This text is about the human sense of morality. Taurek writes about having moral dilemmas when a person has to choose who to help. The main question is whether the number of the endangered people should count or their personal qualities in a situation when you can save only one group of people and not the other.
He uses the term trade-off to describe a problem of not having enough medicine to save all the people who are in need. Taurek believes that we should not consider the numbers of people involved.
He makes up a hypothetical situation where there are six people who need a certain drug. All of them will die if not treated. One of them needs the whole drug and the other five need one-fifth to survive. What is the solution in this case. Taurek thinks that the greater number of people is not the solution. Most people would think that the numbers should count but it is not so easy.
Taurek make the assumption that the one person who needs the whole drug is someone who can possibly be a great inventor or a great scientist who is on the verge of a discovery that would save a great number of people. Perhaps the other five people don’t have such qualities and nobody would miss them. They might be some bad people who were torturing other people for the majority of their lives. In that case Taurek believes that the right thing to do is save that one person who is a better person and someone who could save much more lives in the future. That is why he should survive.
“It may well be permissible to save the one wholesome person instead of the five others”(Taurek 295). Taurek believes that he is “morally required to prevent the worst” (Taurek 295).
He also makes another assumption and invents a story where this one person is his good friend David, whom he likes and the others are strangers to him. Taurek would save David and his opinion is that it is a moral thing to do. Some people would disagree. This is different from the previous case where that one person who needed the whole drug was someone important for the whole society. However, Taurek would still save David because he knows him and likes him.
If Taurek didn’t know David, he wouldn’t think that his death would be a greater loss.
There could also be a situation that a person made an agreement in advance that he would have the whole drug at a certain time. It would be a binding contract to save that one person and let the other five people die and it wouldn’t be immoral.
In the case where he would save David only because he knows him and likes him, he would consider it moral because his well-being is much more important than the well-being of other people who are strangers.
It is all a matter of personal preference. “It is the absence of any moral requirement to save these others rather than David that makes my doing so morally permissible” (Taurek 297).
However if all these people are equal than it is a moral duty to save those five people instead of one. The only thing that makes a difference is the fact that the person who decides likes David more than he likes other people.
Taurek also considers a situation where the five people have made a contract with him to deliver the drug at the particular time and that they are for example American soldiers, whereas the other person is of another nationality. In this case any person would have to be impartial and save the five people. The loss of the sixth person is relative in this case.
Taurek thinks that there is case where it would be morally permissible to save a friend instead of five strangers. For example, the person who decides couldn’t ask David to give up his life in order to save the lives of strangers.
There is a point that the five people would bring more happiness in their lives than the one person who would continue to live. However, that is not a reason which is good enough for David to accept to be sacrificed.
David would use the drug to save what is most important for him and that is his life. He doesn’t care about the lives of other people more than for his own life. If the drug belonged to David it would be immoral if the five other people stole it from him or killed him.
Taurek says that “if it is morally permissible for David in this situation to give himself all of his drug, why should it be morally impermissible for me to do the same? “ (Taurek 301). This is legitimate. It is all a matter of choice and personal preference.
If there would be a situation that one person would have to lose his arm and the other person his life, it would also be a complicated problem to solve. The person who should give up his arm so that someone else would save his life doesn’t have to feel morally obliged to do that. A third person could make a choice instead of them and save the life instead of saving the arm.
Taurek says that “It is a moral shortcoming not to prefer what is admittedly in itself a better thing to what is in itself a worse thing” (Taurek 305).
In any case nobody’s right would be violated if the person in charge would save his friend in stead of saving strangers.
If the case would be that objects have to be saved than the number would count, especially if they have the same value. However in the case of saving people, empathy is involved. Taurek says that “it is the loss to the individual that matters to me, not the loss of the individual” (Taurek 307).
In the situation where one person would agree to suffer a great pain so that one or more other people would be saved from suffering a lesser one, it wouldn’t be moral to expect from that person to make a sacrifice. Taurek says that “In such a trade-off situation as this we are to compare your pain or your loss, not to our collective or total pain, whatever exactly that is supposed to be, but to what will be suffered or lost by any given single one of us” (308).
The last situation is when there are two groups of people to be saved after a volcanic eruption on an island. There would be a larger group at the north and a smaller on the southern part of the island. If a captain of a Coast Guard would flip a coin, it would be immoral. He ought to save the larger group of people. If a private citizen would want to save the smaller group of people it would be morally right, because it is a personal choice.
The last argument is whether people should have a priority to be saved because they have higher IQs or are more socially important. In that case there could be a policy that would treat all the people equally.
Works cited
Taurek, John. “Should the Numbers Count?” Philosophy and Public, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Summer, 1977), pp. 293-316
