Utility and the survival lottery.

TLDR: The author argues that if human life is valuable, a scheme that saves human lives must be desirable, and sides with Harris against objections based on the idea of the sanctity of human life and the wrongness of killing an innocent human being.

Abstract: In an ingenious article John Harris has proposed a 'survival lottery' which would minimize the total number of deaths in a community by sacrificing randomly chosen individuals so that their organs could be transplanted to other people, each of whom needs to have an organ replaced. Since, assuming the perfection of transplant technology, the parts of one 'donor' (if that is the right word) could save the lives of four or five others, the proposal appears to be a rational one. If we had the option of joining such a scheme it seems, at first glance anyway, that we would be imprudent to refuse to join. More lives will be saved by the transplants than will be lost by the sacrifices required; hence our prospects of living to a ripe old age are better if we join.1 Rational as Harris's idea seems, it will no doubt evoke numerous objections based on the idea of the sanctity of human life and the wrongness of killing an innocent human being.2 It is not my present purpose to discuss such objections, although my inclinations are to side with Harris against them, on the ground that if human life is valuable, a scheme that saves human lives must be desirable. To say that one violates the sanctity of human life by killing one person to save four, while one does not violate it if one allows four to die because one refuses to kill one, invokes a very dubious notion of moral responsibility. Moral responsibility, as Harris and others have argued, must apply to what we deliberately allow to occur as well as to what we directly bring about.3 Similarly, the charge that it is arbitrary or unfair to be called upon to die just because one's number has been drawn in a lottery can be met by pointing out that it is arbitrary and unfair to die just because one has contracted a kidney disease; and if the only way to prevent four arbitrary and unfair deaths is to inflict one arbitrary and unfair death, that procedure is itself neither arbitrary nor unfair. In any case, the charge of unfairness, or of infringing individual rights,