During this week, Mr. Jamie has given us a scenario describing “Three of your loves ones are captive of war. You are forced to choose which one will die. If you don’t choose, all three will be killed. What will you do?” War is something where both parties are eventually in lost-lost sector. When there is a war, both parties normally have to spend both monetary and human resources. A party might gain certain advantages after the war if they win. However, for those people who are not involved in war, the victims, they have no choice except getting into a shelter where they can survive and stay peacefully. In this kind of situation people try to minimize the amount of loses they will be encountered. By keeping that in mind, I need to choose two out of three to be survived, in another word, I need to let one of my love ones to be died. The ethical dilemma here is that my choice of two people out of three will make injustice to the last one.
My decision will be so simple. I would definitely choose and save two out of three. I would not let my stupidity of being so emotional to the third one killed this two person who I can save. Apparently, I need to make a decision of choosing a person to die. Who will I choose? I would follow my human instinct persistently in this situation. Giving the equal rank-rank of love- to these three people will be ultimately illogical. We do not love everyone equally all the time. We normally have a preferred one even between mother and father. Thus, I might have a preferred one whom I cannot resist seeing him or her died. Therefore, I would choose two whom I feel like worth saving against another friend of mine. I believe that the person who is going to die will not want to do such a thing which will kill all three of them although he would also like me to save him. I would not feel as though I made a wrong decision or unethical one in fact, I will proud of myself to be able to save two of my colleagues.
I define ethics as the degree of acceptability by the community. Ethicality of an issue is directly proportional to the people acceptance. In simple term, majority are always right. To give you an example, fishing might be ethical for a community where they live nearby sea or river and they survive literally on fishing while it might be unethical for a community where people do not depend on this profession and they might probably be vegetarians. The reasoning behind fishing which made unethical is that killing is unethical. Fishing is a kind of killing animals. Thus fishing is unethical. For those who think as ethical, they reason that killing is unethical and torturing oneself is also unethical. Without fishing, their lives will be difficult to survive. Thus, fishing is ethical. By looking at this, we can conclude that fishing is ethical for certain people and while it is unethical for some other people. Therefore, it is difficult to generalize for certain ethical issue into global or universal ethics. Similarly for this scenario, the family members of the person died might not or will not agree upon my decision while family members of the rest might praise me for saving them. I do not, however, expect unanimous acceptance from the whole community. But the acceptance of majority will utterly make me feel that I have done a decision which is desirable.
Comments