I began wondering about practicality in relation to ethics and morality last class, in the discussion of destroying embryos to harvest stem cells. I am still pondering the question: if an action is unethical but practical, which takes precedent?
There were two situations that Alex, Mike and I were talking about the other day: 1) A train is going to crash, killing all 5 of its passengers. But you have the power to change its track thus saving the train and its 5 passengers, but in doing so, you will kill 1 person who is stuck on that track. Practically, you would change the track, thus saving 5 lives and killing one, rather than doing nothing where you save one life but kill 5. Ethically it is more complicated: by actually changing the track, are you murdering that 1 person? By doing nothing, are you murdering 5 people? To me it seemed that generally, most people would change the track, sacrificing one person to save 5 in the name of practicality.
Mike then informed us of a similar situation in which there are five people in need of organs, they will die if they don't receive them. There is one perfectly healthy man with all the needed organs, but he will die if he donates them all. Does the doctor kill the healthy man to harvest the organs to save the 5 lives? In this situation, it seems that ethics trumps practicality, because hardly anyone would advocate such an act.
How can these situations be applied to the destruction of embryos? It is practical to destroy the embryos because they are going to die anyways; it makes practical sense to use them for a greater cause. Ethically, it is quite different for all the reasons we have discussed.
I tend to lean towards practicality over ethics in realistic situations. I would not consider the doctor intentionally harvesting 5 organs from a healthy person a realistic situation. In certain situations, practicality must trump ethics.
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2 comments:
But that would render ethics completely pointless. The reason why ethics are ethics, is because if something is ethical, it is the RIGHT thing to do. This doesn't mean that practicality and ethics are mutually exclusive, but practicality should NEVER trump ethics.
When reading this post and Alex's comment, I immediately thought of Peter Singer's book "Practical Ethics" and decided to look to see what he had to say about the relationship between ethics and practicality. He defines practical ethics as "the application of ethics or morality...to practical issues" (1). Although I did not read much of Singer's argument, it seemed that he was trying to say that we do have a system of ethics yet the problems come when we have to apply the ethics to practical situations. In such situations, the ethical decision may be difficult and may not have a definite answer. I think in the situations Yuri described you could argue on the basis of ethics that any of the solutions are correct, but the important part of ethics is its application into a practical setting. Practically, you would not take the organs from the one man to save the five others, but from a utilitarian standpoint that would be ethically correct.
So Alex, to your point, I don't think that it is a matter of practicality trumping ethics but of practicality deciding which ethics to employ.
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