Furthermore, are all humans not equal, with different abilities? Then, how do we decide who to sacrifice? How do we choose who to kill and who to save? This is really unfair to those who are forced to die, as they could not resist at all. Also, once they are born into this world, they have to rights to live, thus what authority do we have to kill them in order to save others?
We often kill one person to prevent harm to others. We killed Timothy McVeigh, so he would never be free to bomb another building. We killed John Wayne Gacy, so he could not kidnap rape and kill any more male teenagers. Most hardened, sociopathic killers have been caught and rehabilitated several times before a death sentence. Would we agree to let a few people die of an incurable and highly contagious disease so that the rest of us could live? Would we kill someone about to poison the main water supply for millions of people? Would we kill a man trying to hijack a plane in intent to crash it, or kill a woman about to drive through a park full of children? If not, they will harm much more other innocent people! If this is the type of reasoning adopted, you would think that it is morally right to kill some people to save others, because killing by inaction is no better than killing by action.
If you have to kill three people to prevent them from murdering a hundred, for example, that's very justified and proper police work, though it would be preferable to find a better solution.
If it is not possible to save everybody in a fire, we will tend to choose the large group before the smaller one, because each life is precious, thus many precious lives are worth more than a few precious lives.
A train is stuck on a cliff, enough of it hangs on the dangerous side of the cliff, and the other big portion is on the safe side. You can cut away the piece that hangs down, killing all people in it, but saving many others that will otherwise die, if the piece hanging over the cliff pulls down the whole train.
Many men are trapped in a submarine. I can get to five men to save them, but if doing so will rupture another deck, flooding it and drowning the four men below. If I save the four, the other deck ruptures and kills the five above. If all there lives are of the same value, then numbers win. I should save the five, not the four. We don’t know what each of those men would want us to do in such a situation, whether they want to live or they are willing to sacrifice themselves. However, when it comes down to saving lives that you don't know enough about, the moral thing to do is save as many as you can.
When a “leader” chooses to sacrifice some people for the sake of others, what are the criteria for this choice? Does he consider the people to be sacrificed less important in the society so it's not going to be a great loss, or considers them nobler and stronger so it will be their honour to sacrifice for the common good? If it is the first case, egalitarianism, humanism are out of question for the sake of practicality. If it is the second case, then we talk about the so-called heroes.
But still we have the problem of the morality or the immorality of his choice. What if the leader was deciding instead of sacrificing anyone else, but to sacrifice himself and his own family? Or what if he would be blindfolded and he would pick randomly from the crowd? Would those two cases be ethical?
Thus it can be said that killing to save others is justified in certain cases, but not in other cases. This is a very controversial question that many ask themselves, but till today, not many people are able to come up with a whole answer as to whether or not it is justified.
