Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
Not a huge update but an interesting discussion of FDA approval; can the FDA actually stop or sanction experimental procedures like this?
They explicitly permitted this operation, by means of https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/expanded...
Sometimes called “compassionate use”, expanded access is a potential pathway for a patient with an immediately life-threatening condition or serious disease or condition to gain access to an investigational medical product (drug, biologic, or medical device) for treatment outside of clinical trials when no comparable or satisfactory alternative therapy options are available.
It’s funny how Americans surrender medical autonomy to the government but draw a strict line in the sand in other issues
If only there hadn't been a major high profile collapse of a fraudulent diagnostic test company recently.
Or, as this guy[1] put it, like house cats. “convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”
As a former Libertarian who luckily grew out of that phase, I love this analogy.
1: https://twitter.com/jspauldingphoto/status/14615069981183303...
One of the things I always liked about HN (even years ago HN) is that it seemed to feature a diversity of age ranges. Which brings some nice perspective.
When you live with hearing loss, it leads to social isolation and embarrassing situations, depression, and all the usual attendant disasters in people's lives.
The hearing cartel has used their wealth to create a pseudomedicine so as to brand their salespeople as doctors, and infested almost every state with bureacrats who determine policy and direct licensing and enforcement.
Hearing aids that are priced at $5000 or more are produced at scale for less than $5 per unit. It'd be trivial to turn most modern headphones into hearing aid equivalent technology, but there is a regulatory moat surrounding real time audio enhancement that will cause the fda to shut down any attempt to augment regular hearing, let alone allow the hearing impaired the ability to operate what amounts to a stereo equalizer.
The fda does engage in legitimate business, but that's insufficient to justify the costs paid by people who get screwed when the FDA is exploited for profit.
I currently pay for "hearing aids as a service" and lose $200 a month for the privilege of hearing. I pay what amounts to extortion money for my disability. Because my loss is classified profound, none of the Obama era loosening of hearing aid restrictions help. It's lip service that acknowledges the problem but leaves 95% of it unsolved.
Libertarian shmibertarian, I think I'm entitled to not get specially fucked because my ears don't work. I think it's sick that I feel grateful that I can afford hearing as a service when it should be something covered by insurance, or something I can buy for the same cost as premium earbuds.
Government shouldn't be involved in hearing aids, except in the consumer protection arena. The fda has no business enabling the exploitation of disabled and vulnerable people, but hearing aids are just one area they happily strong-arm the public on behalf of cartels and industry lobbies.
The FDA doesn't set prices. The cartels provide a product that works, which as far as the FDA is concerned, is all they care about. The FDA does not set prices.
As of 2017 there is already laws being changed to help lower prices and provide OTC hearing aids.
>Government shouldn't be involved in hearing aids, except in the consumer protection arena.
That is what they are involved with...
You seem to have demonized the FDA over one issue they don't really control and are now throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Why is the FDA Funded in Part by the Companies It Regulates?
https://today.uconn.edu/2021/05/why-is-the-fda-funded-in-par...
Hidden conflicts? Pharma payments to FDA advisers after drug approvals spark ethical concerns:
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-conflicts-pha...
Gaps, tensions, and conflicts in the FDA approval process: implications for clinical practice:
https://www.jabfm.org/content/17/2/142.long
Revisiting financial conflicts of interest in FDA advisory committees:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0009.12073
(edit: more links)
The root of all government problems is "We trust you to make decisions that impact a large amount of monetary value, but also pay you less than the amount of money flowing through you, and also pay you less than private industry would be willing to."
Which... sets up an interesting dynamic.
There are a lot of selfless saints out there. But there are also a lot, not. And so internal processes and regulations pile on top, in an attempt to curb the worst of corruption.
Can we make the system better? Eh... maybe? But it's important to remember that a lot of features that look insane are actually reactive solutions to problems inherent in the system.
The FDA (and the CDC and others) and pharma sectors trade people all the time. There is a revolving door between the two. Medicine isn't the only place this happens. It happens in telecomm, military, manufacturing, and so on.
We have experts at all levels. Those same experts may or may not have patriotic tendencies. They are placed for their knowledge of their respective industries. They may also have a financial ax to grind.
Is there a conflict of interest? Only if the appointee was appointed by the other party. I argue that the apparent conflict of interest is only surface level. In the US we don't have "capitalism", we have "crony capitalism" that is verging on technocracy (rule of The Science and unelected bureaucrats).
> The root of all government problems is "We trust you to make decisions that impact a large amount of monetary value, but also pay you less than the amount of money flowing through you, and also pay you less than private industry would be willing to.
The kinds of people who make those decisions are paid very well, and if they make it out without media incident, they are nearly always guaranteed a job in the industry they used to regulate.
There is no such thing as capitalism separate from democracy, with a government that performs many functions.
