The transplant dilemma is framed in a way that personalizes the healthy young traveler while keeping the other five patients anonymous. This activates the part of our brains that treats people as individuals rather than numbers. There’s nothing wrong with the math. We object to the unfairness to the only individual in the story.
This dilemma is usually paired with an example of triage. Here an emergency-room doctor has to choose between saving one severely injured patient or five moderately injured patients. Five lives or one, the numbers are the same, but as long as all six patients are anonymous, it remains a numeric problem, and no one has a problem with the math.
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