The last merchant vessel of the trading season is bound for home. During their voyage home, the ship encounters an unexpected storm and four of the crew members are thrown overboard and assumed drowned. Later though, these crew members all wash to the shore of an island in which crews frequently make pit stops during the trading season. Alongside the crew, several crates of food and other supplies, also thrown overboard, wash up beside them. After taking an inventory of the crates, it is discovered that only enough food exists for three of the crew to survive until the next trading season when help will finally arrive back at the island. If they attempt to stretch out the food for all four of them, every one of them will surely die. Should the crew accept the fact that one should die to save all four or hope for an unlikely miracle? If the crew decides to accept this fact… How should the crew decide who dies? Should it be upon age, merit, or some other factor? Or should they draw straws to make it random? Finally, if the person selected to die attempts to fight the other three or steal their food, would the three be justified in killing the condemned man? And would the condemned man be justified in fighting back against his would-be murderers?

Assuming that you are not an overly hopeful person waiting on a miracle, nor a complete nihilist resigned to the void, you are simply a product of our modern environment. Driven by a pragmatic mindset, you have decided collectively with all the other surviving crew members that you must let one person die for the rest to survive. You argue that it is the best utilitarian choice ? So now that the grim reality is accepted, the question persists: how do you decide who to let go?

You all have quite a few options when deciding who dies based on their immediate usability on the island. You could look at things like how physically strong or capable they are, or how sharp their wits are, whether they can navigate the complexity of the woods to contribute to survival in other ways. Perhaps they are just a good lad, a companion who keeps the group motivated and serves as a source of entertainment and hope in despair.

OR, perhaps you look beyond the shores of your current prison and weigh their lives against their value to the world back home. Should a person’s profound contributions to the mainland spare them, even if they are virtually useless when it comes to raw survival on the island? Imagine saving a brilliant physics researcher who is on the brink of a novel, world-altering theory, or a major philanthropist business owner whose enterprises sustain thousands of families. Does their immense, complex contribution to human society out there justify preserving them in here, regardless of their inability to forage or hunt?

Now, all of these choices lead you down to the exact same paradox: the person ultimately selected for elimination by these methods would not consent to forfeit their life. Acting out of their own biological reflexes to live, they might rebel. But initially, they had agreed to the fact that one must die for the rest to continue and ensure survival. So, is killing them now justified?

You might say yes or no, depending on what you believe and how you assign value to a human life. If you are a strict utilitarian, you could argue that enforcing their elimination is entirely justified; the moral math clearly dictates that three valuable lives outweigh one. The individual’s rebellion is simply viewed as a breach of the group’s survival contract. However, if you look through the lens of human rights and deontology, you realize that quantifying human life like a currency is a terrifyingly slippery slope. To claim a wealthy philanthropist deserves to live more than a humble sailor is to flirt with eugenics and elitism. From this viewpoint, assigning value based on utility strips humans of their inherent dignity, meaning any use of force to eliminate someone crosses the line from a tragic necessity into premeditated murder.

Ahh, let’s assume a scenario where you cannot decide on the basis of merit and skill, or perhaps you simply cannot morally justify such an elitist selection process. So, collectively and with mutual consent, you all agree: “Let’s do a random dice roll, and whoever’s number comes up is the person who will sacrifice themselves for the greater good.” The dice rolls. It lands on a person, and in a perfect scenario, he accepts his fate and dies. He becomes a hero; you all remember him, you survive, and once back on the mainland, you hold a grand memorial in his honor. But in our not-so-perfect world, the guy who got selected says no. He refuses to give himself up, rebelling and preparing to fight. Now, is the killing of that man, either by starving him out or by sheer brute force, justified simply because you all agreed to the terms initially?

Hmm, we have arrived at a particularly sensitive juncture in this discussion, one with massive implications for our society and the world we live in: HOW DO WE KNOW OR DECIDE THE STATE OF CONSENT? In this lifeboat scenario, a prior agreement to a dice roll was made under the absolute, mind-altering duress of impending starvation. In the real world, our modern legal, medical, and social frameworks dictate that valid consent must be given freely, entirely absent of coercion, deception, or desperation. If someone puts a gun to your head and asks you to sign a contract, that signature is entirely void. The island operates on a remarkably similar premise, as the threat of collective starvation is the gun. A pact made under such severe psychological trauma cannot override the primal, biological instinct to survive. Therefore, holding the loser to his promise ignores the very reality of what it means to be human. True consent cannot exist where the only alternative is certain death.

If you and the others choose to enforce that dice roll anyway, you effectively appoint yourselves as judge, jury, and executioner. You may rationalize it as merely enforcing the laws of your isolated island, but fundamentally, you have become aggressors against another human being’s right to live. Consequently, the condemned man is entirely justified in fighting back. Under natural law, every sentient creature possesses an undeniable right to self-preservation. When the three survivors come to forcefully take his life or sever his food supply, they initiate lethal aggression. His violent resistance is not an act of murder or a breach of contract; it is a rightful act of fundamental self-defense against an illegally deputized mob.

And at last, just to leave you thinking: imagine what if, instead of expelling a guy just so the food stock lasts, it was about killing one person and performing cannibalism for the rest to survive? Would your choice change? How does our earlier moral landscape shift? The results are technically the exact same in the pragmatic world, and from a strictly utilitarian perspective, there is absolutely no change to the math, three people live, one person dies. But something has profoundly changed. The sheer, visceral horror of cannibalism introduces the sacredness of the human body and the psychological boundaries of our own humanity. If the math remains identical but the method suddenly turns your stomach, what does that say about pure pragmatism? What would you have done?