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Originally Posted by politicophile
Uhhhh, I don't think either of these situations are necessarily theoretical. Furthermore, even if they are only theoretical, they can be useful as controlled experiments to help us isolate a single moral variable.
As for the broken finger... that really had nothing to do with the example: I just didn't see why a perfectly healthy person would be hanging around the hospital unless they were a friend or relative of one of the injured (or of you) and that would just complicate things.
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I still disagree. The first situation is not an ethical concern but a judgement call. Since we cannot forsee the future, we can never have all that information at once. Meaning someone has to arrive before the other. You do what you can, not try to cure everyone. If that were the case then docs would never treat minor symptoms or do any paper work. The second situation is similar, we can't know if some corpse is seconds away from coming in that has all the correct organs. We can't know how long each has to live so because we can't see into the future, these are not ethical or moral concerns, but rather judgement calls, and you just have to hope you made the right call.
And what I meant by the broken finger was that it makes no sense to even bring that guy into the equation. You have 4 (or 5 or whatever) people with organ failures, none have the same failure, so if you were going to kill someone you'd kill one of the ones that is already terminal, not a healthly bloke.