In Europe, a woman was near death from
a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the 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 ten times what the drug cost him to make. He
paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the
drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to
borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which
is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying
and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the
druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make
money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's
store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done
that? (Kohlberg, 1963, p. 19)
Kohlberg is not really interested in
whether the subject says "yes" or "no" to this
dilemma but in the reasoning behind