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Joker
Sinn Fein
Joined: Mar 20, 2011
Age: 24
Posts: 7593
Location: North Carolina The Tar Heel State :)
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 Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 2:07 pm Post subject: |
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| I would save the child. |
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Kraichgauer
Phoenix
Joined: Apr 13, 2010
Age: 47
Posts: 12794
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 6:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Joker wrote: | | I would save the child. |
And I'd suspect the ninety year old person with only a week more to live would think likewise.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer |
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blunnet
Phoenix
Joined: Apr 04, 2011
Posts: 942
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| Posted: Sun May 06, 2012 8:10 pm Post subject: |
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| heavenlyabyss wrote: | | if you had to make the grisly choice between killing a 90 year old woman who was expected to live a week longer or a 5 year old child who who was expected to live to 90. who would you save? As morbid as the question is, there is an objectively correct answer to question. You know what you know what you would do. |
I'd ask the child first, do you want to become like this one day? pointing out towards the 90 year old. |
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Aelfwine
Pileated woodpecker
Joined: May 04, 2012
Posts: 184
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| Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 10:58 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | heavenlyabyss wrote:
if you had to make the grisly choice between killing a 90 year old woman who was expected to live a week longer or a 5 year old child who who was expected to live to 90. who would you save? As morbid as the question is, there is an objectively correct answer to question. You know what you know what you would do. |
What would be if the old women would give you 100 million $ when you decided to save her?
I think that many persons would take the money and "forget" moral values. |
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CrazyCatLord
Phoenix
Joined: Oct 25, 2011
Posts: 2177
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| Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 11:21 am Post subject: |
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| heavenlyabyss wrote: | if you had to make the grisly choice between killing a 90 year old woman who was expected to live a week longer or a 5 year old child who who was expected to live to 90. who would you save? As morbid as the question is, there is an objectively correct answer to question. You know what you know what you would do.
I apologize for the depressing subject matter in my post, but hey, you started it. |
I agree that there is an objectively correct and obvious answer in this special case. But "an adult" and "a terminally ill 90 year old person" are not the same thing. While the latter is an adult, not all adults fall into this very small subset of the adult population. The fact that everyone would pick the child in this case doesn't mean that children are worth more than adults in general.
Let's look at another hypothetical case: Two persons desperately need a donor organ. Only one organ is available. One patient is a 35 year old, widowed father of three young children. The other is a 10 year old special needs child. This is an even uglier dilemma as in your example, but in my opinion, the right choice is just as obvious. Any impulse to save the child would be misdirected and irrational. Parents can always make more children (and in this case it might be a good idea for them to start over anyway), but children can't make themselves a new father. |
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YippySkippy
Phoenix
Joined: Feb 27, 2011
Posts: 1524
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| Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 2:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Let's look at another hypothetical case: Two persons desperately need a donor organ. Only one organ is available. One patient is a 35 year old, widowed father of three young children. The other is a 10 year old special needs child. This is an even uglier dilemma as in your example, but in my opinion, the right choice is just as obvious. Any impulse to save the child would be misdirected and irrational. Parents can always make more children (and in this case it might be a good idea for them to start over anyway), but children can't make themselves a new father. |
Ah, but the father is an abusive drunk. The special-needs child is an autistic savant with a gift for science, who is working on a cure for cancer.
We could go on and on... |
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Joker
Sinn Fein
Joined: Mar 20, 2011
Age: 24
Posts: 7593
Location: North Carolina The Tar Heel State :)
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| Posted: Mon May 07, 2012 2:39 pm Post subject: |
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| Kraichgauer wrote: | | Joker wrote: | | I would save the child. |
And I'd suspect the ninety year old person with only a week more to live would think likewise.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer |
I would think so to. |
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ruveyn
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 22, 2008
Age: 76
Posts: 29338
Location: New Jersey
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 4:51 am Post subject: |
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| Joker wrote: |
If we could start cloning and harvesting the clones organs like they did in a movie similar to that we would have plenty of organs to work with. |
I am familiar with that motion picture. The clones weren't just blobs of human flesh. They were sentient and alive -persons-. Harvesting organs from a sentient alive human person does raise some ethical questions, does it not?
There is no ethical justification for killing a human person except for self defense. And killing someone for their kidneys to replace your own defective kidneys is NOT self defense. It is theft and bloody murder.
ruveyn |
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Janissy
Phoenix
Joined: May 06, 2009
Age: 46
Posts: 4858
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 11:59 am Post subject: |
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| CrazyCatLord wrote: | | heavenlyabyss wrote: | if you had to make the grisly choice between killing a 90 year old woman who was expected to live a week longer or a 5 year old child who who was expected to live to 90. who would you save? As morbid as the question is, there is an objectively correct answer to question. You know what you know what you would do.
