Oct 30, 2023·edited Oct 30, 2023Liked by Richard Y Chappell
"However horrified you are by this lone individual gratuitously burning their kidney when it could have saved someone, you should be all the more horrified by government policies that gratuitously deprive thousands of the kidneys that they need."
Well, the government's intervention is in some sense more causally *distal* to the sick person eventually not getting the kidney than would be the burning-action. Thus by (I conjecture) widely-held principles of penalizing harm in-proportion-to some notion of its causal proximity, it's not as bad.
I would expect deontologists to be furiously working on trying to elaborate such accounts. Somehow I don't observe them doing that.
Right now, my brain is primarily hurting at the thought of deontologically-minded masses who regard "selling" kidneys as the blackest of evils, supporting the exact goddamned same thing via government, but using different magic words like "tax credit" and "incentive". Except, of course, that instead of an actual market price, we'll end up with bureaucrats who have a stake in never seeing the funding for the program decrease, leading to price floors and *extra* kidneys being paid for and thrown in the trash.
The government brokered injustice is all the more worthy of moral outrage when one understands the high percentage of deceased donor kidneys that go in the trash -effectively burned- because the transplant centers are rated by their one year survival rate, therefore toss any organ not in great quality. An average of 12 (functioning) kidneys were passed up for each patient that died waiting for one.
FYI- I am in that club and I can’t seem to figure out what all you folks, adept at moral calculus, with a sense of communitarian justice, are waiting for to be a donor?
To me it’s quite simple. If you are of sound mind and you wish to sell/donate your body parts then so be it! On the proviso that ALL the implications of losing a kidney are thoroughly explained and understood.
"However horrified you are by this lone individual gratuitously burning their kidney when it could have saved someone, you should be all the more horrified by government policies that gratuitously deprive thousands of the kidneys that they need."
Well, the government's intervention is in some sense more causally *distal* to the sick person eventually not getting the kidney than would be the burning-action. Thus by (I conjecture) widely-held principles of penalizing harm in-proportion-to some notion of its causal proximity, it's not as bad.
I would expect deontologists to be furiously working on trying to elaborate such accounts. Somehow I don't observe them doing that.
Right now, my brain is primarily hurting at the thought of deontologically-minded masses who regard "selling" kidneys as the blackest of evils, supporting the exact goddamned same thing via government, but using different magic words like "tax credit" and "incentive". Except, of course, that instead of an actual market price, we'll end up with bureaucrats who have a stake in never seeing the funding for the program decrease, leading to price floors and *extra* kidneys being paid for and thrown in the trash.
The government brokered injustice is all the more worthy of moral outrage when one understands the high percentage of deceased donor kidneys that go in the trash -effectively burned- because the transplant centers are rated by their one year survival rate, therefore toss any organ not in great quality. An average of 12 (functioning) kidneys were passed up for each patient that died waiting for one.
FYI- I am in that club and I can’t seem to figure out what all you folks, adept at moral calculus, with a sense of communitarian justice, are waiting for to be a donor?
To me it’s quite simple. If you are of sound mind and you wish to sell/donate your body parts then so be it! On the proviso that ALL the implications of losing a kidney are thoroughly explained and understood.