Topics Ethics

Question In the end of the movie <i>The Good Son</i>, two children are about to fall over a cliff. One child is good and the other is evil. A lady, who is the evil child's mother, catches them so that she is holding the wrist of one in her right hand and the wrist of another in her left hand but she only has the strength to pull up one, so she has to choose which to let go. She chooses the good child. Did she make the right choice?

Accepted:
August 30, 2006

Comments

One thing it might depend on is how she chose. Did she choose the good child over the evil one, or did she choose to save one child? If the former is the case, then her action is questionable, since all life is valuable and it is invidious to distinguish between different sorts of life. She would need some sort of utilitarian argument to argue by contrast that some lives are likely to be more productive of welfare and so on than others, and so the good child ought to be saved. She would also need a utilitarian argument against mothers favoring their children, if it could be found, since it might be argued even from a consequentialist perspective that we are all better off in general if mothers favor their children. Whether these sorts of utilitarian arguments can be made to seem plausible seems implausible to me, and if they did work then bad children would have a good motive for dissimulating and pretending to be good. This would also work the other way round, so that good children, not wishing to stand in the way of their less perfect peers, might pretend to be bad in order not to be selfish. Let us hope, then, that the choice was to save just one child, not any particular child.