Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T12:33:01.973Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Harris's Modest Proposal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Michael B. Green
Michael B. Green
Affiliation:
University of Texas
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In ‘The Survival Lottery’ John Harris raises the following issue. Suppose it is possible for physicians to save the lives of two patients, Y and Z, otherwise doomed to die through no fault of their own, by taking the life of a third person, P, and using various of his organs appropriately for transplants. To provide a fair and impartial way of selecting the organ donor, a survival lottery is proposed for the society. This lottery randomly selects an organ donor from the population at large. Harris, speaking from the point of view of Y and Z, defends the demand that such a lottery be established. What if anything is wrong with this scheme?

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 54 , Issue 209 , July 1979 , pp. 400 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Harris, John, ‘The Survival Lottery’, Philosophy 50, No. 191 (01 1975), 81–87CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, For other commentary, see: Morillo, Carolyn R., ‘As Sure as Shooting’, Philosophy 51, No. 195 (01 1976), 80–89CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Hanink, J. G., ‘On the Survival Lottery’, Philosophy 51, No. 196 (04 1976), 223–225CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Singer, Peter, ‘Utility and the Survival Lottery’, Philosophy 52, No. 200 (04 1977), 218–222CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Trammell, Richard L. and Wren, Thomas E., ‘Fairness, Utility and Survival’, Philosophy 52, No. 201 (07 1977), 331–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Future references are to these papers.

2 Trammell and Wren note this lottery of Nature, but their claim to have thereby found a reductio against Harris for generating an infinite regress of lotteries is vitiated because they consider only the organ redistribution lottery without utilitarian gain (op. cit., 333).

3 Morillo assimilates the proposed society to our own by asserting: ‘Perhaps… we do require saintliness of those eligible for the draft’ (p. 81). This is misleading. The draft is more reasonably construed as a risk incurred to avoid a greater harm.

4 Hanink notes this point, but his example is very weak. It is arguable, contra Hanink, that a ship's crew should expel an immune carrier of a highly contagious fatal disease if quarantine were not possible (op. cit., 225).

5 For the first, see this paper supra and Trammell, and Wren, (p. 322passim)Google Scholar. For the second, Morillo, (pp. 88–89)Google Scholar. Third, Hanink, (pp. 224–225)Google Scholar and this paper infra.

6 Op. cit., 88.

7 I do not intend C to be strictly true. Its purpose is merely to spell out the sticking point at which we find B unacceptable as it stands.

8 I have spoken as though the lottery were a good idea to bring out the strength of B′. This is unlikely. Singer remarks that ‘to pool the risk [of producing bad health] with others reduces the incentive to avoid loss…’ (p. 221). Worse yet, since the lottery reverses natural selection, it guarantees progressive genetic decline.

9 Op. cit., 218–219.