Week6 Comm101 Tutorial Assignment

1. According to Kantian theory, was Alan Turing’s action to ‘play God’ so that ‘Britain can win the war and more lives are saved in the long run’ ethical? Why? Justify using three key principles of Kantian theory.

I believe that Alan Turing’s actions were not ethical. I support my statement by the help of three key principles of Kantian theory. Firstly, goodwill is an important factor in most decision making process. Kantian implies that if an action or decision creates goodwill then it should be carried on otherwise it must be rejected. Similarly, in the case of Alan Turing’s situation, his actions did create goodwill for the country but at same time they harmed a lot of people who were going to die in the passenger convoy. Therefore his actions definitely did not create goodwill in all aspects.
Similarly, the second key principle of Kantian’s theory suggests that you cannot harm any body while making ethical decision. The decisions made should fulfill the requirements of categorical imperative. Clearly as Alan’s decision harmed many people in short run but there is no clear data and statistics of having saved large number of lives in long run as implied by Alan.
Lastly, our decisions must always be universally accepted to identify if they are ethical. In the case of Alan Turing, his actions were not universally accepted, especially not by families that lost their members. Many lives could have been saved in the passenger convoy and definitely his actions were not universally accepted.
However, if we do not consider Kantian’s theory, Alan Turing’s decision could be ethical because maybe if he tried to save lives of people on passenger convoy. Germany might have changed the code and that could have been more problematic for other countries. But we cannot be sure about this statement and if we consider Kantian’s theories