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Suppose a Healthy Patient Requiring Minor Surgery Is at the Hospital

Question 12

Multiple Choice

Suppose a healthy patient requiring minor surgery is at the hospital, and the surgeon realizes this patient is a donor match for five patients dying of organ failure and decides to let the scalpel slip and kill the patient to maximize utility by harvesting his organs. How might John Rawls object?


A) If the practice of killing healthy patients to harvest organs were followed as a general rule, it would reduce utility as healthy patients would avoid the hospital, causing their conditions to worsen.
B) If the killing could be done such that no one but the surgeon knew, then the killing would maximize utility and be morally necessary. The problem is that this contradicts conventional morality.
C) The requirement to kill this patient to make others well alienates the doctor from his larger practical project of healing people.
D) The calculation of consequences treats the individual patients as mere containers for valuable experiences and fails to factor in that the loss of one person cannot be replaced by saving another.

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