Question

I’m currently listening to a series by Skeptic to Statistics, where a question was raised about a ship that left Liverpool and sank, and there were not enough lifeboats, so one of the passengers pushed people into the water. The assumption is that they should hold a lottery, since no one has more right than anyone else to a place in the lifeboat. The Rabbi raised the question of why the stronger person should not be considered the winner of the fair genetic lottery, and therefore the lifeboat is his. The Rabbi answered that there is no reason to give the stronger person more rights, because who says that this is the lottery? After all, one could just as well demand a lottery in which the weaker person is the winner.
And in my opinion, the Rabbi did not fully grasp the questioner’s point, and I’ll explain it with an example: for the sake of argument, if there were a country that dealt with such a question and determined that the fair lottery was a person’s height (the taller one is saved), then clearly the right to be saved would belong to the taller of the two. This Darwinian argument claims that the universe itself determined the genetic lottery, that the stronger person has a greater right to live because he won the lottery, and the proof that the genetic lottery has validity unlike other lotteries is that, as the Rabbi said, no matter what the weaker person says, the stronger person will decide who gets thrown into the water. That only proves that nature placed power in the hands of those who won (in a fair lottery) the genetic power.