Dilemma

My friend Max Harris recently presented a moral dilemma on his blog www.isitreallylikethat.blogspot.com which, in its essence, asks you to decide how to distribute an antidote for an airborne fatal plague that will soon spread throughout the world. Only enough of the antidote has been stockpiled to save ten per cent of the world's population. Without an antidote, ninety-nine per cent of the world's population will be wiped out. To prevent civil disturbance, everyone will receive a pill, but ninety per cent of the pills will be placebos. No one but you will know who receives which pill. The problem assumes that you won't give it to your family and friends and sell the rest, so that, in the words of the folksong, "the rich would live and the poor would die."

It's up to you to decide.

When asked to solve this problem, my initial reaction was "who am I to judge?" But who for that matter would be any better at it? Can you think of a committee of wise men and women to whom you would entrust responsibility for distributing the pills? Actually, what about the U. S. Senate? It we left it to them, the wrangling would consume so much time that the plague would arrive before anyone could get a pill.

But perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing. The human race would survive, along with some of the world's best and brightest, as well as some of the world's rogues and dullards. I'd want the whole range of abilities and characters, just as before. If one were choosing an orchestra, one would not select only woodwinds, for example, or strings. So with the world. A random culling of the population would leave us much as we are today. We'd have the same proportion of policemen and physicians, athletes and artists. The world's libraries and museums would still be intact, and life could continue, but this time without worrying about pollution or overpopulation or the scarcity of oil.

Is anyone more worthy to live than another? Have we learned nothing from the Final Solution? Besides, human engineering can lead to catastrophic consequences, as implied in George Bernard Shaw's famous response to the actress who suggested that they produce a child together, so that their offspring would have her face and his brains. "But what if, Madam, he had my face and your brains?" So I say throw the antidote into the sea and let chance play itself out, but with one exception. As I said to Max, let's save a pill for Santa Claus so that he can return next year.