What's wrong with killing the healthy patient?
Posted: Fri Dec 20, 2024 12:41 pm
You all know the setup: a surgeon has one healthy patient and five terminally ill patients; he can save the lives of the ill patients, but only by harvesting organs from the healthy patient, who will die in the process. Should he or shouldn't he?
The utilitarian would say he should, because you get five presumed pleasant lives instead of one, and since pleasure is the only good, this is better.
I'm going to say he shouldn't, because killing the healthy patient is wrong.
Why is it wrong? Because it implies a category error, and since this is a moral context, that is a moral error, i.e. morally wrong.
The error is to treat the healthy patient as if he were an object that cannot have moral standing, like an inanimate object. It's not just that he's treating him as if he had zero moral standing, which could at some stage change to positive moral standing; by ending his life, he is treating him as if this were forever a total impossibility, which could only be the case if the healthy patient was not the kind of object that could have moral standing at all. And he isn't that kind of object.
The utilitarian might object to this, saying, 'I'm not treating the healthy patient like an inanimate object, because I factor him into my calculation when I'm considering what to do, which I wouldn't do with an inanimate object.' This seems to me an inadequate reply. The utilitarian's factoring the healthy patient in at the point of consideration doesn't alter the fact that, at the point of action, he treats him the same as he would an inanimate object. Since it is the action, not the consideration, that has an effect on the patient, it is surely what happens at the point of action that matters.
This, I think, is what Kant meant when he said that we should treat people as ends, not just as means. I don't agree with much of Kant's ethics, but I do agree with him on this (though, being a sentientist, I disagree with his view that only humans can count as ends).
So what do we do if we are faced with an action which would spread enormous amounts of pleasure and/or save enormous amounts of pain, but involves the killing of just one sentient being (say, a mouse)? Do we do a very good thing which is wrong, or do right but allow a lot of badness to go on unchecked? I don't know the answer to this. I doubt if there is an answer, because it would seem to require a common feature of both goodness and rightness, or badness and wrongness, which would allow us to rate them against one another. I don't know of any such feature, and I doubt if there is one, so I suspect that the best we can do is make a judgment based on our subjective idea of the relative enormity of wrongness and badness. It may seem odd and even nonsensical that there can be objective good and objective right and yet they could conflict, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson once observed, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. (And in fact it is not nonsense, because right and good are different concepts, so there is no contradiction in claiming that something can be good but not right.) All I can suggest is that since killing is wrong, we should not just try to spread more pleasure and reduce the amount of pain, we should also try to reduce the amount of killing in the world.
The utilitarian would say he should, because you get five presumed pleasant lives instead of one, and since pleasure is the only good, this is better.
I'm going to say he shouldn't, because killing the healthy patient is wrong.
Why is it wrong? Because it implies a category error, and since this is a moral context, that is a moral error, i.e. morally wrong.
The error is to treat the healthy patient as if he were an object that cannot have moral standing, like an inanimate object. It's not just that he's treating him as if he had zero moral standing, which could at some stage change to positive moral standing; by ending his life, he is treating him as if this were forever a total impossibility, which could only be the case if the healthy patient was not the kind of object that could have moral standing at all. And he isn't that kind of object.
The utilitarian might object to this, saying, 'I'm not treating the healthy patient like an inanimate object, because I factor him into my calculation when I'm considering what to do, which I wouldn't do with an inanimate object.' This seems to me an inadequate reply. The utilitarian's factoring the healthy patient in at the point of consideration doesn't alter the fact that, at the point of action, he treats him the same as he would an inanimate object. Since it is the action, not the consideration, that has an effect on the patient, it is surely what happens at the point of action that matters.
This, I think, is what Kant meant when he said that we should treat people as ends, not just as means. I don't agree with much of Kant's ethics, but I do agree with him on this (though, being a sentientist, I disagree with his view that only humans can count as ends).
So what do we do if we are faced with an action which would spread enormous amounts of pleasure and/or save enormous amounts of pain, but involves the killing of just one sentient being (say, a mouse)? Do we do a very good thing which is wrong, or do right but allow a lot of badness to go on unchecked? I don't know the answer to this. I doubt if there is an answer, because it would seem to require a common feature of both goodness and rightness, or badness and wrongness, which would allow us to rate them against one another. I don't know of any such feature, and I doubt if there is one, so I suspect that the best we can do is make a judgment based on our subjective idea of the relative enormity of wrongness and badness. It may seem odd and even nonsensical that there can be objective good and objective right and yet they could conflict, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson once observed, the universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. (And in fact it is not nonsense, because right and good are different concepts, so there is no contradiction in claiming that something can be good but not right.) All I can suggest is that since killing is wrong, we should not just try to spread more pleasure and reduce the amount of pain, we should also try to reduce the amount of killing in the world.
