Heinz Moral Dilemma

Assignment 5. Heinz Moral Dilemma. One page, double spaced, 10 points.

Read the uploaded Reading and the texts below, then write an essay:

In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging $20,000, 10 times the cost of the drug, for a small (possibly life saving) dose. Heinz, the sick woman’s husband, borrowed all the money he could, about $10,000, or half of what he needed. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell the drug cheaper or to let him pay later. The druggist replied, “No, I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.”  Heinz then became desperate and broke into the store to steal the drug for his wife.  Should Heinz have done that?

This is Kohlberg’s most famous moral dilemma. Choose an answer, yes or no, and then try to develop a pre-conventional, a conventional, and a post-conventional argument for that answer. Make each of the three arguments convey the heart of that level of moral reasoning.