Honest question, if you are cool with killing a person in a coma, based on the fact that they will never sense again, how do you feel about a person doing life in solitary? They may sense, but they aren’t able to communicate what they sense to any other human.
What exactly makes life worth its organs, in your eyes?
A person in solitary still has experiences. They just don’t interact with the outside world. People in a coma are, as far as we can tell, not conscious. There are plenty of animals that people are okay with killing and eating that are more likely to be sentient than someone in a coma.
I answered you query in a very precise way. There are tons and tons of laws and court judgements involved and no answer that fits into a few paragraphs.
I have a point here
If that’s the case you could try to make your point explicitly instead of implicitly. You could list your assumptions.
Yeah, and I’m asking, do those experiences “count”?
If organs are going from comatose humans to better ones, and we’ve decided that people who aren’t sensing don’t deserve theirs, how about people who aren’t communicating their senses? It seems like this principal can go cool places.
If we butchered some mass murderer we could save the lives of a few taxpayers with families that love them (there will be forms, and an adorableness quotient, and Love Weighting). All that the world would be out is the silent contemplation of the interior of a cell. Clearly a net gain, yeah?
So, are we stopping at “no sensing → we jack your meats”, or can we cook with gas?
It’s not about communication. It’s not even about sensing. It’s about subjective experience. If your mind worked properly but you just couldn’t sense anything or do anything, you’d have moral worth. It would probably be negative and it would be a mercy to kill you, but that’s another issue entirely. From what I understand, if you’re in a coma, your brain isn’t entirely inactive. It’s doing something. But it’s more comparable to what a fish does than a conscious mammal.
Someone in a coma is not a person anymore. In the same sense that someone who is dead is not a person anymore. The problem with killing someone is that they stop being a person. There’s nothing wrong with taking them from not a person to a slightly different not a person.
If we butchered some mass murderer we could save the lives of a few taxpayers with families that love them
A mass murderer is still a person. They think and feel like you do, except probably with less empathy or something. The world is better off without them, and getting rid of them is a net gain. But it’s not a Pareto improvement. There’s still one person that gets the short end of the stick.
Given that this is suggested to be a voluntary system, it doesn’t really matter what Walter Glannon thinks—it matters what you think.
Personally, I would be more interested in signing up for this if I was assured that the permanent damage was to the grey matter, and would be happy if this included both comas and permanent vegetative states. But YMMV.
It is worth noting here that being in solitary confinement does not necessarily prevent you from writing, receiving visitors, or making telephone calls (it depends on your local jurisdiction). Also, very few people are sentenced to be in solitary confinement until they die. In those places where this sort of sentence is permitted, it is unlikely that prisoners would be allowed any choice in their fate, but it is not obviously bad for a justly imprisoned person to choose suicide (with or without organ donation) in lieu of a life sentence.
EDIT: on re-reading, I see that this was not stated to always be a voluntary procedure; the author goes back and forth between voluntary and involuntary procedures. In involuntary cases, I agree that the simple criteria of “brain functions at a level too low to sustain consciousness but enough to sustain breathing and other critical functions without mechanical support” is too lax. I would still agree with the author in general that DDR is too strong.
Honest question, if you are cool with killing a person in a coma, based on the fact that they will never sense again, how do you feel about a person doing life in solitary? They may sense, but they aren’t able to communicate what they sense to any other human.
What exactly makes life worth its organs, in your eyes?
A person in solitary still has experiences. They just don’t interact with the outside world. People in a coma are, as far as we can tell, not conscious. There are plenty of animals that people are okay with killing and eating that are more likely to be sentient than someone in a coma.
By that standard how about harvesting the organs of babies?
Planned Parenthood does this for aborted babies.
I think babies are more person-like than the animals we eat for food. I’m not an expert in that though. They’re still above someone in a coma.
More for the “shit LW people say” collection :-)
Babies aren’t sentient?
The context is that Steven Pinker arguments that animals we eat are more sentinent than babies: http://www.gargaro.com/pinker.html
What other standard do you propose?
Not harvesting the organs of living human beings?
Define living and human being.
The way the terms are defined in German law and interpreted by German courts.
which is… (trust me, I have a point here, but by not actually answering my query in a precise way your’e making it hard to make)
I answered you query in a very precise way. There are tons and tons of laws and court judgements involved and no answer that fits into a few paragraphs.
If that’s the case you could try to make your point explicitly instead of implicitly. You could list your assumptions.
Yeah, and I’m asking, do those experiences “count”?
If organs are going from comatose humans to better ones, and we’ve decided that people who aren’t sensing don’t deserve theirs, how about people who aren’t communicating their senses? It seems like this principal can go cool places.
If we butchered some mass murderer we could save the lives of a few taxpayers with families that love them (there will be forms, and an adorableness quotient, and Love Weighting). All that the world would be out is the silent contemplation of the interior of a cell. Clearly a net gain, yeah?
So, are we stopping at “no sensing → we jack your meats”, or can we cook with gas?
It’s not about communication. It’s not even about sensing. It’s about subjective experience. If your mind worked properly but you just couldn’t sense anything or do anything, you’d have moral worth. It would probably be negative and it would be a mercy to kill you, but that’s another issue entirely. From what I understand, if you’re in a coma, your brain isn’t entirely inactive. It’s doing something. But it’s more comparable to what a fish does than a conscious mammal.
Someone in a coma is not a person anymore. In the same sense that someone who is dead is not a person anymore. The problem with killing someone is that they stop being a person. There’s nothing wrong with taking them from not a person to a slightly different not a person.
A mass murderer is still a person. They think and feel like you do, except probably with less empathy or something. The world is better off without them, and getting rid of them is a net gain. But it’s not a Pareto improvement. There’s still one person that gets the short end of the stick.
I can’t tell if you have a recommendation. If you have a model to suggest, please share it.
Given that this is suggested to be a voluntary system, it doesn’t really matter what Walter Glannon thinks—it matters what you think.
Personally, I would be more interested in signing up for this if I was assured that the permanent damage was to the grey matter, and would be happy if this included both comas and permanent vegetative states. But YMMV.
It is worth noting here that being in solitary confinement does not necessarily prevent you from writing, receiving visitors, or making telephone calls (it depends on your local jurisdiction). Also, very few people are sentenced to be in solitary confinement until they die. In those places where this sort of sentence is permitted, it is unlikely that prisoners would be allowed any choice in their fate, but it is not obviously bad for a justly imprisoned person to choose suicide (with or without organ donation) in lieu of a life sentence.
EDIT: on re-reading, I see that this was not stated to always be a voluntary procedure; the author goes back and forth between voluntary and involuntary procedures. In involuntary cases, I agree that the simple criteria of “brain functions at a level too low to sustain consciousness but enough to sustain breathing and other critical functions without mechanical support” is too lax. I would still agree with the author in general that DDR is too strong.