I apologize for the depressing subject matter in my post, but hey, you started it. |
I agree that there is an objectively correct and obvious answer in this special case. But "an adult" and "a terminally ill 90 year old person" are not the same thing. While the latter is an adult, not all adults fall into this very small subset of the adult population. The fact that everyone would pick the child in this case doesn't mean that children are worth more than adults in general.
Let's look at another hypothetical case: Two persons desperately need a donor organ. Only one organ is available. One patient is a 35 year old, widowed father of three young children. The other is a 10 year old special needs child. This is an even uglier dilemma as in your example, but in my opinion, the right choice is just as obvious. Any impulse to save the child would be misdirected and irrational. Parents can always make more children (and in this case it might be a good idea for them to start over anyway), but children can't make themselves a new father. |
I disagree that this is an applicable hypothetical because organ recipients are not chosen by comparing the worth of the person. They are chosen by physical parameters, not moral ones.
For that matter, I disagree with the OP that the media saturation of a news story is a measure of how highly a person is valued by others. How much a person is valued is not a single value. It has multiple values (about 7 billion of them, by last count) since every person has a metric for how much they value any other given person. This metric usually doesn't come into play until person A is made aware of person B, although there can be bundling when person A has assigned a particular value for every member of population B. But I don't think this bundling can be generalized between people. I don't think you say that all members of group A have assigned a certain value to all members of group B based on things like the popularity of news stories or "who would you save?" hypothetical scenarios.
All of us are highly valued by some, not valued at all by others and valued to some extent by even more others. And these values are in flux depending on changing relationships. |
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NarcissusSavage
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 03, 2009
Age: 31
Posts: 657
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 12:05 pm Post subject: |
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| No |
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visagrunt
Polymath
Joined: Oct 17, 2009
Age: 45
Posts: 5754
Location: Vancouver, BC
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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| heavenlyabyss wrote: | if you had to make the grisly choice between killing a 90 year old woman who was expected to live a week longer or a 5 year old child who who was expected to live to 90. who would you save? As morbid as the question is, there is an objectively correct answer to question. You know what you know what you would do.
I apologize for the depressing subject matter in my post, but hey, you started it. |
The medical-ethical question is a real one.
Obviously the preferred course of action is to save them both: stabilize one, stabilize the other, and then treat them both. But if the circumstances do not permit that, then I do not think that you would find a single physician who would not take the immediate choice to treat the child first. The canard of the $100m doesn't enter the picture. A doctor who makes a corrupt decision takes us outside the medical-ethical field and into the realm of criminality.
The tougher case is the single donor organ. The father of three is irrelevant--if he is a candidate for organ donation and will be terminal without it, then we are dealing with a patient who is disabled from supporting his children, anyway. Similarly the child's special needs are irrelevant, unless the child's disabilities are so profound that the child has no prospect of reasonable quality of life.
At that point, we really start to get into ever finer and finer gradations of objectivity. Which patient is more likely to remain stable on mechanical assistance to await the prospect of another tissue donation? Which patient is more likely to survive surgical transplant? Which patient is more likely to survive on immunosuppressants while tissue rejection is mitigated? At some point, we will likely continue to look for the, "Aha!" statistic that will make the decision about which patient gets the organ an objective decision rather than a discretionary one.
_________________
--James |
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abacacus
Rock 'N Roll Outlaw
Joined: Apr 16, 2007
Age: 21
Posts: 3324
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 7:21 pm Post subject: |
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AH, the fine art of triage 
_________________
A shot gun blast into the face of deceit
You'll gain your just reward.
We'll not rest until the purge is complete
You will reap what you've sown. |
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snapcap
Phoenix
Joined: Oct 13, 2011
Age: 31
Posts: 2328
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 7:27 pm Post subject: |
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A reason to not save the kids is because they are like a fruit basket of fresh organs waiting to be harvested.
Nice and barely used!
_________________
*some atheist walks outside and picks up stick*
some atheist to stick: "You're like me!" |
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Kraichgauer
Phoenix
Joined: Apr 13, 2010
Age: 47
Posts: 12794
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| Posted: Tue May 08, 2012 10:33 pm Post subject: |
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| snapcap wrote: | A reason to not save the kids is because they are like a fruit basket of fresh organs waiting to be harvested.
Nice and barely used! |
In that case, you've got to be careful not to over harvest.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer |
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