Freepost #3

While I was reading a book about scenarios and questions, I came across an interesting scenario and decided I would reflect upon the responses for the scenario for my free post.

If you could world hunger by killing a person, would you do it? I found this scenario interesting because it was related to the article we read in the beginning of the year entitled, “The Gift,” which was about a man who donated most of his estate to many charities. He sacrificed a lot to help others, and this scenario requires an even greater sacrifice to save others. I posed this scenario to a few of my friends and even a teacher. The majority of the boys that answered were quick to say that they would gladly sacrifice the one person to save many others, whereas the girls were reluctant to sacrifice anyone, but in the end decided to sacrifice the one person. In other words, the boys instantly weighed the total outcomes, whereas the girls tried to empathize with both parties before making a decision. The teacher also chose to sacrifice the person, but he explained his thought-process to us, which ended up being more profound than our thought-process’. He told us that he had not only weighed the two parties, but had accounted for who the person that was being sacrificed. As he put it, “I wouldn’t want to go home and find one of my parents dead and have to explain it to the other.” This made me think about how this would have changed the answers of my friends. Would the guys who didn’t even try to empathize with the unlucky person who would have to die be able to do the same to their mother? And would the girls who were so reluctant to sacrifice a stranger be able to sacrifice their father? Are our personalities so selfish that we couldn’t sacrifice our loved ones for the loved ones of many other families? In “The Gift,” the man had said that he didn’t know if he could sacrifice two strangers so that one of his kids could live. Which is the more morally, sacrificing many for a loved one or sacrificing a loved one for many?
When I answered this question, I was just trying to create opposition to make it more interesting. I decided to say that I wouldn’t sacrifice the person (this is assuming the person is a stranger), under the pretense that saving many people would actually be detrimental to the human race. Our population is increasing with the deaths of many due to starvation, which will eventually cause over population in the world, which would hurt everyone. If those that should have died from starvation end up living and contributing to the population increase, then in our lifetime we could expect drastic increases in population densities across the globe. This increase of population would also greatly affect our resources, such as plastics, metals, and fuel. When I proposed this, I instantly thought of all the charitable people in the world that would hate me for just thinking this, but I questioned whether they saw the future of mankind or only the present. Eventually, all of my controversial ideas accumulated to two questions; by helping others that are less fortunate, are we helping the human race as well as being morally decent? And is there a difference between helping the human race and being morally decent? The workings of the world are too complex to comprehend, and maybe the helping others and resources don’t even have a correlation. But if it were, the entire view on what is good would be completely different and our ideas on life would change drastically, either for the better or for the worse.