Philosophy
The presented moral dilemma concerns a doctor’s moral obligation and patients’ rights as specifically embodied in the professional medical ethics. Medical professionals ought to exercise beneficence, such as safeguarding patients against harm and protecting their lives. Concisely, doctors have the duty to save lives and not to kill unless otherwise permitted legally. Whether the five patients need suitable organs for them to be out of danger, the undistinguished man who has no family also has the right to live life with dignity, respect and love.
The question or issue that the moral problem addresses is about saving or sustaining lives. Killing the man just to harvest his organs for the sake of the five patients is wrong. Without proper moral, familial, medical, legal, inter alia procedures, it could be assumed and inferred that the patients’ lives are more important than a single individual is, which for my part, is again contrary to reason and virtue, as Aristotelian advocates would suggest. Why not instead do the proper way for all patients and man not to have their human rights violated, such as by letting the man to voluntary exercise his right to donate his organs or for the five patients to donate their organs to one another? As such, the several implications of the assumption of killing one person for the sake of the five patients is, for me, grossly grotesque. First, a doctor saves life and not kill. Killing an innocent man is simply morally not permissible given the injustice of the possible actualized scenario. Second, all humans have equal rights, even when such rights seem to differ slightly in other circumstances (such as a free man versus an incarcerated person). Third, life is sacred. Even when the man is undistinguished, his life is simply immeasurably precious and that his life ought not to be treated simply as a mean to an end, as Kantian adherents claim and which I uphold.
In conclusion, every person has a right that ought not to be taken away from him. Medical professionals ought to adhere to their sworn ethics and that they ought to save lives unless otherwise specified by law.
