The survival lottery

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The Survival Lottery is a thought experiment, proposed by the philosopher John Harris. The basis of the idea is to ask people to imagine if organ donation were expected to save more individuals than it would kill. Hypothetically all individuals are assigned a number and drawn out of lottery when a donation is needed, and are expected to give up their lives to allow two or more people to live.

1 Arguments for
2 Arguments against
3 Sources
4 See also

[edit] Arguments for

The argument for the survival lottery can be as follows:

Imagine that organ donation was perfect.
There is no difference between killing and letting die.
Given 1 and 2 we should adopt the Survival Lottery.

The article by John Harris can be seen as an argument against utilitarianism, although Harris himself often makes utilitarian claims in his work. It is also a direct challenge to the belief that there is a difference between killing and letting die, and an exploration of the moral consequences that follow from this.

[edit] Arguments against

The survival lottery relies on the following assumptions:

Each life (killed or allowed to die naturally) is of equal value
Two lives saved are of more value than one life killed to save them
Two lives saved would be completely cured, or be sufficiently cured as to show a quality of two lives greater than a healthy life killed to save them
Two lives saved would be able to live sufficiently long enough on the transplanted organs (staving off rejection and the original sickness causing their need for replacement) as to show a quantitative gain over a completely healthy (and presumable longer) life randomly chosen to be killed

One or more of these assumptions can be proven false and invalidate the survival lottery thought experiment by proving that while killing and letting die can be determined as equal (hypothetically), the actual lives involved cannot be determined as equal or lives saved as greater than one life lost.

Another assumption, or adaptation, of this argument could be the supplemental premise that within such a lottery system the only individuals who die, die by saving at least two lives by means of the lottery.

[edit] Sources

The Survival Lottery, John Harris -In, Applied Ethics, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, ed. Peter Singer
Harris, John (1975). "The survival lottery." Philosophy, 50: 81-87.