John Harris Survival Lottery

Just What, If Anything, Is Wrong with Harris’ Proposal of The Survival Lottery?

The Survival Lottery (John Harris, 1975) is an example of a society being governed with a utilitarian philosophy behind it, with the purpose to live in a society where the majority of people will prosper. Harris’ Survival Lottery explains that organ donation should be an obligation of every human being, and that when selected randomly in a lottery, people are required to sacrifice their life so that their organs can be harvested and used to save the lives of two or more people who are in need of a transplant to save their lives. Harris’ justification for this is that there is no difference between killing one healthy person and allowing two ill people to die because they are both equally as innocent as the healthy person; it was just chance that they fell ill. Harris importantly excluded any people with self-inflicted diseases or illnesses such as liver failure due to excessive alcohol consumption from the lottery.

In this essay I will explain why J.S.Mill’s branch of Utilitarianism, often referred to as Rule Utilitarianism, supports Harris’ idea of a survival lottery. However I will then reject this proposal of Utilitarianism because it devalues the sanctity of human life by treating people as a “means to an end” which I believe to be

immoral. Furthermore I will suggest that a deontological Kantian ethic which aims to treat everyone equally is a better ethical guideline to live by as it commands us to respect all human life and to treat people as ends in themselves.
Harris tries to justify his proposal of the Survival Lottery with the following argument;
1. Organ transplantation has been perfected.
2. There is no difference between “killing and letting die” .
3. Therefore we should adopt the Survival Lottery as it will save the greatest number of lives.
Harris is a utilitarian who believes that we should look at the consequences of an action to judge whether it is considered the right or wrong thing to do (teleological), this opposes the idea of judging our actions on the morality of the action itself (deontological). This doctrine links into Mills idea of Utilitarianism which states that the individuals own happiness is not important, but what is imperative is for society to have “the greatest amount of happiness altogether” for the greatest amount of people. This premise further justifies Harris’ idea of the Survival Lottery because in Harris’ thinking saving multiple lives will bring about more happiness than allowing them to die and not harvesting a random persons organs.
At the start of Harris’ argument he makes clear that all medical transplantations have been perfected and there will therefore be no complications in any medical procedures such as organs being rejected. Even though this means that Harris’ proposal will increase the average human life expectancy, I still believe that is immoral and unjustifiable for various reasons.
One such reason is that using a lottery to pick somebody to give up their life for other people to have their healthy organs in my opinion is just systematic murder of the innocent.

I believe that it is immoral to tell someone they are going to die in order to save a certain number of other people because in doing this it is devaluing human life considering people are losing their right of life and self-defence. Furthermore, this extreme style of control over a population in my opinion will lead to a loss in individuality of people as they may become more susceptible to negative thoughts as they may fell they are being used like a cog in a

system.
In addition to this, Utilitarianism is a deontological ethical theory which looks at the consequences of an action to decide whether it is right or wrong. The main weakness with this principle is that when applied to the survival lottery it means that we presume the lives saved will amount to a greater good then the life lost. This in my opinion is impossible to predict and so utilitarian’s will only be able to assess whether it was the right thing to do after it has happened. Furthermore even if they do try to assess whether they believe it to have been the correct thing to do it is still impossible to quantify and therefore cannot be justifiably implemented.
Overall I believe that the proposal of the survival lottery is immoral as it fails to respect human life. Furthermore it is unjustifiable to suggest that one person’s life is less valuable than a number of other lives. In conclusion I would suggest that instead of living with morals based on the idea of utilitarianism, society would benefit more by following a Kantian ethic. I believe this because Kant centred his ethical theory on treating all human beings with intrinsic worth and not allowing them to be exploited. However the survival lottery does not follow this principle as it treats people as means to an end, furthermore it goes against the basic human right of a right to life.