Put yourself into the middle of a war, with a small child. Enemy troops have invaded your city, and you are with a group of 30 or so people. The baby starts to cry. If the baby continues to cry, the troops will find you and kill all 30 people. Do you kill the baby to save the other 29 people, or do you let the baby cry and, in essence, allow all 30 people to be killed? Are there any other options?

That's one of the subject I taken for this last semester in university, Business Ethics. Very challenging subject for me because of the questions. How will you answered?! What will you do?! And all that reflecting your ethical behavior. There's not right or wrong but grey area that exist... And here's another question we got for our first chapter.


          "In 1842, a ship struck an iceberg and more than 30 survivors were crowded into a lifeboat intended to hold 7. As a storm threatened, it became obvious that the lifeboat would have to be lightened if anyone were to survive. The captain reasoned that the right thing to do in this situation was to force some individuals to go over the side and drown. Such an action, he reasoned, was not unjust to those thrown overboard, for they would have drowned anyway. If he did nothing, however, he would be responsible for the deaths of those whom he could have saved. Some people opposed the captain's decision. They claimed that if nothing were done and everyone died as a result, no one would be responsible for these deaths. On the other hand, if the captain attempted to save some, he could do so only by killing others and their deaths would be his responsibility; this would be worse than doing nothing and letting all die. The captain rejected this reasoning. Since the only possibility for rescue required great efforts of rowing, the captain decided that the weakest would have to be sacrificed. In this situation it would be absurd, he thought, to decide by drawing lots who should be thrown overboard. As it turned out, after days of hard rowing, the survivors were rescued and the captain was tried for his action. If you had been on the jury, how would you have decided?"


That is the story, you are in a boat, and the boat can only take 7 people but it has 30 inside it, either some get off and die or everyone on the boat dies. If you're in charge how you make that decision? Would you willing to murder some people to save others? Or would you rather everyone died then face the guilt of killing so many people? Some will die for others VS everyone dies... it is really a hard decision to make. How you decide who can live and who will die?

Are the Captain qualify as a murderer because he killed them by throwing them from a safe boat to freezing icy water and some of them didn't even know how to swim? But isn't it also called self-defense because he killed those people as he knew keeping them alive would have ended his life as well? Murder or self-defense?

For me, I would done the same thing as the Captain. He tried his best to save some instead of letting everyone dies. And to survive you had to keep rowing and only strong people can survive at last. And one hidden meaning I interpret from this case is that, what separates the people on the boat and the people under the water. In this realistic world, only strong people survived.