Is Murder Justified?

I follow a number of blogs for personal growth and education. Among these blogs are some that focus on science, religion, and theology from different perspectives. One blog I like is entirely for fun. It is the blog of a philosophy professor who designs online questionnaires that act as philosophy experiments. The most recent addition to his series is a set of questions answering the above question. While philosophy tends to deal in hypothetical questions, especially as related to questions of morality, this set of questions mostly relate to true situations and how the reader responds to them. Jeremy Stangroom chose as one of his questions the scenario of Richard Parker who was killed by his shipmates after they found themselves shipwrecked and starving in a lifeboat. Richard Parker was chosen to be killed to sustain the lives of the other men because he did not have a wife and children depending on him, and it seemed that he was on the verge of dying anyway. Later investigators agreed that the men would have died had they not eaten the body of Richard, but they were convicted of murder even though the murder was the only choice possible to save the lives of several men.

One of the interesting questions that this raises is what would be the Biblical response to this situation? American Christians would state that every life is precious which is why they tend to dislike abortion and euthanasia, and so they would tend to feel that one life is too precious a cost for the attempt at saving two or more other lives. Of course this instinctive response is not necessarily Biblical. Based on the math present in the many Bible stories that deal with substitutionary death one life lost is a reasonable cost for the saving of many others. This is an issue at conflict with the American Evangelical aversion to abortion. God is certainly not "pro-life" in the Bible, and yet many Americans would still oppose abortion and the killing of Richard Parker as being against Scripture when their ethics really are a product of their culture and not the Bible.