21 December to 4 January

Are we responsible for saving everyone we could save? (Or just some of them?)

What would you do if you were given the opportunity to secure a huge amount of money, simply by pressing a button? This question lies at the centre of the The Box, a movie in which Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a couple whose lives change after a visit from a stranger who undertakes to pay them a million dollars if they simply press the button on the box he leaves with them. As a 'get rich quick' scheme it seems pretty simple, except that he also informs them that at the moment they press the button, somewhere in the world, someone unknown to them, will die.

Applied ethicists often use hypothetical stories to shake up our values. One celebrated example is a story by the American James Rachels in his book The End of Life, in which the starring role is taken by a man that he labels a 'moral monster', because he fails to save the life of someone he could have saved. Having drawn attention to the fact that each of us fails, regularly, to save the lives of people we could save, Rachels then invites us to reflect on whether we are also moral monsters.

Gavin Fairbairn, Running Stream Professor of Ethics and Language, School of Applied Global Ethics.