Situational Ethics

Prophet For Hire always has food for thought – his Matthew series is excellent – but this latest post on ethics is really something to chew on: Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Violinist.

I once took a Scripture and Ethics class which turned out to be a lot fun, especially when I’d watch other twist and squirm under the teacher’s seemingly impossible ethical dilemmas. Well, the BBC thought it would be fun to do the same last week. In my class, the popular question was, “Would you lie to save a life?” Here, however, the author wants to know, “Would you kill one to save five or let the five die?”

For me, it’s a no-brainer. Unless the one is willing to lay down his life, the other five must die. When you reduce life to a numbers game, it neither adds up nor reflects reality. And when I see a comment like this, I know some have fallen far down the rabbit hole:

Surely the answer to the runaway trolley depends on the people involved. If it were the choice between five 90-year-olds and a single 20 year old, it would be right to save the 20 year old who, in probability, had longer to live than the others put together? Or what if those five were criminals and the other was a volunteer worker?

The BBC scenarios are interesting, and the comments are frequently terrifying. So many people feel empowered to take another person’s life, if what they perceive to be the greater good is served. The problem is, people no longer have a clear idea what is right and what is wrong. Commenters mention several different rationales about how they would make decisions on who gets to live – age, superiority, and relationship are three factors mentioned. This is how we end up with an ethics committee deciding that Andrea Clark must die. I remember years ago, when the Netherlands legalized euthanasia, they actually had a TV show in a game show format to debate who should live and who should die. There are no standards anymore. People with no firm foundation to stand on are trying to weigh and balance heavy things. They aren’t equipped to do it.

In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his eyes. (Judges 17:6)

For Christians, even if we don’t adhere perfectly to the model we have been given, at least we have a standard available for comparison. There are things worse than death, and reducing life vs. death decisions to a numbers game is one of them. Prophet for Hire concludes

So, “do I have an obligation to stay connected?” When I think of Matthew 5:41 which says, “If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles,” or John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends,” the answer is yes. If Jesus hadn’t done it for us, we would all be dead.