Our exams begin on December 11 and go through December 18.
In one class, there is no final exam. There's a paper instead. You guessed it...the paper is 100% of the grade.
The paper is due December 7.
No really, this is not me making up excuses for ONCE AGAIN going over a week without blogging. Clearly I would never do such a thing! In fact, how dare you think it?
Yesterday, in Criminal Law (fast shaping up to be my favorite class...who would have guessed it?) Professor Berman posed the following hypos:
The famous "trolley case"
There's a train coming. Five unconscious people lay on the track. You notice a switch that, if pulled, will redirect the train to a spur, sparing the five. One person is asleep on the spur. What do you do?
Now, say a doctor has five patients who need various organ transplants, all about to die. A complete stranger walks by who happens (bizarrely) to be a perfect blood and tissue match for all five. Should the doctor kill the stranger in order to harvest his organs and save the other five?
Were your two answers different?
If they were, why? Can you justify it?
The class discussion wasn't resolved, we're going to finish it on Monday. But this is why I love Criminal Law: because as a Christian, I approach the two hypos above from a gut-reaction that is presumably the Holy Spirit prompting me as to the correct course. We have The Law, spelled out pretty clearly in the 10 Commandments, we have Biblical principles to live by woven through the Bible, and we have the Holy Spirit prompting us. What's beautiful about Christianity, though, is that if you have to argue without using those three authorities, you can. It's a joy to reach Christian conclusions to moral dilemmas by just thinking it through one step at a time. Because it just makes so much sense. Now of course what's illogical is that it is premised on the ideas that self should not be priority and that death is not the greatest evil, and in my experience outside of Christianity it is generally accepted that you should put yourself first and that if you have do something (anything) to prevent your own death it is permissible. Apart from that, though, a joy of Christianity is the sheer logic of it all. That as a system it works within itself completely, no holes, no problems. That as a moral philosophy it has an answer for every possibility without requiring exceptions to the rules.
So this little game for your minds was just to illustrate a tiny bit of what my classes are like. Enjoy...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I can't believe i missed your post! Wow, this was a good one.
Daddy and I fixed the first question...throw your keys at the guy on the spur, waking him up in time for you to switch the train.
I'll work on the other one.
I'm glad you're in law school and I'm not. But I do love a good hypothetical question (not). It's too much like, "Mom, what if the sky suddenly fell on all of us and killed us", you know?
I linked to you from your mom's site and always enjoy reading your writing. I know what you mean when you referred in one post to being an industry without a soul. I feel like I can usually relate. :-)
Hope your exams went well. Merry Christmas to you.
Thank you both for your comments, and Merry Christmas to you!
Mom, I admit it is a bit like Jamie's 'impossible hypotheticals.' So, I've asked around 15 non-law students the question, and they all respond in some variation similar to your response to the first question: an attempt to break the imposed rules of the question and save everybody. The funny thing is that its not meant to be a 'figure out how to save everyone' hypo...it's meant to challenge your moral values. Most people say save the 5 at the loss of 1 to the first question, (assuming you can't possibly save all 6 ;-) ) but then are stumped at the second because our consciences can't extend the logic. So the point is to show that 'necessity' cannot always be a defense to otherwise criminal activity, or doctors WOULD be able to go around deciding who to sacrifice for other lives. So the law can't always be purely 'moral' or purely 'utilitarian' (moral is not letting the doctor do his thing, utilitarian is saving the 5) sometimes the law just has to be 'political' (i.e. we don't want doctors to go around killing people).
I, of course, don't always agree with all of this, but then again I have the awkward position of being a Christian in law school....
Post a Comment