Thursday, November 16, 2006
Ethical Dilemma
Jack is 92 and on a kidney machine. Ellen is brought into the hospital after an accident and needs a kidney machine within 24 hours or she will die. She is nineteen years old. Do you take the machine off Jack and he will then die within a few hours so that Ellen can live? Or do you leave Jack on the machine since he had it first and let Ellen die? There is only one machine. Please give your reasons for the decision you make.
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5 comments:
Ellen gets the machine.
Oh I forgot to say why.
I value life and the 92 year old has lived a "whole" life according to society.
Let's change the scenario a little. The man on the machine is 52 and a surgeon who has given many free surgeries to help people with no money. A 20 year old drugg addict who has an IQ of 170 is brought into the hospital and will die if he does not get the machine. What do you do?
Life often comes down to the luck of the draw and it doesn't always feel fair. If the hospital had no additional machines (I'm assuming), then its a first come first served situation regardless of whether it was situation one or situation two. I would be totally open to the 92 year old man giving up his machine, though I'm not sure it would be ethical to ask him. I think that people too often get caught up in feeling like they are entitled to life or to happiness or whatever. At the end of the day, you have no "real" control over a lot of things - God does and we don't always understand why he let's one person die and another live but it's not really our job to figure that out. We should just live the best and happiest life we can while we have it and to all the negative stuff I say: "This too shall pass!"
Life is more than just a "luck of the draw". God gave us minds to think things through and to reason with. We get to decide a lot of things in life that impact others including at times who will live and who will die. We get to decide in a court of law if a criminal will get the death sentence, life or freedom. We decide at birth between the life of the mother or the child or even which child to save when complications arise. Families sometimes have to make a decision to stop life support to a critically ill loved one. Life is full of these situations. Our human task is to make a rational decision based on fairness, the rules of ethics, the value and evidence of the potential for good to humanity and the quality of the lives being considered. We are not God but we can make those decisions based on what we know. In these decisions, if made in the spirit of Christian compassion there is no moral fault to the decision maker(s). After that it is God's issue to deal with.
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