First, I presume that failing to save yourself from certain death when you could do so easily would be considered suicide.
I offer the following conundrum.
If there are two people who are about to be killed by some non intentional and unstoppable action and the only way to save themselves is to murder the other person and they could easily save themselves. How would you resolve that in a Christian biblical sense? Is there anything in the bible that provides evidence to your answer?
Thanks.
I know you want to be vague, but the scenario matters. The reason it matters is because the type of ethics promoted by Christianity is aretaic, not consequentialist. That being the case, we need more information about what action it is you are proposing and under what circumstances. Only a consequentialist could look at something as abstract as you are proposing and give you an informed answer about what "the right thing to do" is.
It really depends. Are we talking about pushing someone off a bridge (or jumping off it yourself) before it collapses from too much weight on it? or are we talking about shooting someone in the head because a psychopath is forcing you to either kill him or he will kill you both? There are different answers depending on what the scenario is.
csbrown28 said:
We are on the space station, just you and I. There is a catastrophic failure and we are caught at each end of the station with the part between us impassable. NASA says that it can have a shuttle up in 8 days, but there is only 4 days of air at your end and 4 at my end. We both have the ability to take the air from each others section.
This one is fairly simple. The right thing for a Christian to do would be to give the other guy your air. Selflessness is a Christian virtue and giving your life for someone else is the ultimate act of love.
John 15:13
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.(NIV)
There's a few quirks with your scenario. Can you push air? If not, are you able to convince the other guy to take your air? But they are quirks of the scenario, not really part of the ethical question you are proposing.
One can imagine other similar scenarios where the answer is the opposite. Take some "Saw" movie scenario wherein you either kill another person or you both die. At that point, the right thing to do is to let the psychopath do what he will and face the consequences himself even if you are 100% certain that he will choose to murder you both. It would go against Christian ethics to murder someone in order to save yourself.
You'll basically find two approaches to Christian ethics. Among fundamentalist circles, you will find a deontological ethics approach which views the bible as the arbiter of what is right and wrong and everything can be judged by the "rules" in the bible. You'll find that view primarily among the southern baptists and other fundamentalist groups. The more mainstream Christian view is an aretaic ethical view that sees the goal of Christian ethics as leading us towards being more "Christ-like". It's from this stream of thought that the old cliche "what would Jesus do?" arose in the 1990s. The goal of Christian ethics is not to follow rules, but to turn us into people "of character", people who truly embody the Christian ideal modeled for us by Christ and taught to us throughout the bible. So, in questions like this, the idea isn't "what rules does the bible say about x or y and how do we balance what it says of x with what it says of z?", the question is "how should a righteous person act in this situation?". Ideally, in a real life situation, the Christian won't even have to think, they will have been practicing virtue throughout their life to the point where making the right decision in a crisis like this would be instinctual.