8 ms·

This reminds me of "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics": http://web.archive.org/web/20160806191858/https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of

This reminds me of "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics": http://web.archive.org/web/20160806191858/https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ http://web.archive.org/web/20160806191858/https://blog.jaibo... Our culture has a very strange belief that you shouldn't benefit from the less fortunate. Even if you benefit them too. People that have never donated a dollar to charity in their lives, will come out of the woodwork and complain about "exploitation".

kome 10y ago
"People that have never donated a dollar to charity in their lives" is a particularly American, or let's say anglophone, way to approach social justice. Charities are based on good will, but "the less fortunate" do not need "good will": they need social rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rights If you don't see "exploitation" when people need and they are willing to sell their blood, I have no idea what you mean by exploitation.
- gravypod 10y ago
  Does that sentiment hold when your donations are to pro-bono legal firms?
  - aqme28 10y ago
    The "donations" in this case aren't really donations. They're being paid in exchange for their blood plasma. So I don't see the comparison to pro-bono legal firms.
    - gravypod 10y ago
      Trades of goods are equivalent to currency.
    - chimeracoder 10y ago
      > The "donations" in this case aren't really donations. They're being paid in exchange for their blood plasma. Which gets back to the question - what's wrong with that? The alternative is not to pay people for donating plasma, and we can see quite clearly that that doesn't work - every country that does not pay for blood plasma donations runs a shortage, and most of them end up importing plasma from the US. So, we have to pay for plasma, or else we won't have enough, which means people will literally die. Given that we have to pay for plasma, what's wrong with letting anyone who's medically eligible to donate do so? Most of the common arguments against tissue donation (safety, incentive to lie, etc.) either don't apply to plasma donation or are no longer relevant thanks to the cost and accuracy of modern testing methods. There is no medical or financial reason not to permit the practice, and I'm struggling to see a moral one that doesn't eventually result in people dying because we refuse to collect the life-saving tissue that people are perfectly capable of providing and willing to provide.
      - Retric 10y ago
        People also die due to disease contamination of the blood supply when you pay. Donation only blood supplies are much safer in the short and long term, until we can manufacture a replacement. Sure, right now we gave good tests for most diseases, but the next AIDS has no test making the long term risks real.
        gravypod 10y ago
        I don't think you read the post you replied to in full. He stipulated that the current testing methodology is good enough to prevent any death from blood purchasing.
        Retric 10y ago
        None of the current tests are 100% accurate for known diseases. So, no it's really not safe today. Further as I said, the risk for the next outbreak is significant. PS: Risks of AIDS are conservatively estimated at 1:1.5 million per transfusion, but some people get a lot of transfusions. Here is one example from 2008: https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5941a3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5941a3.htm AIDS is also rapidly becoming drug resistant making reduced transmission even more important.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  You are missing the point entirely, and being exactly the kind of person I am complaining about. Buying plasma doesn't hurt anyone. It doesn't make the poor worse off. It's certainly not "exploitation". And it's doing more to help the poor than the vast majority of people that don't do anything. There is a problem in the world, that people are poor, desperate, or in need. But the plasma industry didn't cause poverty, and they aren't making it any worse. If anything they are making it better, if only slightly.
  - tunap 10y ago
