Every time a physician gives a unit of blood to a patient e does so believing it is a life-saving procedure. So if 3 units are given the patient’s life was saved 3 times in rapid succession. (You have to be willing to save a life multiple times, because that’s the analysis we’re using for the rest of this discussion: multiple mosquito nets saved the same kid’s life multiple times over his lifetime; that same kid was then saved by anti-diarrheal treatments; etc. The same analysis belongs here)
There are not many times I see a line of reasoning and have to reject it at every single step. Apart from being conceptually absurd the very thought is morally objectionable. It totally devalues the value of ‘saving a life’ to the point of utter meaningless. How could that ever make someone ‘feel-good’?
It totally devalues the value of ‘saving a life’ to the point of utter meaningless.
Which part? I thought that started silly (it’s explaining the logic behind a non-profit’s puffery, did you expect it to be rigorous?) but then got better. The idea of “saving a life” is pretty meaningless when you poke at it- it’s all just lifespan extension. And so the idea that each emergency treatment extends lifespans by the ‘natural span of a life’ is silly. If someone would die if they don’t receive a unit of blood at 50 separate occasions on their life, should each transfusion get the full moral weight of saving a life? If so, we just gave this person 50 lives. If not, then we need to abandon the language of “saving a life” and talk about “extending a lifespan” (because we can say those units of blood each added a year to the person’s life, for example).
There are not many times I see a line of reasoning and have to reject it at every single step. Apart from being conceptually absurd the very thought is morally objectionable. It totally devalues the value of ‘saving a life’ to the point of utter meaningless. How could that ever make someone ‘feel-good’?
Which part? I thought that started silly (it’s explaining the logic behind a non-profit’s puffery, did you expect it to be rigorous?) but then got better. The idea of “saving a life” is pretty meaningless when you poke at it- it’s all just lifespan extension. And so the idea that each emergency treatment extends lifespans by the ‘natural span of a life’ is silly. If someone would die if they don’t receive a unit of blood at 50 separate occasions on their life, should each transfusion get the full moral weight of saving a life? If so, we just gave this person 50 lives. If not, then we need to abandon the language of “saving a life” and talk about “extending a lifespan” (because we can say those units of blood each added a year to the person’s life, for example).