3 ms·
Would we let a doctor murder a random healthy person to harvest organs to save ten lives? When we talk about weighing alternatives, it's like you say: It won't
by imh 10y ago
Would we let a doctor murder a random healthy person to harvest organs to save ten lives? When we talk about weighing alternatives, it's like you say: It won't save lives in all cases, but it will decrease the loss of innocent lives overall.
- Kalium 10y agoThat introduces an imminent death that wasn't there before. Doing so with a deliberate decision changes the whole thing. This is more like vaccines. They protect a great many lives from events not deliberately introduced at the cost of a small number of bad reactions. Is that number more than zero? Yes. Does it feel small if it's someone you love? No. Is humanity as a whole better off for polio vaccines? Yes, absolutely. When we talk about weighing alternatives, we're talking about considering the status quo as an option that might be actively chosen rather than a privileged position.
- tlrobinson 10y agoIt's kind of like a reverse firing squad: we won't choose to kill 1 person with 100% certainty, but we will choose to kill 1,000,000 people with a probability of 0.000001 each.
- Kalium 10y agoWhen your choice is 1,000,000 people with 0.0001 each or those same 1,000,000 people with 0.00000001 each, it starts to seem like a really silly question. Every human life is unique, special, and sacred. Yet, we cannot ethically permit ourselves to be paralyzed by this to the point where we refuse to reduce the amount of avoidable death because our options are not perfect.