    But they did ratchet back the prices! Back in college I went with friends to donate plasma(I had a job, didn't 'need' the money). It was interesting and paid $75 for < 2 hours of my time. Wow! I went back once(twice?) a month as allowed. It was a great boost to my income, plus got to watch free movies and free juice and snacks on the way out. Fast forward several years and local labs pay $35 or $25 per seasion and it turned into a 4 hour episode of mostly waiting around to get the 20 min(?) procedure, watching movies. Sure it beats a poke in the eye, but the incentive for anyone but the poor and desperate was gone. Nowadays I'll give blood for free(& snacks!), will not waste half a day to enrich the lab's bottom line.
    - jrs235 10y ago
      Where I am you can donate twice a week and usually takes an hour, during busier times it might take 1.5 hours depending on a short wait and how quickly you cycle (the more hydrated you are the faster it can go and your weight determines how much you will have to donate). First donation of the week they pay $20, second time is $50. That's $70 a week, $280 a month. I donate. I don't need to but why not get paid to read?
      - tunap 10y ago
        That seems like a lot of plasma your body has to replenish. Sure the platelets are put back, but sounds extreme... IANAMD. I am referring to my experience in the '90s and it may have been allowed more than 2xs a month, but that is all I was comfortable with. When the payout was reduced >50% I desisted.
- darawk 10y ago
  What's wrong with selling your blood? To me it seems like selling your time is a far more personal, unrecoverable injustice. And most people just call that 'work'. If you want to make it out like these people are being 'exploited', then you can make the case just the same that all property is exploitation. Railing against poor people donating blood plasma, or organs for that matter, is profoundly misguided.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    Not an expert on the subject, but I recall hearing somewhere that selling blood gives people an incentive to lie about their health history. "Do you shoot up illicit drugs with shared needles?" "Um... No. No I do not."
    - timv 10y ago
      Yes, but don't many job applications have equivalent incentives for lying? - Have you ever been charged with a criminal offence? - Do you use recreational drugs? Etc. I don't think that the blood donation questionare is especially problematic on that regards.
      - CamelCaseName 10y ago
        The difference is who is harmed. A company may have to fire and replace a lying employee, so the shareholders lose some money, but a person contracting HIV from a bad blood transfusion is substantially more devastating.
        timv 10y ago
        Sure, but as darawk argued in a sibling thread, that's not evidence that the poor are being exploited. As far as the "Low-Income Americans" from the article are concerned, all sorts of jobs give them an incentive to lie, why should donating blood be considered more exploitative because of it? The question of whether buying blood has a net positive public health benefit is a very real one, but it's unrelated to darawk's ancestor post arguing that selling blood is just another form of work.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Wow, you would take this opportunity away from them? As a father this situation would be horrible if my only chance to provide things for my daughter was taken away to "help" me: "he was giving plasma because his daughter had a birthday, and he needed $7.50 to buy her a bathing suit and money for a cake" Sure, you can say it would be better if the dad had some other opportunity available, but that's changing the subject. This is what he has right now, that gives him more happiness than anything in his life.
0xfaded 10y ago
A donated dollar is one less taxable dollar, so in practice provides a means for individually diverting taxes to charities one finds agreeable. In the US I've even heard people using this rational to avoid fuelling the military industrial complex. However a well functioning government that best served society would not have this problem. In principle it's the government's job to take care of society's needs, not the charities'. I think the existence of Planned Parenthood is a case in point. Undoubtedly they provide a necessary service, but in what world should a pregnant teenager not have access to a doctor? In practice charities act as a highly inefficient decentralised mechanism for providing basic needs to those that can't afford them. In some cases, the charities are stellar. In others, they come with a religious taint (e.g. access to a doctor through a church). In the worst case a charity can operate as a scam, see the untouchable tele-evangelists.
