Six great moral dilemmas

Moral dilemmas are paradoxical situations in which values ​​are contradicted.. In these scenarios, it is not possible to act in such a way that no harm is caused. What must be evaluated is which of the options causes the least harm and/or which of the alternatives maintains greater ethical coherence.

One of the best-known moral dilemmas is “the trolley dilemma.” . In this one, there is a train running at full speed. On your way you will meet five people who are tied to the road. However, it is possible to press a button to change its route, with the difficulty that on this new route there is also a person tied to the track.

In this case, the dilemma is what to do. The debate is whether it is morally more valid to let the train continue on its course and kill five people or deliberately decide that the sacrifice should be the one tied to the other track. If things continued their normal course, he wouldn’t die. Whoever presses the button causes them to lose their life.

From this hypothetical situation, another series of moral dilemmas have arisen.. The best known are the man on the roof, the loop track and the man in the garden. Let’s see what each of them is about.

1. The man on the roof

The man on the roof is one of the moral dilemmas derived from the tram case. The situation is similar: there is a tram that is moving towards five people who are tied on the track. However, In this case the option that exists is to throw a large weight in front of the train, to stop it before it reaches those who are bound.

The only possibility that exists is an obese man standing on the side of the road. If he were thrown into the tram, he could stop him and prevent the other five people from dying. What should be done? The difference in this case is that an active task must be carried out to deliberately end a person’s life.

Utilitarian ethics points out that the determining factor is the number of victims. So it is well worth sacrificing one life in exchange for saving five. Humanistic ethics points out something different. The man on the side of the road is in full use of his rights. One of them is the right to life and, therefore, not to serve as a means to save others.

2. The loop road, one of the moral dilemmas

The loop track is a variant similar to the tram dilemma in the framework of moral dilemmas. What happens in this case is that there is a loop road, that is, a road that makes a circular path: returns to the starting point.

In this case there are five people tied to the road. You can also activate the train to take a different track. In this There is a man who is tied. He is bulky and could stop the train before he makes the loop and reaches the other five victims.. To do?

The classic tram dilemma states that there are only two paths: one way or the other. One inevitable path or the other. In the case of the loop, this dilemma has a subtle modification, which implies a more calculated decision: a man is deliberately used – as an obstacle – as a means to save five others.

3. The man in the garden

The third of the moral dilemmas related to the trolley dilemma is the man in the garden. In this case the situation is the same as the original. The difference is that The only way to divert the train is to make it derail.. This would cause him to fall off a cliff and into a garden, where a man is resting in his hammock.

This means that, If it is decided to activate the deviation, the person who would end up dying is a person who has nothing to do with the situation and that he would end up being a victim of someone else’s decision.

4. The case of the escaped prisoner

A man was sentenced to 10 years in prison. After a year, however, he escaped from prison, went to another part of the country and took the false name of Mr. Cruz. For 8 years he worked hard and little by little he saved enough money to start his own business.. He was courteous to his customers, paid high salaries to his employees, and spent most of his profits on charity. It happened that one day Mrs. Trévelez, his former neighbor, recognized him as the man who had escaped from prison eight years before, and whom the police had been looking for.

Should or should Ms. Trévelez denounce Mr. Cruz and have him return to jail or not? Because?

5. Heinz’s dilemma

In Europe there is a woman who suffers from a serious illness and will die soon. There is a medicine that doctors think can save her. It is a form of radium that a doctor in the same city has just discovered. The medicine is expensive, but the pharmacist is charging ten times what it cost him to make it. He paid $200 for the radium and is charging $2,000 for a small amount of the drug. AND

The sick woman’s husband, Heinz, goes to everyone he knows to borrow the money, but
He only manages to raise $1,000, which is half of what he needs. He tells the pharmacist that his wife is dying and asks him to sell him the medicine cheaper or let him pay later. The pharmacist refuses, because he wants to make money with his discovery. Heinz is desperate and thinks about robbing the establishment to steal medicine for his wife.

Which alternative should Heinz choose, steal the drug or not at all?

6. A murder case

In the North American state of California, 17 young people have been murdered. The police manage to arrest the alleged murderer and he is put on trial. The judge in charge of the case discovers throughout the oral hearing that the procedures used to arrest the suspect have not complied with the law. The current judicial system in the United States explicitly states that all evidence obtained through non-legal procedures must be considered null and void at trial.

The police entered the house of the alleged murderer without a court order (forcing the door) and obtained photographs of the girls and other evidence of guilt. When the owner of the house arrived, they caught him. But, realizing that they were missing an arrest and search warrant, one of the police officers managed to get a judge to falsely sign an order dated the previous day.. Society and the prosecutor ask that the accused be convicted. The son of the judge handling the case pressures his father to issue a guilty verdict, since two of the victims were his colleagues. What should the judge do?

To conclude, at the bottom of all these dilemmas there is a contradiction between doing good for a greater number of people or undertaking an action that goes against essential rights. A study carried out by Guy Kahane, from the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), indicates that People who are happy to severely harm someone to save others show antisocial traits. and in their daily lives they are less scrupulous about harming others, even if this is not useful.

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