Conundrum wrote:
Basically the same for me.
Four. My wife and three kids.
Another Lack of Date Point wrote:
Common easy answer. Now lets make it more difficult. Would you give up your life to save a stranger. No, OK how about a dozen strangers? 100 strangers? A city?
This reminds me of an introductory ethics class I took in first year of nursing. We were given a sort of survey that apparently would divide us into the four basic types of people based on our answers (I have long forgot the descriptions of these four classes). The questions were quite provoking and tough to answer.
Here's two I remember:
1. You are a doctor and drive by an accident on a highway. Four people are involved, each with varying injury. Upon initial assessment, you feel that one person is near critical and needs your full attention immediately, and may still not make it even if you give it to them and ignore the rest - but they will surely die if you delay responding to them even for a minute. The other three are not so serious, but still quite critical, and delaying assistance to them may further compromise at least one (and importantly, maybe more than one) of the three's chances of survival, although to a lesser chance compared to person #1. Who do you attend to first?
... and the most difficult question I remember from the survey:
2. You know (somehow, just go with the question's premise) that you can eradicate all cancer completely, overnight and forever, by doing tests on 100 infants and children that will torture them with terrible pain, and eventually kill them all. Knowing that cancer kills many more people than this every day (probably even every hour, worldwide) and certainly causes terrible pain to them as well (many of them also infants and children), would you be able to make the decision to go ahead with the tests and rationalize this terrible deed for the 'greater good' and the knowledge that no one will ever suffer from cancer again?