Formspring Question #253--Morality by the Numbers Edition

In your review for "Nothing Human” you are implying committing immoral acts for the greater good is bad, but you have frequently said dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was morally acceptable because the resulting deaths would be fewer than in an invasion. Please explain the contradiction.

The two scenarios are more complicated than saying the number of dead is smaller than the number saved, therefore the action is moral. Krell Mercet took hundreds of people prisoner and experimented on them in agonizing ways in order to find a cure for a plague that was killing thousands. There is no moral justification for it because it is a deliberate criminal act. Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was a matter of their being no good options. Japan refused to surrender, but the war had to end before casualties piled up exponentially in an invasion. Dropping the bomb was the lesser of two evils, and therefore moral.

We are just wired as humans to understand that deciding what is moral comes down to more than weighing the numbers against each other. As a Christian, I think it is the natural law, but if you want to call it being wired for such decisions, be my guest. Let me illustrate how it works regardless of its origins.

Take two scenarios:

One: There is a train with five passengers racing towards a section of the track between two cliffs which has been destroyed. The train is going to fall off the edge of the cliff once it gets there. There is no way the passengers can stop the train. Their only hope is you, because you can flip a lever which will switch the train to a new track which will save them. However, there is a man on the new track who cannot be warned in time the train is coming. If you pull the lever to switch tracks, you will kill him, but you will save five people in the process.

Two: There are five patients in a hospital ward. They each need a different organ transplant to live. A man walks into the ward, and you suddenly get the inspiration that you could kill him and harvest his organs for transplant. (Assume the organs would be compatible.) Again, you would be killing one person in order to save five.

the numbers are the same--sacrifice one to save five--but the circumstances make the morality of the decision different. In the first scenario, not pulling the lever would cause five people to die. While pulling the lever will cause the death of another, you automatically think it is the most moral choice of a no win situation in which you have been forced. But the second scenario has an air of sinister conspiracy. You are not really in a no win situation, but you have decided to initiate a deliberate evil because you have calculated the results are worth it. But they are not.

It is difficult to establish a general principle in regards to how moral decisions are more than adding up the numbers to make the better choice. I am a fallible person with a sinful nature. But there does appear to be a natural pull towards the right answer if you honestly look for it. The pull tells me that experimenting on people against their will to save thousands is evil, but dropping a bomb killing thousands to save far more lives is moral. You may draw your own conclusions, of course, but I would like to see your reasoning first.