- jeffdavis 10y ago
  "In principle it's the government's job to take care of society's needs, not the charities'." I disagree strongly. Concentrating responsibility concentrates power, which is dangerous. Governments should share power internally, share between levels (federal, state, local), and leave a lot of the power with the people (who may use it for private enterprises, NGOs, etc.).
  - darpa_escapee 10y ago
    Unfortunately, in the history of the world, charity hasn't even come close to helping as many of those in need as successful government programs. The incentives to provide enough support to different charities aren't there. Charity follows trends and whims, not needs. For example, the top cumulative donations went to charities that do not serve the needs of the poor, despite how many people are still in need of assistance despite government programs.
    - rvdavis 10y ago
      > Charity follows trends and whims, not needs. You imply government policy does not follow trends and whims, which is observably false.
chongli 10y ago
Believe it or not, some people are averse to charity or even oppose charity on principle. In many cases, it could be argued that charity sustains poverty [0] and that it would be better to endeavour to eliminate poverty entirely. One phenomenon that most dismays me is cultural capitalism [1]. This is a big part of the problem. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/charity/against_1.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/charity/against_1.shtml [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRvRm19UKdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRvRm19UKdA
woodruffw 10y ago
To paraphrase Kant: You shouldn't use the less fortunate (or anybody, really) as a mere mean to an end. Paying the homeless a pittance to behave as moving antennas is about as close as you can get to treating someone as a mere mean. The same goes for paying the disadvantaged $40 for their plasma - we can all intuitively recognize that a minimal "solution" that treats the individual as a mean and not an individual (autonomous, self-legislating, etc) is not a "right" one. The idea that recognizing this while not giving to charity makes you a hypocrite is puzzling. There's no conflict between the positive right to give to charity and the negative right to not be exploited.
- Houshalter 10y ago
  Who cares? The only relevant question is "Do their actions make the world a better place?" Or perhaps, "Are they improving these people's lives, or making them worse?" And yes, they are improving their lives, if only slightly. They are making the world a better place. The people who claim to care about these poor people, have done nothing to help them. Their revealed preferences show they don't actually care at all. They just want to signal how virtuous and moral they are. The policies they support would actually make them poorer. And they know that and don't care. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy, and I believe it's responsible for many of the world's problems.
  - woodruffw 10y ago
    Are they improving their lives? They don't think so, and I don't think so either. $40 twice a week is not a substitute for self respect or a job that you can admit to your children. > "Do their actions make the world a better place?" Do they? Is a "better" world a one in which people are forced to sell their plasma to survive? In your dimly utilitarian view, you've neglected to consider whether such a state of affairs is truly a good one (much less a maximally good one, as most utilitarians would actually demand). > The people who claim to care about these poor people, have done nothing to help them. Their revealed preferences show they don't actually care at all. Sure, if you think voting and advocacy count for nothing. Charity and philanthropy are good, but they're general obligations not directed at any individual or group of individuals. Whether or not people choose to give to your pet injustice (there are many of them, after all) is not indication that they passively abide by it.

