Question: Two men enter, only one can leave...but one's dying anyway

[Reepicheep]

If I throw myself on and IED in order to save my buddies, knowing that it will kill me, then that is a suicidal act. It is suicide. But my intent is to save others.

The analogy holds, in my opinion, with martyrdom. If I choose to die rather than to recant, then it is certain death. You may argue that the alternative is damnation. But the fact of corporal death remains, and it is an active choice.

But if you could save your buddies without dying you would.
If you could refuse to recant, and yet live, you would.
You do not chose death for itself. You choose the good thing that exposes you to the threat of death as an undesired side effect.
The suicide chooses death for itself.

 

[Reepicheep]

Let’s not forget the complication I added in the second case: the scientist is going to die anyway because the medication that would keep him alive is outside the vault. His options are (1) die now and possibly save the other man or (2) die later and take the other man with him.

Like the Cold Equations example, this one sounds impossibly contrived. What illness kills instantly if medication is not regularly taken? And assuming that such a condition exists, what is someone so gravely ill doing outside of a hospital?

It’s all too easy to wind these conjectures up to where they no longer resemble human life.

ICXC NIKA

Indeed. You can “prove” just about anything if you define the terms to suit yourself and tweak the situations enough.

 

[Reepicheep]

Perhaps we can say that the difference between self-sacrifice and suicide is that if the goal one is trying to accomplish through self-sacrifice can be achieved without the death of said person occurring that would be the default method of accomplishing the goal, whereas in suicide the person’s goal IS to kill themselves; even in theory they wouldn’t WANT to do something else.

In practice:

Suicide: Someone shoots at your friend and you dive in front of him to stop the bullet, even though you know that you could just as easily have pulled him to the ground to save him. You jumped in front knowing, as you jumped, and with full clarity of mind, that you’re jumping in front will almost certainly cause your death and you could have accomplished the same thing doing something else. This was not “in the heat of the moment”-it was calculated. This is suicide.

Self-defense: Diving in front of your friend is the only possible thing that you could do, or at least that occurs to you, to save your friend’s life. No other option would have gotten the same result. This is self-sacrifice.

This is precisely and gloriously true!!

Thank you, Marc Anthony.

 

[Reepicheep]

So is the bottom line basically this?

1. It’s moral to save a life even if saving a life takes a life.
2. It’s immoral to take a life even if taking a life saves a life.

Greatly oversimplified.

 

[Incomplete]

The problem is that we’re talking about a case different from St. Gianna Molla’s in which there is no chance of survival on the child’s part. If a mother were in a situation where:

1. The mother had a cancer requiring chemotherapy right away to save her life.
2. The baby was not sufficiently developed to survive outside the mother’s womb.
3. The chemotherapy would kill the baby and cause a miscarriage.
4. The mother would not survive a miscarriage, therefore an abortion is needed to safely remove the baby from her womb before the chemotherapy is administered.

Then we would be on the same page – we would have a case in which either two people die, or one person who is going to die anyway is sacrificed early to save the other.

I am curious about what you mean by abortion in this case; in other words, I am curious what procedure was safe for the mother when miscarriage would kill her, because abortion can also be very hard on a woman’s body. And I am curious how the doctors knew an abortion would be safe and a miscarriage would not be. I ask this because I can’t tell you the number of times doctors are wrong, not just in issues regarding abortion but so many times when you would think it would be so clear. (My own life is full of medical errors.)

 

[Reepicheep]

I keep remembering the words of Jesus, though: “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?..But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” (Matt 12:3-4,7)

Had David respected the Law, he and his men would have starved, so he broke the Law in order to achieve a greater good. And he was right to do so – the needs of his men and himself outweighed the illegality of the means by which David would supply those needs.

Make it 500 babies, have the lunatic gas one just to prove he’s not kidding, and then stand back so Ralph’s blood doesn’t spatter on you.

How many babies did David kill to feed his men? And in that passage isn’t Christ opposing the Pharisees* because* they “condemned the guiltless”?

And I will not kill Ralph, no matter what the lunatic does. Also, once again, you assume the lunatic’s word can be trusted.