24.231, Ethics, Spring 2008

Topics for your third paper.

Note: your third paper should be about 10 pages long. Please contact either Brad or Adam if you want help on your paper. You are free to choose a topic of your own devising; but if you choose this option you must contact an instructor and have your topic approved.

1. Joe is a surgeon, and in his hospital are five patients, each of whom will soon die unless they receive an appropriate transplanted organ: one needs a heart, two need kindeys, one needs a liver, and the fifth needs new lungs. Unfortunately, due to tissue incompatabilities, none of the five can act as donor for the others. But another man, Chuck, is in the hospital today for routine tests. The hospital computer reveals that his tissue is completely compatible with the five patients. Joe has two options: do nothing, and let the five die; or chop up Chuck and use his organs to save the five.

   How might consequentialists respond to this case? Start by clearly explaining why Consequentialism seems to say that Joe should chop up chuck. In his article, Williams discusses the "appeal to remoter effects"; what kind of remoter effects might a consequentialist appeal to in this case, to argue that consequentialism does not say that Joe should chop up Chuck? (Make sure you explain in detail just what effects the consequentialist appeals to, and why those effects manage to tip the balance the other way.) What do you think about the plausibility of this appeal to remoter effects? Does the appeal work in this case? Even if it does, are there ways to modify the case so that the appeal does not work?

2. People who believe in a special constraint against doing harm think that consequentialism gives incorrect results about which actions are morally permissible in certain scenarios. On page 311 of "The Doctrine of Doing and Allowing" Quinn imagines a consequentialist who responds by complicating his definition of "the value of outcome O" so that his theory will give the same results as the non-consequentialist about those scenarios.

   Write a paper in which you evaluate the merits of this attempt to defend consequentialism. Start by describing the two "pond rescue" scenarios. Which actions are right in those scenarios, if standard consequentialism is true? Which actions are right, if there is a special constraint against doing harm? (You will need to explain both what standard consequentialism is, and what it means to say that there is a special constraint against doing harm.) Explain why this pair of scenarios appears to show that consequentialism is false.

   Then explain how you think a consequentialist might amend his definition of "the value of outcome O" so that the amended theory will say the same things about which actions are right, in the two pond scenarios, as does the special constraint against doing harm.

   Is this amended version of consequentialism plausible? Two questions to think about when trying to answer this: does the amended version yield the same verdicts about which actions are right as the special constraint against doing harm in ALL scenarios? (What about Jim and the indians?) Does the amended version correctly explain WHY it is wrong to run over the guy in one of the pond scenarios? (You might want to consult the motivating idea for the constraint against doing harm that Quinn discusses.)