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Originally Posted by politicophile
It seems as though everyone is dancing around the underlying point of this thread without quite addressing it. We seem to agree universally that it would be immoral to save only the one person in Scenerio 1 instead of the five. Yet, in the second scenerio, where you have to actively kill someone to save five people, the concensus seems to be that we should allow five people to die rather than actively causing the other one to die.
I'll pull out an old Kantian example to illustrate the problem with taking the "principled" stand in situations like this:
Suppose that you are asleep in your bedroom when your sleep is disturbed by a madman with an axe. The madman asks you where your children are sleeping. Now, if you don't give him an answer, you are confident that he will search around your house for your children and inevitably find them. Furthermore, you are absolutely morally opposed to lying: you think that intentionally lying is a terrible moral offense and have avoided telling a lie for your entire adult life up to this point.
You have three options:
1. You can tell the axe-carrying madman where your children are sleeping, despite the fact that you have every reason to believe the madman will kill them.
2. You can not answer him, in which case, the madman would conduct a brief search of your very small house and find your children anyway.
3. You can violate your longstanding moral principle of not intentionally lying and tell the madman they are in the backyard (e.g.), giving you and your children time to escape.
In this soemwhat different scenerio, should one be held morally responsible for the death of one's children if one chooses option 1? If so, why should the same responsibility not apply to the doctor who is unwilling to kill one patient to save five?
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It is still a matter of principle. Simply because the protecting the lives of one's children is generally a fundamental and nearly universal principle makes it no less a principle. All of these decisions are not "principle versus other", they are "principle versus principle", and the principle chosen by that person as most important wins. All decisions are principled, regardless of the situation.
The reason a person would or would not be held morally responsible for his or her actions depends on whether the principles used in the decision were shared by society. For example, the greater society believes that the lives of children are more important than lying to a murderer. Hence, if one were to choose to lie, one's actions would not be considered morally reprehensible. It is not a question of right or wrong, it is a question of with or against. Does the decision coincide with the values of society as a whole, or does it not?