3 ms·
> To suggest they might not work hard to save someone right in front of them is insulting and horrible. Counter-argument in the form of a question: does one li
by eganist 6y ago
> To suggest they might not work hard to save someone right in front of them is insulting and horrible.
Counter-argument in the form of a question: does one life matter as much as (or more than) three or four that might be saved from that one life's organs? Especially if the one that's clinging to life might've ended up in that position as a consequence of their own actions, such as by way of an at-fault car crash?
I'd argue that the doctor's responsibility is to save any life presented to them regardless of how, but I won't put it past anyone to do the calculus above.
(this may appear to meet the textbook definition of a strawman argument, but I'd venture that this is--by virtue of how many organs can come from one person--a real enough possibility to warrant consideration)
- grecy 6y agoOf course, organ donation is far from a guarantee. There are a lot of complications and challenges, and it's major surgery.
- eganist 6y agoNo disagreement at all. Coming back to the calculus performed: if the odds of survival are much less than certain, what's the point at which a doctor, thinking algorithmically rather than with a mission, decides that there's more value in lives saved from a patient's organs than in trying to save the primary patient and potentially losing organ viability (or just time) if the mission fails? I'm pretty certain the vast majority of doctors will obey the Hippocratic Oath as intended. I'm also somewhat certain that a minority subset of doctors will interpret the Oath differently than others, and this is the most impossible assertion to falsify because very few surgeons/teams will admit this short of a certifiably anonymous survey... if that.