I think the first hurdle is whether this a worthwhile policy at all. We’d need to weigh the expected cost in donor lives against the improvement in recipient lives; I would think that the factors which make for the best donors like youth and health would tend to militate against the policy given the profile of recipients, often older and already known to be unhealthy. Secondly, even if the program would be positive sum, we’d need to weigh it against alternatives (like forced donation at death) to ensure that it was actually the best policy possible.
Obviously, you could restate the hypothetical until all the factors which must be weighed demand Policy 145. But this is almost certainly a trivial exercise provided by the rule set governing consequentialism. At that point, however, I think there are a few responses available: (1) the world is not recognizable to me and I cannot, even with difficulty, really imagine what the balance of worlds close to it would be like; (2) while this world sounds great, I think I’m better off in this one and so I can safely say that I do not prefer it for myself; (3) the world is so different from the actual world that it is difficult to say whether such a world would be internally consistent if usefully similar to our own.
I think response (1) allows us to “bite the bullet” on paper, knowing it will never be fired; response (2) seems like it may usefully encapsulate our problems with the hypothetical and generate the correct response “good for them, then”; (3) this response allows a denial or agnosticism about the world and “out there” hypotheticals in general.
I think the proper response to this process is all three: I should agree were it so; I should properly recognize that I don’t like it (and don’t have to); and I can deny that the hypothetical reveals any important information about theory. I think these responses could be elided, though, simply by noting what was suggested earlier: given a static rule set and a fully malleable world, the generation of repugnant (or euphoric) results is trivial and thus unhelpful.
I think the first hurdle is whether this a worthwhile policy at all. We’d need to weigh the expected cost in donor lives against the improvement in recipient lives; I would think that the factors which make for the best donors like youth and health would tend to militate against the policy given the profile of recipients, often older and already known to be unhealthy. Secondly, even if the program would be positive sum, we’d need to weigh it against alternatives (like forced donation at death) to ensure that it was actually the best policy possible.
Obviously, you could restate the hypothetical until all the factors which must be weighed demand Policy 145. But this is almost certainly a trivial exercise provided by the rule set governing consequentialism. At that point, however, I think there are a few responses available: (1) the world is not recognizable to me and I cannot, even with difficulty, really imagine what the balance of worlds close to it would be like; (2) while this world sounds great, I think I’m better off in this one and so I can safely say that I do not prefer it for myself; (3) the world is so different from the actual world that it is difficult to say whether such a world would be internally consistent if usefully similar to our own.
I think response (1) allows us to “bite the bullet” on paper, knowing it will never be fired; response (2) seems like it may usefully encapsulate our problems with the hypothetical and generate the correct response “good for them, then”; (3) this response allows a denial or agnosticism about the world and “out there” hypotheticals in general.
I think the proper response to this process is all three: I should agree were it so; I should properly recognize that I don’t like it (and don’t have to); and I can deny that the hypothetical reveals any important information about theory. I think these responses could be elided, though, simply by noting what was suggested earlier: given a static rule set and a fully malleable world, the generation of repugnant (or euphoric) results is trivial and thus unhelpful.