This feels like begging the question. Why is it obvious that a doctor shouldn’t kill one patient to save five? It seems like it is obvious because we have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that it is wrong. Given that there are many people who have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that being gay is wrong, I’m unsure if it’s a good idea to just rely on that intuition, and leave it there.
Intuition is probably a proxy for all the negative externalities. You can’t quickly think through all of them, but there’s a feeling that harvesting organs from a (soon to be healthy) patient is a huge breach of trust, which is Wrong. Why is breach of trust wrong? Intellectual answer goes one way, and intuition goes the evolved way, which is “thou shalt dislike people who breach trust”.
I don’t know whether it is because I have examined that case more closely but I think it can be thought throught.
If you had doctors who were known to organ harvest then anybody submitting to be their patient would risk getting harvested. This is not merely possible but kind of justifiable. It is so justifiable that even if a harvesting would save more lives more immedietly the effect of people not seeking medical treatment would easily displace this benefit.
On the contrary if all the patetients are super glued in tot he decision making it becomes more natural to do the harvesting. Imagine a tight family where everybody would give their lives for each other. The resistance to one of them heroing for the others melts away (intuition claim) quite effectively. So as a doctor you can’t mandate a harvesting but you can present the harvesting option to the relevant people. One of the possible hurdles is of thinking of a sane person knowingly consenting to be harvested (people like tend to aviod death where possible) but where it makes sense it mainly happens via that route.
I guess there is still the tricky situation where asking for consent is not possible but the doctor questimates that the relevant parties would be on board.
My answer is that in the trolly problem the people are interchangeable, and 5 > 1. In the doctor problem, you have 5 sick and 1 healthy, and they have different value.
What the doctor should do is pick (by any means) one of the sick patients, extract thier 4 healthy organs and save the other 4. The end result for the unlucky one is the same (death), but the other 4 do better.
In this scenario we giving the doctor an awful lot of power. We need to have unreasonably high trust in him to make such choice practical. Handling other people lives often have funny effects on one morality.
There is another problem: In reality, shit happens. But our intuition says something like “Shit happens to other people. I have control over my life, as long as I do everything right no shit will ever happen to me”. See? In my mind there is no way I ever need organ transplant so such arrangement is strictly detrimental, while in reality chances are I will be saved by it. Again there are good reasons for such intuition, as it promotes responsibility for own actions. If we are to make health “common property” who will be responsible for it?
I suspect it is easier to solve artificial organs than human nature.
“No, obviously. That would be monstrous.”
This feels like begging the question. Why is it obvious that a doctor shouldn’t kill one patient to save five? It seems like it is obvious because we have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that it is wrong. Given that there are many people who have an overwhelmingly strong intuition that being gay is wrong, I’m unsure if it’s a good idea to just rely on that intuition, and leave it there.
Intuition is probably a proxy for all the negative externalities. You can’t quickly think through all of them, but there’s a feeling that harvesting organs from a (soon to be healthy) patient is a huge breach of trust, which is Wrong. Why is breach of trust wrong? Intellectual answer goes one way, and intuition goes the evolved way, which is “thou shalt dislike people who breach trust”.
I don’t know whether it is because I have examined that case more closely but I think it can be thought throught.
If you had doctors who were known to organ harvest then anybody submitting to be their patient would risk getting harvested. This is not merely possible but kind of justifiable. It is so justifiable that even if a harvesting would save more lives more immedietly the effect of people not seeking medical treatment would easily displace this benefit.
On the contrary if all the patetients are super glued in tot he decision making it becomes more natural to do the harvesting. Imagine a tight family where everybody would give their lives for each other. The resistance to one of them heroing for the others melts away (intuition claim) quite effectively. So as a doctor you can’t mandate a harvesting but you can present the harvesting option to the relevant people. One of the possible hurdles is of thinking of a sane person knowingly consenting to be harvested (people like tend to aviod death where possible) but where it makes sense it mainly happens via that route.
I guess there is still the tricky situation where asking for consent is not possible but the doctor questimates that the relevant parties would be on board.
My answer is that in the trolly problem the people are interchangeable, and 5 > 1. In the doctor problem, you have 5 sick and 1 healthy, and they have different value.
What the doctor should do is pick (by any means) one of the sick patients, extract thier 4 healthy organs and save the other 4. The end result for the unlucky one is the same (death), but the other 4 do better.
In this scenario we giving the doctor an awful lot of power. We need to have unreasonably high trust in him to make such choice practical. Handling other people lives often have funny effects on one morality.
There is another problem: In reality, shit happens. But our intuition says something like “Shit happens to other people. I have control over my life, as long as I do everything right no shit will ever happen to me”. See? In my mind there is no way I ever need organ transplant so such arrangement is strictly detrimental, while in reality chances are I will be saved by it. Again there are good reasons for such intuition, as it promotes responsibility for own actions. If we are to make health “common property” who will be responsible for it?
I suspect it is easier to solve artificial organs than human nature.