Moral Quandaries

[jales4]

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.

[MadArchitect]

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.

[Robert Tulip]

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

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.

[medmo]

Gut reactions:

[quote]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

[Frank 013]

I only have an answer to one of these questions...

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

[DWill]

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?