Blow Up the Fat Guy
This phrase sums up everything I learned from my college ethics classes: blow up the fat guy! We often discussed the question of whether there was any ethical difference between actively killing someone or passively letting someone die.
This was my favorite scenario. You have a bunch of people trapped in a cave. There’s a small opening and people have been getting out through the hole until this fat guy gets stuck, so now the people inside the cave are really trapped. The water is rising in the cave, and if we don’t do something fast, everyone is going to drown, except the fat guy who’s head is out in the air.
There’s some dynamite, and we could take the chance to blow a hole in the cave wall, but if you do that, the fat guy gets blown to smithereens.
So the question is, what do you do? Do you let all these people die because you don’t want to commit murder? Or do you say, to hell with my mortal soul, I’m saving these people?
The answer is simple to me. I mean, what was the fat guy thinking anyway? He knew he wouldn’t fit through that hole, so the least he could have done was let all those tiny little women and children go through first.
These are the hard decisions that leaders must make. You must be prepared to pay the price. You must be prepared to blow up the fat guy.
Tags: meanderings