Prudence and Madness

Remember the little philosophical experiment I posted several days ago?

Okay, I’ll just repost the experiment here so you don’t have to go back and forth my site:

Life dependency

Dick had made a mistake, but surely the price he was paying was too high. He, of course, knew that level six of the hospital was a restricted area. But after he had drunk one too many glasses of wine with his colleagues at the finance department Christmas party, he had inadvertently staggered out of the elevator on the sixth floor and passed out on one of the empty beds.

When he woke up, he discovered to his horror that he had been mistaken for a volunteer in a new life-saving procedure. Patients who required vital organ transplants to survive were being hooked up to volunteers, whose own vital organs kept both alive. This would continue until a donor organ could be found, which was usually around nine months later.

Dick quickly called over a nurse to explain the mistake, who in turn brought over a worried-looking doctor.

“I understand your anger,” explained the doctor, “but you did behave irresponsibly, and now you are in this position, the brutal truth is that if we disconnect you, the world-renowned violinist who depends on you will die. You would in fact be murdering him.”

“But you have no right!” protested Dick. “Even if he dies without me, how can you force me to give up nine months of my life to save him?”

“I think the question you should be asking,” said the doctor sternly, “is how you could choose to end this violinist’s life.”

Source: The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher by Julian Baggini

Here are some of the reactions to this little experiment by some of my blog readers:

I would agree that it is a tricky, tricky situation to think about and could probably make anyone to have epistaxis more than Inday’s rhetorics.

This philosophical experiment is actually used as a defense for abortion in Judith Jarvis Thomson’s widely anthologized article, A Defense of Abortion, from Philosophy and Public affairs published in 1971.

But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.” Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

Surprised?

Because this is rather a complicated topic to discuss and I’m going to be rather busy these next few days, I’ll have to make another post regarding my views about it and the different perspectives on it.

But you are all free to react and post your comments here.