There’s a passage in Richard Dawkins‘ The God Delusion that discusses morality:
Five patients in a hospital are dying, each with a different organ failing. Each would be saved if a donor could be found for their particular faulty organ, but none is available. Then the surgeon notices that there is a healthy man in the waiting-room, all five of whose organs are in good working order and suitable for transplanting. In this case, almost nobody can be found who is prepared to say that the moral act is to kill the one to save the five.
At face value, it almost makes sense to say it’s more moral to save five lives instead of one. Like Dawkins says, however, finding someone who agrees with that idea is not likely. Nobody would say it makes sense to kill the healthy person.
Almost nobody.
I have a feeling it was one of those kinds of people who killed abortion doctor George Tiller this morning.
Someone whose warped mind believes that it’s more moral to kill the one person (Tiller) to save the lives of hundreds (unborn children). Someone who can rationalize calling himself “pro-life” even after murdering someone.
By the way, the only pro-life organization that has put out any sort of public statement is Operation Rescue (Update: other groups have now released statements as well). Their site is down at the moment, but Kristjan Wager at Pro-Science caught a screenshot of the Operation Rescue website before it went down.
At the lower right hand corner is a picture of Tiller with the label “Doctor of Death.”
Over the next day or two, you’ll see all the pro-life groups putting out similar statements — that they had absolutely nothing to do with the murder. They didn’t pull the trigger, but it’s the mindset they put people in that is the problem here. When one of their followers snaps, people like Tiller get killed.
