The technical creativity of this solution reveals the limits of rationality. This is a solution only in a world of dice. But in a world of minds and psyches there are problems. The nine survivors have killed a man so they themselves can live. The “dice-argument” that it was voluntary and everyone had an equal chance of dying or surviving is irelevant. The survivors pulled the trigger on the victim in order that they could survive. That is their legacy, that is their gulit and only a “self-deceiving rationalist” would be able to suppress this guilt by rejoicing in the numbers.
Throwing a die is a way of avoiding bias in choosing a person to kill. If you choose a person to kill personally, you run a risk of doing in in an unfair fashion, and thus being guilty in making an unfair choice. People value fairness. Using dice frees you of this responsibility, unless there is a predictably better option. You are alleviating additional technical moral issues involved in killing a person. This issue is separate from deciding whether to kill a person at all, although the reduction in moral cost of killing a person achieved by using the fair roulette technology may figure in the original decision.
But as a doctor, probably you will have to choose non-randomly, if you want to stand by your utilitarian viewpoint, since killing different people might have different probabilities of success.
Assuming the lest convenient possible world hypothesis, you can’t make your own life easier by assuming each one’s sacrifice is as likely to go well.
So in the end you will have to assume that one patients sacrifice will be the “best”, and will have to decide if you kill them, thus reverting to the original problem.
The technical creativity of this solution reveals the limits of rationality. This is a solution only in a world of dice. But in a world of minds and psyches there are problems. The nine survivors have killed a man so they themselves can live. The “dice-argument” that it was voluntary and everyone had an equal chance of dying or surviving is irelevant. The survivors pulled the trigger on the victim in order that they could survive. That is their legacy, that is their gulit and only a “self-deceiving rationalist” would be able to suppress this guilt by rejoicing in the numbers.
Throwing a die is a way of avoiding bias in choosing a person to kill. If you choose a person to kill personally, you run a risk of doing in in an unfair fashion, and thus being guilty in making an unfair choice. People value fairness. Using dice frees you of this responsibility, unless there is a predictably better option. You are alleviating additional technical moral issues involved in killing a person. This issue is separate from deciding whether to kill a person at all, although the reduction in moral cost of killing a person achieved by using the fair roulette technology may figure in the original decision.
But as a doctor, probably you will have to choose non-randomly, if you want to stand by your utilitarian viewpoint, since killing different people might have different probabilities of success. Assuming the lest convenient possible world hypothesis, you can’t make your own life easier by assuming each one’s sacrifice is as likely to go well. So in the end you will have to assume that one patients sacrifice will be the “best”, and will have to decide if you kill them, thus reverting to the original problem.