The Archive · 1962 · Seattle
The Seattle “God committee” of 1962: who gets the machine?
How do you choose?
The case
Told from where the person who decided stood. In the game each line is written into a drawing as you tap.
- A new machine can keep people alive after their kidneys fail. Seattle has places for only a few. The rest will die.
- Doctors have already said who is medically fit. There are still more people than places.
- So the hospital asks seven ordinary citizens to choose: a minister, a lawyer, a housewife, a banker, a union man, an official, a surgeon. You are one of them.
- You are given each person’s file: age, work, family, what they give to the town. Or you could refuse to weigh lives, and draw lots.
The two calls
- Draw lots.Every fit patient has the same chance. Nobody is judged. A father of six and a man with no one have the same chance.
- Judge each case.Weigh the lives, file by file. You must now say whose life counts for more, and why.
Make the call in the game Free. No account. Two minutes.
What happened
The committee judged. It met in secret and weighed work, family and what a person gave to the community.
A magazine story in 1962 made it famous. Critics said it was choosing people like itself, by their “social worth”.
In 1972 Congress voted to pay for the treatment for everyone who needed it, and the choosing stopped.
Source: Aulisio, M. P. (2016). Why did hospital ethics committees emerge in the US? AMA Journal of Ethics 18(5), 546–553. First reported by S. Alexander, LIFE, 9 November 1962. journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/why-did-hospital-ethics-committees-emerge-us/2016-05
How to read this
History is not an answer key. This page says what was done and what came of it. Whether it was right is the question the case leaves with you.
Where the game asks it
The same kind of question runs through The Distribution (What does fairness require?), one of the nine journeys of the game.
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- Typhoid Mary: may a city lock up a healthy woman?
All the rooms: the case files