Vol. 24 No. 16 · 22 August 2002
pages 16-18 | 3942 words
Fearful Thoughts
Stephen Mulhall
- The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life by Jeff McMahan
Oxford, 554 pp, £35.00, February 2002, ISBN 0 19 507998 1
Two-thirds of the way through this dense, involved and exhausting book, its author acknowledges that his views about the nature of persons have the following implication. Suppose that a woman, without family or friends, dies giving birth to a healthy infant. At the same hospital there are three five-year-old children who will die if they do not receive organ transplants, and the newborn has exactly the right tissue type. If Jeff McMahan’s theory is right, it is morally permissible to ‘sacrifice’ the orphaned infant in order to save the other three children.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
From Stuart Hood
In June 1944 the chance of war has made a young British officer part of an Italian resistance formation. When an Allied arms drop is signalled he is in charge of its reception. Arriving at the dropping zone he meets a group of Italians led by his second in command, an Italian officer, who takes him aside and says that there is a man too many in the group – a man unknown to anyone. The British officer interrogates the man – he is in his late teens – who is unable to explain his presence. It would be impossible to keep a prisoner secure. The drop is imminent. The British officer consults with his Italian colleague who says: You are in command here. The British officer says the man has to be got rid of. He is duly shot.
Having been that officer, I am still worried by the 'case', which seems to me more difficult to deal with than an imaginary one concerning the 'sacrifice' of an orphaned infant, discussed by Stephen Mulhall (LRB, 22 August).
Stuart Hood
Brighton
