The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

by Kevin Dutton

A brilliant transplant surgeon has five patients. Each of the patients is in need of a different organ, and each of them will die without that organ. Unfortunately, there are no organs currently available to perform any of the transplants. A healthy young traveler, just passing through, comes into the doctor’s office for a routine checkup. While performing the checkup, the doctor discovers that the young man’s organs are compatible with all five of his dying patients. Suppose, further, that were the young man to disappear, no one would suspect the doctor. Would the doctor be right to kill the young man to save his five patients? This moral conundrum was first put forward by Judith Jarvis Thomson, the author of the fat-man-and-trolley experiment we discussed in chapter 1. Though certainly a talking point, it’s pretty easily resolved by most people. It would be morally reprehensible for the doctor to take the young man’s life—no physician has the right to kill a patient, irrespective of how humane or compassionate the justification may seem at the time. It would be murder, plain and simple. But what would someone like Joe’s take on it be? “I can see where the problem lies,” he commented matter-of-factly when I put it to him. “If all you’re doing is simply playing the numbers game, it’s a fucking no-brainer, isn’t it? You kill the guy, and save the other five. It’s utilitarianism on crack … The trick’s not to think about it too much … If I was the doctor, I wouldn’t give it a...