You are a very skilled doctor with five dying patients, each of whom needs a different organ in order to live. Unfortunately, there are no organs available to perform any of the transplants. It just so happens that you have a sixth dying patient, suffering from a fatal illness, who will die sooner than the other five if not treated. If this sixth patient dies, you will be able to use his organs to save the five other patients. However, you have a medicine you can give to this sixth patient that will cure his illness and he won’t die. Would you:
Get rid of the sick guy. His death will go towards everyone’s great good.
I’m sure that makes me a communist.
Not so much a communist as a utilitarian – the greatest good for the greatest number is the premise of that ethics. What’s interesting is that most people like the premise of this theory, and then I will bring up an dilemma such as this one and suddenly they don’t like it anymore! So it’s interesting that you start out liking that solution =)
The greatest good goes further than those 6 individuals. The reason people balk at that sort of thing is that even though the five lives may outweigh the one life (Que Spock quote here) the broader implications of living in a society where this is a realistic possibility is horrific. The premise of a working social system is that we treat each other like we want to be treated and each person is an individual worthy of respect and rights not respective of their utility towards “others.”