kome 10y ago

"People that have never donated a dollar to charity in their lives" is a particularly American, or let's say anglophone, way to approach social justice. Charities are based on good will, but "the less fortunate" do not need "good will": they need social rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rights If you don't see "exploitation" when people need and they are willing to sell their blood, I have no idea what you mean by exploitation.

gravypod 10y ago
Does that sentiment hold when your donations are to pro-bono legal firms?
- aqme28 10y ago
  The "donations" in this case aren't really donations. They're being paid in exchange for their blood plasma. So I don't see the comparison to pro-bono legal firms.
  - gravypod 10y ago
    Trades of goods are equivalent to currency.
  - chimeracoder 10y ago
    > The "donations" in this case aren't really donations. They're being paid in exchange for their blood plasma. Which gets back to the question - what's wrong with that? The alternative is not to pay people for donating plasma, and we can see quite clearly that that doesn't work - every country that does not pay for blood plasma donations runs a shortage, and most of them end up importing plasma from the US. So, we have to pay for plasma, or else we won't have enough, which means people will literally die. Given that we have to pay for plasma, what's wrong with letting anyone who's medically eligible to donate do so? Most of the common arguments against tissue donation (safety, incentive to lie, etc.) either don't apply to plasma donation or are no longer relevant thanks to the cost and accuracy of modern testing methods. There is no medical or financial reason not to permit the practice, and I'm struggling to see a moral one that doesn't eventually result in people dying because we refuse to collect the life-saving tissue that people are perfectly capable of providing and willing to provide.
    - Retric 10y ago
      People also die due to disease contamination of the blood supply when you pay. Donation only blood supplies are much safer in the short and long term, until we can manufacture a replacement. Sure, right now we gave good tests for most diseases, but the next AIDS has no test making the long term risks real.
      - gravypod 10y ago
        I don't think you read the post you replied to in full. He stipulated that the current testing methodology is good enough to prevent any death from blood purchasing.
        Retric 10y ago
        None of the current tests are 100% accurate for known diseases. So, no it's really not safe today. Further as I said, the risk for the next outbreak is significant. PS: Risks of AIDS are conservatively estimated at 1:1.5 million per transfusion, but some people get a lot of transfusions. Here is one example from 2008: https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5941a3.htm https://www.cdc.gov/Mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5941a3.htm AIDS is also rapidly becoming drug resistant making reduced transmission even more important.
Houshalter 10y ago
You are missing the point entirely, and being exactly the kind of person I am complaining about. Buying plasma doesn't hurt anyone. It doesn't make the poor worse off. It's certainly not "exploitation". And it's doing more to help the poor than the vast majority of people that don't do anything. There is a problem in the world, that people are poor, desperate, or in need. But the plasma industry didn't cause poverty, and they aren't making it any worse. If anything they are making it better, if only slightly.
- tunap 10y ago
  But they did ratchet back the prices! Back in college I went with friends to donate plasma(I had a job, didn't 'need' the money). It was interesting and paid $75 for < 2 hours of my time. Wow! I went back once(twice?) a month as allowed. It was a great boost to my income, plus got to watch free movies and free juice and snacks on the way out. Fast forward several years and local labs pay $35 or $25 per seasion and it turned into a 4 hour episode of mostly waiting around to get the 20 min(?) procedure, watching movies. Sure it beats a poke in the eye, but the incentive for anyone but the poor and desperate was gone. Nowadays I'll give blood for free(& snacks!), will not waste half a day to enrich the lab's bottom line.
  - jrs235 10y ago
    Where I am you can donate twice a week and usually takes an hour, during busier times it might take 1.5 hours depending on a short wait and how quickly you cycle (the more hydrated you are the faster it can go and your weight determines how much you will have to donate). First donation of the week they pay $20, second time is $50. That's $70 a week, $280 a month. I donate. I don't need to but why not get paid to read?
    - tunap 10y ago
      That seems like a lot of plasma your body has to replenish. Sure the platelets are put back, but sounds extreme... IANAMD. I am referring to my experience in the '90s and it may have been allowed more than 2xs a month, but that is all I was comfortable with. When the payout was reduced >50% I desisted.
darawk 10y ago
What's wrong with selling your blood? To me it seems like selling your time is a far more personal, unrecoverable injustice. And most people just call that 'work'. If you want to make it out like these people are being 'exploited', then you can make the case just the same that all property is exploitation. Railing against poor people donating blood plasma, or organs for that matter, is profoundly misguided.
- amorphid 10y ago
  Not an expert on the subject, but I recall hearing somewhere that selling blood gives people an incentive to lie about their health history. "Do you shoot up illicit drugs with shared needles?" "Um... No. No I do not."
  - timv 10y ago
    Yes, but don't many job applications have equivalent incentives for lying? - Have you ever been charged with a criminal offence? - Do you use recreational drugs? Etc. I don't think that the blood donation questionare is especially problematic on that regards.
    - CamelCaseName 10y ago
      The difference is who is harmed. A company may have to fire and replace a lying employee, so the shareholders lose some money, but a person contracting HIV from a bad blood transfusion is substantially more devastating.
      - timv 10y ago
        Sure, but as darawk argued in a sibling thread, that's not evidence that the poor are being exploited. As far as the "Low-Income Americans" from the article are concerned, all sorts of jobs give them an incentive to lie, why should donating blood be considered more exploitative because of it? The question of whether buying blood has a net positive public health benefit is a very real one, but it's unrelated to darawk's ancestor post arguing that selling blood is just another form of work.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
Wow, you would take this opportunity away from them? As a father this situation would be horrible if my only chance to provide things for my daughter was taken away to "help" me: "he was giving plasma because his daughter had a birthday, and he needed $7.50 to buy her a bathing suit and money for a cake" Sure, you can say it would be better if the dad had some other opportunity available, but that's changing the subject. This is what he has right now, that gives him more happiness than anything in his life.

