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jales4 
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 Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 4:45 pm Post subject:
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| JulianTheApostate wrote: |
| I'm probably in the minority in this, but I would approve the transplant. Saving a life seems more important to me than respecting someone's wishes about what happens to their body after their death. |
I know this is a bit off topic, but I have to register my disagreement with your opinion.
In a one-off situation, your approving the transplant may work. But in the real world, before long, corruption would begin. A patient who is dying, but not quite fast enough for a transplant recipient might be helped along, or not helped as much as usual. A indigent patient without someone to protect their rights might be let to die, so that someone with a bit of influence or who is known to staff can receive a transplant.
Even beginning something like you suggest starts humanity down a very slippery slope.
Just my opinion. Jan. |
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MadArchitect
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| Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 7:18 pm Post subject:
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| I think Jan raises another interesting objection, and even if we were to dismiss it as a probability (and I'm not saying that I would dismiss it), it serves to illustrate my point about such hypotheticals. It's too easy to seal the moral question off in a vacuum. |
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Robert Tulip
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| Posted: Sat Jan 19, 2008 7:45 pm Post subject: Re: Tangental disagreements
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| Theomanic wrote: |
Robert: I think you are confusing two movies, and missing my point besides. The other movie you're remembering is Logan's Run. It hasn't anything to do with Soylent Green. As to the economics of this dubious old sci-fi movie, I don't believe they were killing people, they were simply collecting the dead (especially from things like suicide booths). I'm not an economics major, but I don't see why that wouldn't be cost effective, since you don't even need a farm or to feed your livestock or anything. Especially in the distopian future we are given to accept where there is a massive food shortage. Again, I could be mistaken. My point was that we may some day be in a food crisis also, and any waste at all would be unforgivable. So maybe then we would practice cannibalism.
I finished the essay yesterday and it was very excellent. It makes me wonder if everyone with wildly variant morals from the norm has brain damage. |
Theomanic, maybe it was the "voluntary" euthanasia in Soylent Green that morphed in my memory into murder. I watched Soylent Green in my school hall on an old reel-to-reel projector in 1976, so it goes back a way. You commented
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| Maybe someday we'll have such a desperate need for food that Soylent Green really will be needed. Who can say about such things. |
My point was that it is possible to avoid this dystopia through economic development. Soylent Green (compulsory "algae" biscuits which are made from dead people) is a bit too much like Zyklon B in its evil banality, but of course that happened at Auschwitz. The moral disruption caused by systemic cannibalism can only arise in situations of utter collapse or isolation, such as described on Easter Island by Tim Flannery in The Future Eaters, or as depicted by Rodin on The Gates of Hell. I would think a cannibal dystopia would be more like Mad Max, ie where law has broken down, rather than the Soylent model where law is used to eat people. I just think that while we have a regulated corporate society we can easily afford to grow more food (including large quantities of real algae for fertilizer and stockfeed). Your hypothetical desperation comes up against the fact that it is much better to feed algae to cows and sheep and eat them than to address the socio-political taboos that would arise from systemic efforts to eat people. The repugnance factor is in play here. After reading Pinker's essay I find myself thinking 'Argghh - anyone who can talk dispassionately about cannibalism must have brain damage'.
Part of the problem with the brain damage idea is that our emotional responses are wired by instinct but are often heavily sub-optimal. For example in health, economists talk about 'Disability Adjusted Life Years' (DALYs) as a guide to rationing funds, but encounter furious reactions from people who say 'what if it was your own mother seeking funds for this expensive operation?" This comes up in the balance between HIV prevention and care. Ordinary emotional morality is personal, while rational morality is impersonal and utilitarian. The trouble is we don't always know what is really rational. |
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medmo
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| Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2008 9:34 pm Post subject: Re: Moral Quandaries
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Gut reactions:
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| Julie is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark. One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom, too, just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other. What do you think about that — was it O.K. for them to make love? |
Gross. Morally wrong? Feels like it, but I don't have a very rational reason why.
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| A woman is cleaning out her closet and she finds her old American flag. She doesn’t want the flag anymore, so she cuts it up into pieces and uses the rags to clean her bathroom. |
Feels wrong. Especially if she has other rags around. Again, don't have a rational reason to conclusively call it immoral. Distasteful, maybe.
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| A family’s dog is killed by a car in front of their house. They heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cook it and eat it for dinner. |
Disturbing. I kinda like Mad's rationale for why this could be considered immoral.
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| On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? |
Yes. But, I can see how I would feel less guilt if I did nothing than if I threw the switch. By simply doing SOMETHING that affects the outcome, I've had some role in causing harm. If I do nothing, then I'm just letting events occur. They would be tragic, but I would not have actively caused or affected one event or another.
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| You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? |
Not so clear now. That's pretty strange. I would feel even more responsible if I actually threw the guy than if I threw the switch. If you're the fat man, would you jump? I wouldn't. What if those five guys are on their way to assault someone? Then I definitely wouldn't throw the fat man.
And, to those who complain these questions aren't realistic - come on! Have some fun! They're fun to think about! |
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Frank 013
Embodiment of Reason
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| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 9:34 am Post subject:
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I only have an answer to one of these questions…
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| You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? |
One could always throw them self off the bridge. There is no need to become a murder to save someone else in this situation.
Besides I can jump a lot further than I can throw a fat guy. 
Later |
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DWill
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| Posted: Thu Feb 21, 2008 12:12 pm Post subject:
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On the first scenario (brother and sister having sex), yes, I have a problem with it, and I don't consider it moral. Is my response a rational one? I suppose not. Is that something to worry about? I don't think that it necessarily is. We can't find in ourselves rational bases for some things we feel or believe, but that does not automatically mean that we should disavow these feelings/beliefs, or even that some quality we might be able to call rational is not in fact there.
As a non-theist, I could not subscribe to a view that a god's disapproval makes brother/sister sex wrong. The impulse to proscribe this relationship came from the human mind and was then ascribed to a god to make the prohibition more potent. What do we do about this and other deep beliefs that have a primary existence in the mind and are not in fact the creations of religion? That they have been incorporated into theistic religions does not provide, just on that basis, the justification to reject them. Can we as individuals be arbiters of each moral proposition through a logical process? Shouldn't a skeptical view extend even to our own powers of rationality? |
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