Question

You are a doctor at a top hospital. You have six gravely ill patients, five of whom are in urgent need of organ transplants. You can’t help them, though, because there are no available organs that can be used to save their lives. The six patient, however, will die without a particular medicine. If s/he dies, you will be able to save the other five patients by using the organ of patient 6, who is an organ donor. What do you do?

A. Keep patient 6 comfortable, but do not give him medical care that could save his life in order to save other five patients.
B. Save patient 6 and let the other five die; It’s unfortunate, but that’s not your call to make.

Answer 1

Doctors must adhere to medical ethics and laws, which dictate that life-saving treatments cannot be withheld for the benefit of others; thus, patient 6 must be saved, even if it means the other five cannot be helped. This choice respects legal and ethical standards and individual rights.

Step-by-step explanation:

The correct option : b

The ethical dilemma presented here revolves around a deeply challenging medical ethics scenario. Medical ethics and laws prohibit doctors from withholding life-saving treatments from a patient to harvest their organs for others; therefore, option B is the ethically correct choice. Saving patient 6 is both a legal and moral obligation, while letting the other five patients die, though tragic, respects the rights of all patients.

Physicians take an oath to do no harm, which upholds the sanctity of individual patient care and prohibits directly harming one person for the benefit of others. The organ donation question brings into focus the moral philosophies including utilitarianism, which might argue in favor of sacrificing one to save many, but this contradicts medical ethics that demand consent and individual rights. Patient 6's right to life cannot be overridden by the potential benefit to other patients. Furthermore, legally, it is prohibited to harvest organs without consent or to deny treatment with the intent to cause death, making option A both unethical and illegal.

Comparisons to scenarios such as the trolley problem illustrate similar moral conundrums, but these thought experiments often fail to consider real-world legal and ethical guidelines that govern medical practice. Doctors must always work within the confines of these frameworks or risk legal penalties and personal moral culpability. In this scenario, harvesting organs from patient 6 without consent falls into the category of forbidden actions, while saving the drowning child, an example of clear moral obligation, would be considered obligatory.