Heinz dilemma
Heinz wife is dying of a rare form of cancer. There is a drug that can cure the cancer. Heinz tries to get the drug for his wife by raising money and beseeching the CEO of the drug company. He fails; what should he do?
1. Steal the drug and not go to jail.
2. Steal the drug and go to jail.
3. Let his wife die.
Conventional ethics, law and order, good boy, bad boy ethics state he should go to jail if he steals the drug. Post conventional ethics, he should not go to jail because the “broader” social contract asserts that he’s doing the right thing and pre conventional ethics would let his wife die, the rules are the rules. This according to Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development who hypothesizes that each stage is more advanced than the previous; pre-conventional leads to conventional which leads to post conventional and so on.
Interesting, though in my approach to the dilemma I couldn’t help but thinking beyond the simple facts presented. Yes the drug company in the scenario is going to make tremendous profits at the cost to their social contract and I do have a problem with that. However, let’s suppose that a key ingredient in the drug is harvested by the poorest of poor farmers in the poorest of poor nations and that by stealing the drug to save his wife; Heinz denies those farmers a paycheck and their children starve to death. Then, did Heinz do the right thing? Did the ends justify the means and does Kohlberg’s scale really hold water?
My conclussion is that questions of morals and ethics in many situations tend to be much more blurry than what we see on the surface.
