The Survival Lottery - Research Paper Example

Critical Evaluation-Survival Lottery The survival lottery as suggested by John Harris was an experiment that was designed to give reason for taking lives in order to save more lives, based on utilitarianism. The essay bases on a utilitarian faced with the same and having to choose, arguing that under the same law, then the survival lottery is disregarded and thereby offering a criticism of the experiment as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). It also brings into considerations that not all the population is utilitarian and thereby expecting all to subscribe to the experiment would be subjecting all to one system of belief. It also offers another analogy that serves to counter the survival lottery. First, the assumption is that the lottery speaks about the traditional utilitarianism as there are other flavors of the same that have been considered less influential and yield different results. It is easy to put ones thumb on a scale whenever arguing concerning ethical status of acts under utilitarianism as utilitarianism takes no account of other things but the sort of things suggested. They seek to maximize pleasure, not simple hedonistic pleasure, but something that stands in for what people find desirable (Tittle 34). This includes moral sentiments, feelings and emotions. If the society finds the lottery unacceptable inherently, then there is bound to be displeasure and pain associated with its execution that could outweigh any good done in saving lives. ` This type of argument sidesteps the thrust of the thought experiment, but it aims at illustrating how acceptable it is to kill an innocent person under utilitarianism to save others. In isolating this point, the imagination could be that the survival lottery minimizes pain, maybe spearheaded by few people who are not known by the public as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). Perhaps those selected are told they are selected for a heroic government mission so that if they do not return their families are left proud to be associated with the loss. Maybe the deaths of the selected are quick and without pain and the people are not pre-informed so as not to traumatize them. Maybe the recipients of the organs are never to be informed that someone was killed so that they do not feel guilt. This would make the public oblivious so that the only people that would be suffering from guilt would be the few who had to do the task. And maybe even this would be accomplished by sociopaths so that no one would feel the guilt at all. What then would the argument be? A utilitarian would seem to be forced to accept the survival lottery then. The argument being that as long as the recipient is able to experience pleasure that is greater than that the harvester would have experienced after the operation, then utility would have been increased. This then however troubling it may seem, would have to be accepted by the utilitarian (Tittle 34). A utilitarian will be forced to attempt to minimize the troubling concepts rather than to object to the principle thought experiment. This presents a dilemma for them, but not only that, it fails to recognize that not all of the population is utilitarian and not all would subscribe to that thought line as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). Taking life to save one may result in net utility increase but it so does in two acts, one of them causing massive pleasure (saving life) and the other causing the opposite, massive pain (taking life). It appears to me that when pain is in the equation, then we have a duty to minimize it and maximize utility even if the utility could be maximized without reducing the pain. It then appears that the lottery is not the best way to select donors, while considering making pain minimal. Consider a situation where our organs could be harvested from a person who is recently deceased. As an organ donor, if I die, some of my organs could be used to save others. Perhaps some organs cannot be harvested from the recently diseased and needs live donors. It would seem to be better to find people who are leading the worst types of lives so that pain is minimal. Maybe convicted murderers could be used (Tittle 34). The families of their victims would feel a sense of justice and the likelihood for them to leave grieving loved ones behind is low. Their future would have been spent in prison if they had been alive as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). Maybe a system that allows for voluntary suicide could be instituted. Suicidal people could be put in the programs and allowed to achieve death easily and be of use after death. The system would seem to yield much better utility gains than the survival lottery. The question would then be whether the programs would be intuitively troubling as the survival lottery. Generally utilitarianism seems to make a distinction between killing and letting die. It is argued that if I shoot a person, am robbing them of all possible future and grieving their loved ones, but if I let one die and there was no better course of action that would yield more pleasure. What the survival lottery does not illustrate is that if you can save a person and you do not under the same utilitarianism, the act is the same as killing them as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). Utilitarianism forces them to accept the tough cases as moral and ignore those that find them disturbing as not being utilitarian or accepting that something is wrong with the logic that produces the act. Another objection that Harris misses is the person’s right to life. Even if it were to be agreed that killing and letting die are the same, it would not justify the adoption of the lottery. Whereas each person has a right to life, they have no right to claim the life of others. Consider two people with a right to own property, each buys a car. After purchase, the company making one car goes out of business and produces no more spare parts as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). If the cars break down, and only parts of car C can replace them, what rights have the owners to require for c to sacrifice their own? From this analogy, it is clear that it does not matter if one person’s blood can save a hundred they have no right to claim his to save theirs. Another objection to the same is that the system would have to bind people to stay within the country and take from them their right to travel. People having a right to leave, would probably opt to do so than to stay and risk death thus beating the lottery as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). To require that people stay within the country would be to contractually bind them without giving them any choice and thus infringing on their freedom. A concern that rises with the survival lottery institution would also be the value that is placed on individuality. The society prides itself in having people that are valued for their being and the survival lottery destroys this by treating people as though they are cogs, existing in a system that is designed to foster the highest possible number of healthy units. Perhaps worth noting is the fact that just like death is inevitable, so are sicknesses as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). They are in fact the very reason there exists professional doctors in the first place. Suppose they have succeeded in perfecting their machines and several years from then, it is possible to carry out the experiments with a high success, would that give them a right to carry them out? Also, there is the probability that most of the people that would need transplants would be the older people other than the young ones, would not the implementation yield a society that is dominated by the old people, and with no future since the young are killed so that the old live? This argument could be countered by the fact that human lives cannot be compared by the analogy of cars, but this would still not diminish the argument or cause it any less effective (Tittle 34). Another issue that could be raised is the fact that a utilitarian law, if it brought the same general wellbeing would be accepted, but this is rejected due to its seemingly negative effects on the populous as argued by Kuhse and Singer (67). However, this would not diminish the fact that no one has a right to claim anyone else’s life even if their own were at risk. It can also be argued that the selection algorithm can be made in such a way that it ensures an optimum age distribution throughout the whole population, but such an admittance would only reflect on the experiments (survival lottery) failure and not that of this argument against the lottery. Works Cited Ethics and Economics: Willard Gaylin . New York, N.Y: Films Media Group, 2005. Internet resource. Harris, John. Bioethics . New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print. Hohoff, Christian, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Peter Chatel, Karlheinz Böhm, Harry Baer, and Peer Raben. Faustrecht Der Freiheit: Fox and His Friends Survival of the Fittest [dvd] . New York, NY: Wellspring Media ; Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation, 2002. Kuhse, Helga, and Peter Singer. Bioethics: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2006. Print. Tittle, Peg. What If: Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy . New York: Pearson/Longman, 2005. Print. Read More