Decisions..

Many people have heard such scenarios: Imagine your part of a 7 person team going caving when the guide gets stuck in the cave entrance/exit. The tide is coming in, and when it reaches high tide the 6 of you will die but the guide won't - he will eventually lose a bit of weight and wriggle out. Conveniently someone brought some dynamite with them - which could be handy for removing the obstacle; namely the guide stuck in the exit. There are no other exits, and you are too deep to blow another exit. The guide won't budge either. Do you kill the guide, or not?

As part of a paper we discussed this question as part of a tutorial. It was interesting to note that many of the females wouldn't kill the guide and hypothesized over possible alternatives. Guys took more to the principles and opted to kill the guide. In the tutorial I opted to blow the guide out of the hole. Guess I looked at it like this:

Someone is going to die; either the guide (1 person) or us (6 people).
The 6 who will die will do so uncomfortably by drowning whilst the guide will be killed instantaneously.
Thus, the guide will go. I think when faced with the decision between ones own life or anothers that it is hard to be impartial about it (in saying this there are many exceptions e.g. defending loved ones). In this case the best good from this scenario would be to save six.