A choice
Two people are on a plane flying during a thunderstorm.
A bolt of lightning hits the plane, killing the engine and damaging the steering controls.
The plane is spiraling down. There’s a good chance both passengers will die.
There is one parachute.
One of the passengers picks up a wrench and hits the other over the head, killing him.
The passenger then puts on the parachute and jumps.
It was a choice to save the life of one of them, right?
A bolt of lightning hits the plane, killing the engine and damaging the steering controls.
The plane is spiraling down. There’s a good chance both passengers will die.
There is one parachute.
One of the passengers picks up a wrench and hits the other over the head, killing him.
The passenger then puts on the parachute and jumps.
It was a choice to save the life of one of them, right?
posted by A Secular Franciscan | 8:54 PM
3 Comments:
No.
An intrinsically immoral act purposefully done (e.g. killing an innocent person) cannot be made moral by any intent.
Are you going to ask next how this differs from simply taking the parachute and jumping (without killing the other first)? Or are you planning to make this an allegory of something else?
Also, note that according to the teaching of the Church (as I understand it), intentional killing is not intrinsically wrong (though the few cases in which it is licit are very special cases), but intentionally killing the innocent is per se intrinsically wrong.
Patrick - fair analysis. Yes, it is about something else - abortion, and the questionable position that it should be permitted to save the life of the mother.
The person in the story was morally culpable for taking the life of the other person in order to save his own life.
In the same way, I think it is morally wrong to deliberately take the life of the baby to save the mother. Doctor's should try to save both.
There are cases in which the mother is ill and the treatment takes the life of the baby. In that case - one in which the baby's death was not the aim, but an unintended side effect - there is no moral (or legal) culpability.
I do not believe abortion should be legal to "save the life of the mother." So i am talking here about both the religious and the legal sense.
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