A comprehensive guide to the Survival Lottery, including its origins, key arguments, objections, and legacy. 12 min read.
The Survival Lottery is a landmark thought experiment in applied ethics. It was introduced by John Harris in his 1975 paper "The Survival Lottery" and has since become a standard reference in debates about utilitarianism, the ethics of killing, and the distinction between acts and omissions.
Origins and Context
Harris wrote in the context of the 1970s debates about organ transplantation and the allocation of scarce medical resources. The thought experiment was designed to test the limits of utilitarian reasoning. If we accept that we should save as many lives as possible, why not kill one healthy person to save two patients? The fact that we recoil from this conclusion suggests that our moral framework includes constraints that go beyond simple arithmetic.
The Thought Experiment
The scenario is simple: two patients need organ transplants to survive. A healthy person is a match. Instead of letting the two die, a lottery is instituted to randomly select a healthy person to be killed for their organs. The lottery is fair, transparent, and efficient. The question is whether such a lottery could ever be morally justified.
Key Arguments
- The Utilitarian Argument: If we can save two lives at the cost of one, and we have no other way to save them, then the lottery is morally required.
- The Kantian Objection: The lottery treats persons as mere means and violates the categorical imperative.
- The Act-Omission Distinction: There is a moral difference between killing and letting die, and the lottery involves killing.
- The Integrity Objection: The lottery alienates agents from their own moral commitments and undermines personal integrity.
Significance
The Survival Lottery remains a powerful tool for teaching and research in ethics. It forces us to confront the implications of our moral principles and to ask whether we are willing to accept those implications. It is a reminder that moral philosophy is not just about abstract principles but about the real-world consequences of those principles.
Referenced Works & Texts
- John Harris, "The Survival Lottery," Philosophy, Vol. 50, No. 191 (1975).
- Bernard Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in Utilitarianism: For and Against (1973).
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).
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