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Showing posts from December, 2005

Ethics and God

Here is an ethical dilemma I head on a radio talks how hosted by a Rabbi: You are a subway control station operator. There are construction workers in two tunnels that are non operating, but a runaway train is headed down one of the tunnels. If you do nothing it will go down the tunnel and kill 5 workers. But if you divert it, it will go down the other tunnel and kill only one worker. The Rabbi who was posing the problem said that the proper response, according to a deistic viewpoint, is to do nothing because action on your part would mean a lack of faith and dictating to God who lives and who dies. He compared it to this scenario: There are 5 people who will die if they don't get organ transplants. All the organs could come from one person but harvesting the organs will obviously kill him. So, choosing the lives of the 5 over the single person would be the same as sending the runaway train down the tunnel with one guy. I disagree. For two r