he would fall over the bridge onto the track right into the trolley car. He would die but would spare the five.
Would you push the man over the bridge?
What has changed your opinion in this case? How do you explain the difference between killing one in the first example but not killing the fat man in the second example? In both instances you save 5 and kill one.
Your a doctor in an ER and six people come to you, they were in a trolley car wreck. You can spend all day working on one and by doing so the five will die. Or you can work on the five and one will die. Your choice?
What about if your a transplant surgeon and 5 of the men need organ transplants. In the next room their is a healthy man who came in for a check up and he is taking a nap...you could go in yank out the 5 organs and he would die... but you would save the five. Would you do it?
In all of these examples it involves morality of life and it is safe to assume that with out giving it much thought your answers are different in the cases.
Certain moral principles have emerged from these examples. 1) the right thing to do depends on the consequences of your actions.. its better to kill 1 to save 5. Its called consequential-est moral reasoning(Utilitarianism).
But in the second example of the fat man, or the surgeon most people will look at the intrinsic quality of the act it self, or judging based on the act. Most people in these examples will believe it is wrong to kill one person to save the five. 2) This is known as categorical moral reasoning.(Kants philosophy).
Where do you stand?