0xfaded 10y ago

A donated dollar is one less taxable dollar, so in practice provides a means for individually diverting taxes to charities one finds agreeable. In the US I've even heard people using this rational to avoid fuelling the military industrial complex. However a well functioning government that best served society would not have this problem. In principle it's the government's job to take care of society's needs, not the charities'. I think the existence of Planned Parenthood is a case in point. Undoubtedly they provide a necessary service, but in what world should a pregnant teenager not have access to a doctor? In practice charities act as a highly inefficient decentralised mechanism for providing basic needs to those that can't afford them. In some cases, the charities are stellar. In others, they come with a religious taint (e.g. access to a doctor through a church). In the worst case a charity can operate as a scam, see the untouchable tele-evangelists.

jeffdavis 10y ago
"In principle it's the government's job to take care of society's needs, not the charities'." I disagree strongly. Concentrating responsibility concentrates power, which is dangerous. Governments should share power internally, share between levels (federal, state, local), and leave a lot of the power with the people (who may use it for private enterprises, NGOs, etc.).
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  Unfortunately, in the history of the world, charity hasn't even come close to helping as many of those in need as successful government programs. The incentives to provide enough support to different charities aren't there. Charity follows trends and whims, not needs. For example, the top cumulative donations went to charities that do not serve the needs of the poor, despite how many people are still in need of assistance despite government programs.
  - rvdavis 10y ago
    > Charity follows trends and whims, not needs. You imply government policy does not follow trends and whims, which is observably false.

chongli 10y ago

Believe it or not, some people are averse to charity or even oppose charity on principle. In many cases, it could be argued that charity sustains poverty [0] and that it would be better to endeavour to eliminate poverty entirely. One phenomenon that most dismays me is cultural capitalism [1]. This is a big part of the problem. [0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/charity/against_1.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/charity/against_1.shtml [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRvRm19UKdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRvRm19UKdA

woodruffw 10y ago

To paraphrase Kant: You shouldn't use the less fortunate (or anybody, really) as a mere mean to an end. Paying the homeless a pittance to behave as moving antennas is about as close as you can get to treating someone as a mere mean. The same goes for paying the disadvantaged $40 for their plasma - we can all intuitively recognize that a minimal "solution" that treats the individual as a mean and not an individual (autonomous, self-legislating, etc) is not a "right" one. The idea that recognizing this while not giving to charity makes you a hypocrite is puzzling. There's no conflict between the positive right to give to charity and the negative right to not be exploited.

Houshalter 10y ago
Who cares? The only relevant question is "Do their actions make the world a better place?" Or perhaps, "Are they improving these people's lives, or making them worse?" And yes, they are improving their lives, if only slightly. They are making the world a better place. The people who claim to care about these poor people, have done nothing to help them. Their revealed preferences show they don't actually care at all. They just want to signal how virtuous and moral they are. The policies they support would actually make them poorer. And they know that and don't care. It is the worst kind of hypocrisy, and I believe it's responsible for many of the world's problems.
- woodruffw 10y ago
  Are they improving their lives? They don't think so, and I don't think so either. $40 twice a week is not a substitute for self respect or a job that you can admit to your children. > "Do their actions make the world a better place?" Do they? Is a "better" world a one in which people are forced to sell their plasma to survive? In your dimly utilitarian view, you've neglected to consider whether such a state of affairs is truly a good one (much less a maximally good one, as most utilitarians would actually demand). > The people who claim to care about these poor people, have done nothing to help them. Their revealed preferences show they don't actually care at all. Sure, if you think voting and advocacy count for nothing. Charity and philanthropy are good, but they're general obligations not directed at any individual or group of individuals. Whether or not people choose to give to your pet injustice (there are many of them, after all) is not indication that they passively abide by it.