Argument: A utilitarian approach will result in a decision that saves the largest number of lives possible.

Every time a life is extinguished, some amount of present and future good vanishes from the world. All the good things that that person would have experienced – joy, accomplishment, delight – will no longer occur. Similarly, all the beneficially effects they will have one other people, from productively working to loving their family, will also not occur. True, people also experience unhappy times, and they sometimes negatively affect others, but in all but an exceptionally small number of cases, the net contribution of a human life to total utility is positive (indeed, if it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t consider death to be bad). Even though there will be some fluctuations in how much each life contributes to total utility – a happy doctor probably adds more utility than a miserable meter maid – it is overwhelmingly likely that saving the five lives will result in a situation of greater utility than preserving the life of the one.

Candidate 1: "It is worse to actively participate in a death then to simply allow an individual to die

While people die all the time, it is exceptionally rare for one human being to intentionally cause the death of another, even for a perceived “greater good.” The difference is that when one actively kills, one causes the killing. They bring about something that would not otherwise have happened, and they set it in motion. What is key is the moral actor’s role in the very inception of the threat to the life of another person. Their responsibility for the resulting death is far greater than had they committed the same non-action as every other person who wasn’t present to make the decision at all."
Candidate 2: "We cannot make value judgments as to who should and should not be marked for death or for salvation

Different people’s lives may indeed weigh differently. Some people may go on to cure cancer, while others may become serial killers. However, we do not know who will do what with their future, and it is an act of immense hubris to perform calculations that presume otherwise. We could be killing future a serial-rapist in order to save future a philanthropist who funds Somali famine-relief, but we could just as easily be doing the opposite. We are in a state of incredible ignorance as to what these individuals will choose to do. It truly is to “play god”, and vastly overestimate our ability to judge who will be good for the world and who will be bad."
Candidate 3: "Assessing the value of a life on the basis of family members and how much the person is worth to everyone else creates a perverse priority on those with large families and many connections. To do so makes an injunction: position yourself so that you’re important and well-connected, and suddenly you get priority when we are deciding who to save."
Candidate 4: "Intuitively, it is possible to understand that participating in a decision to kill is a priori wrong

While simply consulting our moral intuitions case-by-case is not always reliable (indeed many people have contradictory moral intuitions), certain moral intuitions are needed in order to morally theorize. If a moral theory was impeccably well thought out, but prescribed actions completely at odds with our moral intuitions (such as advocating indiscriminate assault and robbery), then we would rightly dismiss it out of hand. When it comes to killing, our intuition prohibiting it is foundational and widely held."
Candidate 5: "To weigh up human lives in this calculated manner inherently strips them of dignity and reduces them to mere numbers. This “aggregative” ethical standpoint, in which a loss of utility to one person can be compensated for by gains in utility to other people, fails to respect “the separateness of persons” [1] . We are all different people, and we do not all share in the alleged benefits to maximizing total utility. For this reason, our moral intuitions reject out-of-hand many variants on “killing one to save five”; for instance, we would think it abhorrent to abduct a random person and harvest their organs in order to save five dying people, even in the absence of side effects like people now being afraid of having their organs taken. Also, see “different lives weigh differently” argument below.

[1] Richardson, Henry S., ‘John Rawls (1921-2002)’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 18 November 2005, http://www.iep.utm.edu/rawls/"
Candidate 6: "Utilitarianism is morally demanding

If we recognize a duty to actively go out of our way (and indeed, carry the burden of killing another person) to save another person just because it’s in our power, then all sorts of new obligations open up. For instance, we are now obliged to donate all of our disposable income to charity because we could do so and each save dozens of lives a year. The reason why some religious institutions canonize people is precisely because their philanthropy is exceptional and beyond what could be expected of the average person: people like Damien of Molokai, who traveled to an island to help people suffering from leprosy, knowing that he would eventually contract the disease in the process [1] . While such actions may be praiseworthy, it is implausible that they would be morally obligatory.

[1] Donadio, Rachel, ‘Benedict Canonizes 5 New Saints’, The New York Times, 11 October 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/world/europe/12pope.html"
Candidate 7: "The act of killing can wreak immense psychological damage upon rational individuals

To know that one has actually killed another human being will haunt the moral agent forever. Instances of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for soldiers returning for warzones are increasingly reported, suggesting that a situation of killing very often warps the killer’s life [1] . This holds true even for people not directly and viscerally involved in killings, such as the incredible guilt felt by the team of the Manhattan project. [2]

[1] ScienceBlog, ‘1 in 5 Iraq, Afghanistan Vets has PTSD’, 17 April 2008, http://scienceblog.com/15954/1-in-5-iraq-afghanistan-vets-has-ptsd-major-depression-rand/

[2] Long, Tony, ‘Aug. 6, 1945: ‘I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds’, Wired, 6 August 2007, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/dayintech_0806"
Candidate 8: "The idea of a “right to life,” while appealing, is highly suspect. “Rights” are the highest order of human entitlements, things which one can reasonably expect will never ever happen to them, and which if violated represent a colossal failure of our moral and legal infrastructure. In reality, people die all the time for a variety of natural and artificial reasons, and while we certainly think that these deaths are unfortunate, we don’t think that someone’s human rights were infringed upon every time someone dies in a motor vehicle accident. By contrast, we do have an actual right not to be murdered. When one human being deliberately kills another human being, we rightly see that as an exceptional and grave violation of a basic human right. Therefore, it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights to let the five people die, but it certainly does violate the right of putative sixth person to actively murder them to save the others. Moreover, it may be questionable to assume that all lives are equally valuable; if we are going to engage in the grisly business of actually summing up human lives, why treat someone who we’d expect to only live for another year equal to someone we can expect to live for another sixty? If the advocate of killing the one is going to adopt a “maximizing” ethical view, they should at least commit to a true utilitarianism, rather than a view that is not necessarily supported by either utilitarianism or deontology; treating all deaths as equal, regardless of much they cut a life short, is not something a utilitarian would get behind."
Candidate 9: "We should not will a world where killing is acceptable in to existencele in to existence

Knowing that we have agreed that there are situations where we can decide to kill others for the greater good makes us fearful of the prospect of others visiting such judgment on us (independent of whether such an act is objectively right or wrong). Immense psychological harm accrues from knowing that other people may actively judge oneself to be worth killing for an external purpose. Moreover, an acceptance of killing tends to brutalize society and make people more receptive to the idea of killing in general, which leads human beings to behave more violently."
Candidate 10: "Behind the veil of ignorance, human beings may not in fact side with what gives them the statistical greatest chance of survival. As Rawls himself notes, people are naturally risk-averse, and thus will select the rules that protect them from the worst possible situations, even if that sacrifice would help many others. Most people find the prospect of being actively killed by the conscious action of another human being worse than simply dying in an accident, and would seek to protect themselves against that worse outcome."

To weigh up human lives in this calculated manner inherently strips them of dignity and reduces them to mere numbers. This “aggregative” ethical standpoint, in which a loss of utility to one person can be compensated for by gains in utility to other people, fails to respect “the separateness of persons” [1] . We are all different people, and we do not all share in the alleged benefits to maximizing total utility. For this reason, our moral intuitions reject out-of-hand many variants on “killing one to save five”; for instance, we would think it abhorrent to abduct a random person and harvest their organs in order to save five dying people, even in the absence of side effects like people now being afraid of having their organs taken. Also, see “different lives weigh differently” argument below.

[1] Richardson, Henry S., ‘John Rawls (1921-2002)’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 18 November 2005, http://www.iep.utm.edu/rawls/
