• Question: what do you think is more important, saving lives on a small scale or improving lives on a large scale?

    Asked by anon-232222 to Mark, Liam, Laura, Kasia, Gina, Felix on 19 Nov 2019.
    • Photo: Mark Johnson

      Mark Johnson answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      Ooh, that’s a tricky question. I think both ways of helping people are equally important. Before the discovery of antibiotics in 1929, huge numbers of people would die every year from infections that are easily treated today. But on the other hand, antibiotics wouldn’t be so effective without individual doctors going out and treating people on a ‘small scale’.

      There are lots of physicists who are trying to help people on big and small scales every day. I know people who work on proton therapy machines, which help relatively small numbers of people with very hard-to-treat cancers. But there are also scientists working on fusion energy, which would meet the energy needs of the whole world without causing climate change!

    • Photo: Laura Sinclair

      Laura Sinclair answered on 19 Nov 2019:

      This is a very good ethical question. Ideally, we would be able to change the world globally but sometimes we only have the limits to help a small number of people.

      It reminds me of this. “You see a runaway trolley moving toward five tied-up (or otherwise incapacitated) people lying on the main track. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track, and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options:
      1.Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track.
      2.Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person.

      Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?”

      Overall, thankfully there are lots of people working on small and large scale projects. If they could be expanded globally, that would be incredible

    • Photo: Liam Gaffney

      Liam Gaffney answered on 21 Nov 2019:

      Oh I’m late in answering this and just had good fun reading Mark and Laura’s answers. It’s a really interesting question of ethics that helps us put into context our goals. If everybody had the same view point on your question, then I don’t think we’d have seen the advances that we have, such as the example of antibiotics that Mark mentions.

      We need people to think on a large scale and make small improvements to many lives, because that will save many lives in the long term, bit-by-bit. The problem with that, as you have probably identified, is that the effects and benefits are not seen until much later in the future and are hard to predict so it isn’t seen as a priority for many people.

      Saving lives on an individual scale is absolutely necessary though; every life is precious and without people committed to doing that then we’d be screwed! So I have to say that both are equally important but different people within our society focus on one or the other and that makes the perfect balance for us to prosper.

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