[sweetjazz]

What about a simpler moral question? Suppose that the 10 people you most care about all have a terminal illness. (Yes, you have that effect on people.) And you can save them all by firing a death ray from space that will kill merely one starving African child.

I think it is clear that the greater good is to save your beloved friends and family. Even so, it is not at all clear to me that is morally correct to kill the African child. We don't, as a society, go around killing people anytime we think it will be, so to speak, +EV for society.

I am not saying that I would blame people for saving the people (or person) they care about in either scenario and it certainly seems like saving your loved one(s) is what most people would opt for. So if the poll is merely asking "what would you do?" then I think the overwhelmingly chosen answer is obvious. If the question asked is "what should you do?" then I think the answer should change.

EDIT: The key distinction to be made is that our choice is between allowing a natural process to continue in which, sadly, a beloved person will die or taking an action which will result in the willful killing of ten people (who we happen to know have a poor quality of life and to whom we have no emotional attachment, and we also happen to know we will suffer no punishment for our action). It seems to me that the ethical principle of not killing innocent people is more fundamental, and therefore takes precedence, over trying to produce the greatest good in society. You can dress the situation up so that just about anyone would, because we are humans and not moral robots, do the morally wrong thing, but that does not make it right.

I strongly suspect that, were the scenario a real one, I would end up using the death ray in the hypothetical situation outlined, even though I am fairly certain that it is clearly wrong to do so.