Therapeutic homicide: a philosophic and Halakhic critique of Harris' 'survival lottery'.

In a well-known paper entitled, 'Survival Lottery', published in a philosophical journal, John Harris proposed for discussion an interesting idea for saving the lives of certain kinds of patients who are at the point of death. Let us assume that there are two such patients, one that could be saved by a heart transplant, and the other by the transplantation of a pair of lungs. However, no suitable organs are available for this purpose. Might it perhaps not be immoral to select, by national lottery, a healthy person, who would be sacrificed, his organs used as transplants, and thus two lives be saved through the sacrifice of only one? This proposal is subjected first to a critical philosophical and ethical analysis, and then to a critical analysis from the point of view of Jewish Ethics as embodied in Halakhah.