I was not. You have misread. I was saying that Option A (Kill Elders once treatment cost passes a threshold) should have its weighted value, the costs of the option, weighted appropriately, i.e. the costs should include the dramatic costs in human lives, the impact of such a policy on people’s behaviors (e.g. the costs should include the way people will act differently if they know they get terminated at age 80), and so on.
Yes, it would be an option on the table. The moral aspects of each option would be part of the cost-benefit of an ideal search for a solution. Not a filter that lets people say “Let’s not even consider this option because I find it morally reprehensible!”.
You’re not making yourself at all clear. Are you going to off perfectly healthy 80 year olds? Are you going to do anything different to the C/B decisions that already exist in healthcare systems?
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge. The issues are known by lots of people, and reasonable people usually know most of the important factors and variables, so I hoped to avoid some of the more tedious parts of this discussion by mentioning something people already know, rather than coming up with a more obscure example.
I was not. You have misread. I was saying that Option A (Kill Elders once treatment cost passes a threshold) should have its weighted value, the costs of the option, weighted appropriately, i.e. the costs should include the dramatic costs in human lives, the impact of such a policy on people’s behaviors (e.g. the costs should include the way people will act differently if they know they get terminated at age 80), and so on.
Yes, it would be an option on the table. The moral aspects of each option would be part of the cost-benefit of an ideal search for a solution. Not a filter that lets people say “Let’s not even consider this option because I find it morally reprehensible!”.
You’re not making yourself at all clear. Are you going to off perfectly healthy 80 year olds? Are you going to do anything different to the C/B decisions that already exist in healthcare systems?
I am not saying any option in particular should be done (the irony!), or that elders should be killed, or that given the choice and power I would do it. You’re making more strawmen with straw babies living in straw villages than even my overly fertile imagination can comprehend, if you’ll let me push that metaphor.
What I’m saying is that a great many possible options are being overlooked, or dismissed offhand or subconsciously, or never even imagined, simply because people look for ways to have a better distribution of resources or a bit more total money in the pool, rather than look for ways to dissociate some resources from the pool and making their supply match their demand (preferably at a lower total cost). Others yet are being discarded because of savanna heuristics, or because of societal memes that waylay even the best lines of thinking.
Killing elders is perhaps the most well-known example of this. Mercy kills and sanity suicides are the most often debated policy(ies?) that has an impact on medical resources, to my knowledge. The issues are known by lots of people, and reasonable people usually know most of the important factors and variables, so I hoped to avoid some of the more tedious parts of this discussion by mentioning something people already know, rather than coming up with a more obscure example.