Within the thought experiment, the difference is simply numbers and people are giving the wrong answer, as long as you specify that this would increase the total number of years lived (many organ recipients are old and will die soon anyway). Outside the experiment in the realm of public policy, it is wrong to kill the “donor” in this one case because of the precedent it would set: people would be afraid to go to the hospital for fear of being killed for their organs. And if this was implemented by law, there would be civil unrest that would more than undo the good done.
It sounds like you’re saying that the thought experiment is unfixably wrong, since it can’t be made to match up with reality “outside the experiment”. If that’s the case, then I question whether people are “giving the wrong answer”. Morals are useful precisely for those cases where we often do not have enough facts to make a correct decision based only on what we know about a situation. For most people most of the time, doing the moral thing will pay off, and not doing the moral thing will ultimately not, even though it will quite often appear to for a short while after.
Within the thought experiment, the difference is simply numbers and people are giving the wrong answer, as long as you specify that this would increase the total number of years lived (many organ recipients are old and will die soon anyway). Outside the experiment in the realm of public policy, it is wrong to kill the “donor” in this one case because of the precedent it would set: people would be afraid to go to the hospital for fear of being killed for their organs. And if this was implemented by law, there would be civil unrest that would more than undo the good done.
It sounds like you’re saying that the thought experiment is unfixably wrong, since it can’t be made to match up with reality “outside the experiment”. If that’s the case, then I question whether people are “giving the wrong answer”. Morals are useful precisely for those cases where we often do not have enough facts to make a correct decision based only on what we know about a situation. For most people most of the time, doing the moral thing will pay off, and not doing the moral thing will ultimately not, even though it will quite often appear to for a short while after.