I’ve been hearing and reading debates about the old (1884) criminal case The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens since law school, and I must say, I’m a bit sick of it.
A wealthy lawyer from Australia purchased bought a yacht named the Mignonette and hired a Captain Dudley to sail it to him it from England. Dudley and his three crew members encountered a violent a storm off the coast of Africa, and the Mignonette was swamped. Its captain and crew escaped in a lifeboat with minimal provisions. After more than three weeks adrift, the captain decided that all of them would die of hunger and thirst unless extreme measures were taken, so he took them. He decided that cabin boy Richard Parker, a 17-year-old orphan, should be slaughtered and eaten. The captain’s reasoning: Parker was already delirious from drinking seawater, so he was deemed the weakest and least likely to survive anyway. The three men killed to boy, collected his blood in a bailer and drank it, then removed his heart and liver and ate them.
It worked! They were rescued in time, just a few days later in fact. Dudley and the First Mate Edwin Stephens were also prosecuted and found guilty of murder, a result that was considered revolutionary, since resorting to cannibalism in such dire circumstances was considered a normal course of action, “the custom of the sea.” In the U.S. at the time, the courts widely accepted the “necessity doctrine,” which excuses some illegal acts if they are performed in good faith to prevent a greater harm.
Ethics Alarms 
Even more dire, they could see just on the beach within swimming distance was an Arby’s.
I would still choose the sick cabin boy….
would it be unethical for the cabin boy to oppose your Option 3?
can he oppose it by force?
Deadly force?
I don’t think 3 gets you out of the problem.
-Jut
Sorry, cannibalism is one of my bright lines. The survival of anyone in the lifeboat is already moral luck. Mere survival is not enough. Seeing England again is not enough. How are the survivors going to return to a society that doesn’t allow cannibalism? Society could turn a blind eye to what happened, but how would anyone individually interact with someone who at seventh and last killed and ate another?
In short, the murder is not the issue, the cannibalism is. There are some things a civilized man should NOT do…
I don’t know. I think the murder is the issue. You are right they are surviving on pure luck at this point. But murder to increase your luck? Nope.
Once one dies? Maybe you’re all too far gone to take advantage but maybe you aren’t. And then cannibalism is a horrible but tolerable thing at that point.
Agreed, the murder is the bigger issue over the cannibalism. See also Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571.
I feel like I am in Jonathan Haidt’s classroom, where he is presenting a series of trolley problems, and other ethics challenges (e.g. dealing with taboos), where the students tend to arrive at a choice, but are often dumbfounded when asked to defend their moral choice. In “The Righteous Mind” chapter 2 “The Intuitive Dog and Its Rational Tail” Haidt argues that people arrive at ethical judgements rapidly and intuitively, followed by slow and sometimes tortuous process of justification. The conclusion is that judgment and justification are two different processes. Judgment uses older parts of the brain and has a stronger involvement of emotions, while the process of justification is rational and uses the slower prefrontal cortex.
The point of all the trolley problems in Haidt’s ethics class is not to actually solved the particular ethics problem once and for all, but to highlight that ethics is an imperfect process that is not purely rational although we prefer to think it is. Instead all ethics is based on rationalizations. There is no objective ethical truth. The capacity for ethical thinking is evolved in the Darwinian meaning of the term. Our ethical intuitions are shaped by various influences such as our personality structure, but also our personal relations, our interests and preferences.
So now here at Ethics Alarm we have some sort of trolley problem based on a real event. And just like in Haidt’s classroom I am afraid that there is not right solution. In the post the philosophy of Kant (deontology) is mentioned and the philosophy of Bentham and Mill (utilitarianism). Neither system is perfect. Both system may lead to different answers, in which case the ethics problem cannot be solved rationally due to a lack of an objective standard of ethics.
Then there is the ethical zugzwang in which all solutions are unethical. In that case it does not really matter which choice you make from an ethical point of view. Any ranking of unethical options tend to subjective, based on preferences.
Option 1 will most likely not result in a volunteer. Option 2 (the captain) will most likely result in everyone’s death. Option 3 (the cabin boy) raises the possibility that the cabin boy disagrees and musters his little power to fight back or beg for his life. Do I want to live with myself after killing and eating him? Did we perhaps cross a bright red moral line nobody should cross, namely the killing of an innocent human being? Is the cabin’s boy life less valuable than my life even if he is already ill? How do we explain our actions to his mother and sisters? How to explain it to God? Option 4 is to sort it by a poker game, while drinking the remaining rum. Have some grim fun while dealing with matters of finality or death. Real sailors option.
Maybe there is an option 5. We would rather die than kill a mate or leave him behind. Survival does not always trump ethics, and mere survival is not the highest good.