I WOULD push it and I WOULD give it to a worthy cause.... I think.

A million dollars can save a vast number of lives. If my department in the hospital had an extra million dollars to spend this year we could save maybe a dozen lives and improve countless others.

I don't think I could cope with the guilt if I kept a cent, though. If I knew fewer people and the likelihood of the "victim" being a member of my family or close friend, I guess there comes a point when I would personally find it difficult.

Pushing a button or giving an order, it's such an isolating and distancing action, especially if you don't have to deal with the consequences. There'd be a lot fewer wars if politicians actually had to get their hands dirty and do any killing. I think it's the same reason the murder rate is so high in the USA - over here, to kill somebody you have to take a bat and smash their skull in, or take a knife and thrust it repeatedly into them. It's easier to kill when you can just squeeze a trigger (or even more distant, just press a button). In this case, I think I could do it if need be. If I had to push a knife through someone's ribs in this "hypothetical", personally, I don't know if I would be capable.

If I can press a button and there's basically a 99.5% chance the person who buys it will be somebody I don't know anymore or met in passing 5 years ago, and that money can be used directly to save other lives, maybe it's worth it. I don't know, I suppose it's a difficult moral decision, BUT coming at it from a purely logical point of view, I guess theoretically I could; "playing God" would not be a worry for me as a moral issue because I'm an atheist.

I also think it's crazy when people believe that life is sacred and that you can't put a value on it. Every single day we put a value on life, in our society, in our personal lives, whether it be directly economic or otherwise. If human life truly was sacred and had a limitless value to human beings, we would all dedicate out lives to preserving it in every single way possible, which we clearly don't. Indeed, in a capitalist society you put a very exact economic price on life, and it's the poor of society who are usually at the receiving end (those who don't have money to pay for medical care, those who live in countries which are considered less important due to their poor economic status etc.). However, the alternative seems to be socialism, which has more or less failed spectacularly everywhere it's been tried to a greater or lesser extent, and doesn't really directly address the issue of the price of individual lives anyway. So I don't see how you could possibly argue that you can't put a value on life, as we do every day.

How that all relates to this question, well, I don't know. I think anyone and everyone puts both a personal value and a societal value on life every single day, though, so it's hard to take moral high ground.

TRod is right on both counts.

If the value of one human life were limitless, then the speed limit would be 10 miles per hour, there would be no left turns allowed (no right turns in Britain). There would be pedestrian overpasses built over every street. And so on. The value of a human life is not infinite.

On the other hand, it's not up to any of us to put a price on other people's lives.

If it's your own life, then go ahead. Push the button to kill yourself and somehow magically generate an extra hundred million dollars to give to cancer research or whatever to save a thousand lives. Good for you. But other people's lives just aren't yours to take. Duh.

As Clint Eastwood said in Unforgiven: "It's a hell of a thing to kill a man. You take away everything he's got, and everything he's ever going to have." You don't do that just to make your own life a little nicer around the edges.

Hero instapushes