Why is sacrificing yourself in a violent emergency heroic and admirable, but sacrificing yourself to provide essential parts is creepy and objectionable?
You've not much of a choice. Or, it would make you look bad.
Why is that? What's the difference? Either way you're deliberately sacrificing yourself to save others.
It's all psychological, obviously. The end result is the same, you end up dying, and others end up living thanks to your sacrifice. It seems to me that there is a social taboo about such voluntary sacrifice occuring, in the case of the organ transplant. It really just does seem unnatural. I would be willing to help those people medically until the very last moment, but why exactly would I give my life for them?
In the grenade situation, it seems like since you are thrust into the situation, you've almost no choice. Sure, you could leave them there to perish, but I think that since we like to feel in power and being able to protect, we feel we are doing something heroic.
Maybe, it's the way we've been brought up. Like you said, it seems more heroic to save someone from a violent episode than from a medical emergency, because we see that in t.v. much.
Another thing is that the 1st option is reactionary. The 2nd involves meditating. When you are given time to reflect upon exactly what you are doing, you get cold feet.
Here are my respones.
1.) I would run, or throw the grenade back as ABibleStudent mentioned, depends where the grenade landed. There are other options than what you presented, y'know.
2.) This is a tough one. That's 10 people we are talking about... but I'm selfish. I believe there are always other options. Imagine if I were a skilled doctor that had saved hundreds of lives in the course of my career, but in sacrificing myself potentially stopped helping other for what would've been the remainder of my career. If you're talking about numbers, my continuing to live would trump any temporal gains from transplants, for a larger number of people.