Ectopic Pregnancy

[LittleSoldier]

Eh, now that I rethink on it, removing a DAMAGED portion of the fallopian tube is a postive action. However, don’t confuse the consequence with the action itself. The fact that the mother lives is a positive consequence. It says nothing about the morality of the action itself.

Shooting down a rocket which was inadvertantly launched at a city full of innocent civilians.

Remove the person from the equation and regard the action by itself. Example: a train is heading towards a cliff with 1000 passengers. You can switch the tracks, but if you do the train will hit a car with 4 people inside. Everyone on the train will live if you do this.

First, remove ALL the people from the situation. Switching the tracks is niether morally positive or morally negative. It is, quite simply, a morally neutral action.

Second, weigh the consequences. If there are only two people on the train and a bus carrying 100 people, you cannot switch the tracks. Not because switching the tracks would be immoral, but because the negative consequences outweigh the good.

So, first, determine if the action is intrinsically evil by removing the people. If you cannot remove the people from an action, there’s a high likelihood that it is intrinsically wrong. (such as aborting a baby… if there’s no baby, you can’t have an abortion, so the act and the person cannot be separated… there is no direct abortion which does not specifically entail murdering a person)

But using the rocket analogy, isn’t saving the lives of the people in the city a consequence for the act of shooting down the rocket? Why, in this case, is shooting the rocket down a postive moral action? Isn’t it a neutral action with a positive consequence?

 

[LittleSoldier]

I think I’m beginning to understand (thank you, Promethius). I want to introduce a new analogy.

An engineer is driving an empty train. He is the only person on the train. He receives a call from the station-master and is told to stop the train. There has been an automobile accident about a mile down the track, a car was pushed onto the track and the three people in the car can’t get out. Emergency personnel are there trying to get the people out of the car. The car cannot be moved without further injuring the passengers.

The engineer stops the train by applying the brakes. If we take the people out of the scenario this would be a neutral act.

Now let’s go back to the car. They’ve gotten two people out but after hours of working they still can’t get the third passenger out. Finally one of the people helping gets disgusted and frustrated, grabs a gun from a police officer and shoots the third passenger, killing him.

(It’s an analogy - I know it’s a cheesy analogy. Please bear with me.)

The act of killing the third passenger is morally negative and obviously is directly killing the passenger.

My confusion is about applying the breaks. Is this really a morally neutral act? The engineer is applying the brakes in order to save the lives of innocent people. But if we take the people out of the scenario I can’t see it as a morally positive act. It’s just braking.

Is applying the breaks morally neutral or morally positive?

 

[promethius]

But using the rocket analogy, isn’t saving the lives of the people in the city a consequence for the act of shooting down the rocket? Why, in this case, is shooting the rocket down a postive moral action? Isn’t it a neutral action with a positive consequence?

You’re right that the people in the city are merely a good consequence of the action of shooting down the “rocket”, but you’ll note that the rocket in the scenario is faulty… either through being incorrectly launched or mechanical failure.

I would posit that no rocket which has become faulty is going to accomplish what it was sent out to do, and will ALWAYS damage the area where it lands, people or not. Thus I consider it a morally positive action to shoot down a faulty rocket.

Of course, some of this is personal opinion as well, because as you’ve arrived at your conclusion it’s a morally neutral action, which is why the principle of double effect only requires at least moral neutrality (of the action) rather than positive good actions.

 

[promethius]

I think I’m beginning to understand (thank you, Promethius). I want to introduce a new analogy.

Yay! Glad to help!

My confusion is about applying the breaks. Is this really a morally neutral act? The engineer is applying the brakes in order to save the lives of innocent people. But if we take the people out of the scenario I can’t see it as a morally positive act. It’s just braking.

Is applying the breaks morally neutral or morally positive?

Morally neutral. If it were a positive good, then it would be something one should be inclined to do whether or not there was a car in the way. In the example of a faulty rocket, we should be inclined to shoot down any faulty rocket, provided we have the reasonable means to do so and the cost will not outweigh the benefit (AKA, faulty rocket headed towards the middle of the ocean does not justify the use of a counter missile which costs tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars).

By contrast, if we were morally inclined to apply the brakes in all situations, the rail system would go bonkers as train engineers kept hitting the brakes wherever they went…