Another One

[Poker21]

You get paid twice. First for disclosing the negative effects of the former drug to the highest media bidder and secondly by selling the formula of the latter drug to the highest bidding pharmaceutical company.

[Poker21]

Your right I agree. Use contextual instead of situational. 'Contextualism' is a school of thought alot of theorists ie.. ''Sklansky'' hate to accept as an answer to any question. Unfortunately for them and their predecessors such as 'Socrates' or 'Plato' CONTEXT, and not the sincere and all loving soul, accompanies and dictates 99% of all actions and reactions. I say 99% because there are a few good people out there.

[HentaiGaijin]

Is this question intended to be answered in terms of ontology or game theory?

I'm assuming you are talking about two seperate drugs here, but the wording isn't very clear.

How long will it take to bridge the research gap to 100%? If you expect to have the new drug to market within ~20 years, you will save more lives in the first year of the new drug's lifetime than 20 years of the old drug's lifetime.

Up to that point, the future net benefit in X (a human life) is greater than the status quo...regardless as to what you consider the value of X to be.

The only problem seems to be if someone considers the value of life to be of fundamental import, such that the loss of life is valued greater than saving life. Mathematically, they consider X to either be infinite or undefined. In that case, no loss of life can be justified and you must blow the whistle.

The issue of the company going bankrupt is irrelevant to the moral question. You either place a finite value on life (thus supressing the evidence) or you place an infinite and undefinable value on life (thus blowing the whistle).

There are a lot of other factors that could be brought into this, but that's my view of the issue within the parameters defined by the initial post.

In general, I'm looking at this as "Loss of Life == Value of Life == Saving a Life" but some may consider the loss to be greater than saving a life. Shrug.

[BadBoyBenny]

I've got to agree with this situational out that was posted earlier, but if I ignore it...

I can't imagine how terrible I would feel if I suppressed the evidence that the other drug was causing side effects, and then the 10% happened and the new drug turned out to be something other than a lifeaver. I would probably either kill myself or live in a monastery for the rest of my life.

[BadBoyBenny]

By killing one thousand people you can extend the life of every other human on the planet by 6 months.

[felson]

Then undertakers all over the world would go hungry until Valentine's Day. [img]/images/graemlins/ooo.gif[/img]

[Senor Choppy]

Suppress the evidence, and it's not even close.

How many chances do you get to net 850 lives saved like this? People sacrifice human lives at a much worse ratio in times of war everyday. Passing up an opportunity like this would be worse than murder IMO.

[Lawrence Ng]

This is why I hated taking Philosophy in university. It is exactly open questions like this which lead to erroneous generalization on a scale that would make my head split.

When you are dealing with moral issues of saving human lives that involve a new drug there is no doubt that if the drug cures and saves more lives than it does harm then the drug should be legally administered. Even if it only a 1 percent chance increase of saving the person's life. What is the other option - death? Hmm..what's that 0 percent?

Now the morale question of supressing the evidence. Yes I would.

[Atropos]

Yeah suppress the evidence, if you can save that many more lives by doing so.

[OnlinePokerCoach]

Yes, you should let the 50 die to save the 1000 from the 90% chance of death. This would be true until about 5.1% mark, with a expected saving of 51 lives.

No, it makes no difference if I had to do the killing.

These answers may seem odd and gruesome, but if a real world example could be formulated with these same odds (a difficult task), the answers would make intuitive sense as well. The real world example would likely be akin to the example of, "would you kill Hitler before WWII if you had the chance (knowing what you know now and assuming you get away without repercussion)?"