The Survival Lottery
Killing one to save many — but at random
First published: J. Harris, "The Survival Lottery", *Philosophy* 50 (1975): 81–87.
Two patients will die without transplants. Random lottery selects a healthy person to harvest. Greater good is served — yet the intuition recoils.
Harris constructs a setup where transplant recipients who would otherwise die can be saved by harvesting organs from a healthy person chosen by lottery. If the lottery picks fairly and saves more lives than it ends, utilitarian reasoning recommends it; yet the practice strikes most readers as monstrous. The case sharpens the trolley problem by removing the distinction between killing and letting die: it is intentional, organised killing for collective benefit. It remains a central pressure-test for utilitarianism and for theories of agent-relative constraints.
Formulation
N patients require transplants to survive. State institutes a lottery: random healthy person killed, organs distributed. Expected lives saved > 1 per round. Utilitarian: required. Intuition: monstrous. The constraint against killing the innocent appears agent-relative and absolute.
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Targets Observer · Agency: what kinds of agent-relative constraints are permissible in moral reasoning?
Responses — How Schools Engage
Denies / rejects the premise 4
Direct intentional killing of the innocent is absolutely prohibited regardless of consequences; the survival lottery is intrinsically wrong.
The institutional consequences (terror of citizens, breakdown of trust in medicine) decisively outweigh the lives saved. Practical wisdom rejects the lottery.
Using the lottery loser as mere means for others' survival violates the categorical imperative. Kantian ethics is uncompromising here.
Authentic moral life cannot be reduced to a lottery procedure; the case dramatises the alienation of impersonal moral aggregation.
Reframes the question 1
A classic counterexample to act-utilitarianism; defenders of deontic constraints (Nagel, Scanlon) treat the case as decisive against pure aggregation.
Holds it inconclusive 1
Consequentialists must either bite the bullet or develop indirect-utilitarian justifications for why such institutions undermine welfare. No clean resolution.
Related Experiments
Experiments engaged by an overlapping set of schools — likely to surface the same fault lines.
Further reading
- Harris (1975), op. cit.
- Glover, *Causing Death and Saving Lives* (1977)
Related Historical Debates
Debates that share dimensions and/or aligned schools with this experiment.
Personas Most Aligned With This Experiment
Ranked by total declared-influence weight in the schools that respond to this experiment.
Works Most Aligned With This Experiment
Ranked by total declared-influence weight in the schools that respond to this experiment.
Related Contemporary Dilemmas
Dilemmas that engage the same dimensions as this experiment.