You are driving a cement truck and you realize the brakes have failed. You can hit — and no doubt kill — the four people jaywalking in front of you, or swerve and kill one person on the sidewalk.
What do you do?
There are four people in your hospital near death in need of organ transplants — heart, liver, kidney, whatever. There’s a perfectly healthy individual in the waiting room with all those organs.
Can you kill the healthy individual to harvest the organs and save the four?
What’s the difference between the two cases?
The first scenario is tough and I don’t know what to answer, but the second is easy for me.
You can’t kill the healthy person to harvest their organs to save the other four because there is no certainty that any of the other four would survive the transplant.
Couple of thoughts; first, there’s never certainty of cause and effect and second, there’s never a lack of alternatives.
In the first instance, it cannot be a foregone conclusion that the cement truck would hit all or any of the 4 jaywalkers, each of whom are undoubtedly more aware of their location than the sidewalk person. Presumably, the cement truck’s horn works.
SnoLepard already noted the lack of cause and effect in the hospital. No guarantee that harvesting would save 4 lives. Then, there’s the rights and morality of the situation. Nobody has the right to force healthy one to cede organs to the unhealthy 4. And, who’s to say the life of the healthy one is worth less than that of the four unhealthy one?