It's not crony capitalism or technocracy. It's just normal capitalism in a democracy. Same way it has been since the founding of the United States.
> The kinds of people who make those decisions are paid very well
Are they? GS tops out at around $170k https://www.generalschedule.org/ . And S/ES at around $220k https://www.federalpay.org/ses/2022 .
That's a good salary. But it's not necessarily something I'd feel comfortable going to sleep with, knowing they had a finger on the scales of millions of dollars, if there weren't watchdog and mitigation measures in place.
The real world system for which the term “capitalism” was coined, was, is, and always has been crony capitalism; the idea of a non-crony capitalism is a utopian fairy tale that was invented to justify real-world capitalism which has never resembled it.
No, they are normative ideals, not fantastical models of how interactions do, or even could, work. Entirely different class of things, even if you disagree with them.
(It's true that people build utopian fairy tales out of them, such as the idea that a society observing certain complexes of multiple and conflicting rights without any tradeoff between them can exist. But the ideas of the rights themselves aren't the utopian fairy tales, they are just a value function.)
For an extreme example, imagine you had a court system that picks 100 people at random to execute each year (most of whom are naturally innocent). Then, you have a crime wave. Would you say that the solution to this problem would be that the courts need to be tougher? ...more lenient? Both seem quite obviously wrong: being more lenient would solve the problem of innocents getting executed but do nothing about crime, being tougher would only trivially solve the problem of crime near the limit point where everyone is executed. However, being hostile towards such a court system seems quite appropriate.
Likewise, I don't think Theranos is sufficient evidence that the FDA needs to simply be stricter, nor is the difficulty of getting approval for pig hearts sufficient evidence that the FDA needs to be more lenient. Instead, taken together the two imply that the FDA needs to be more specific at blocking the bad therapies and allowing the good ones - in other words, it simply needs to get better at its job. Is this not something we can demand of the government?
The issue here (and with regulators in general) is that in general "being better at their job" means going into more depth to determine whether an approval is warranted, which means expending more resources on investigation. I don't know that I've ever seen any overlap between the people who think the regulators do a bad job at regulating and people who think we should be funding the regulators more thoroughly.
All that not to mention that when a regulator like the FDA starts going into more depth in its investigations of an industry, that industry's firms start spending more money on either complying with or deceiving the regulator, risking a downward spiral of wasted resources.
The FDA regulates with cause and investigates all new medical products before they can be brought to market. They don't willy nilly approve some and nix others.
This is the epitome of survivorship bias. The Moderna vaccine could have just as well made a lot of people very very sick. There are countless examples of problematic medicines and vaccines which didn't get the scrutiny the COVID vaccines got (and continue to get) simply because not enough people were relevant for the studies and statistics are subsequently weaker.
We should all appreciate it went through the regulatory process (accelerated) to confirm it does not before injecting millions of people with it.
Maybe something like "a UL for drug approval" might be worth a go.
It's possible that medical approvals would be less prone to this sidestepping of independent regulators, since much of the spending is proxied by insurance companies looking to maximize profits and minimize BS spending, but I have very little confidence that such a system would function.
Besides, if it's counterfeit, then it's not actually UL marked, so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Consumers can't tell the difference between devices that are fraudulently or legitimately marked with the UL logo, and the UL doesn't appear to be able to do anything about the prevalence of fraudulent uses of the UL mark.
Nobody does that now, for the most part, why would they do it if there were a hyperlink attached to the regulations themselves? Who actually reads the text of regulations in the general population? I have zero data, but I'm willing to bet it's virtually no one. Specialists with a vested interest sure do, and they will probably already know relevant cases or thought processes.
Edit: This was written in a very US-centric way, because it is in response to something originally about the FDA.
The process is not fully transparent. It means that it's easy to create two laws, which are contradicting each other, or modify laws against their original purpose, etc., because it's hard to see consequences when the law is not transparent. For example, our ex-president Yanukovich just replaced Constitution on president site with an older version. Yes, it's online, but it took 2 years(!) until people noticed that and start to revolt.
In software development, we have test cases, which must be passed. In law development, we have nothing like that.
In my county, we read laws fairly often, because they are easy to get, but most of the time people prefer to read «commentary» — a book about law with comments and cases.
Your quip is an easy one to make but there is very clearly no shortage of entities who peddle goods and services seeking, often successfully, to influence lawmaker so those goods and services are legally required despite the benefit to society being marginal if even measurable.
But what is the issue with that? Failures in diagnosis kill people very regularly. It should be regulated.
My best guess is one in a thousand actually needs them so the 999 have a placebo effect and the 1 suffers. I told my neurologist, and he couldn't even prescribe them for me because that isn't a thing. So now I buy all I can find that works and hope they don't stop making it.
I have a couple meds and treatments I’ve been begging doctors to try, but they aren’t aware of them so refuse to consider.
Go onto any support forum and you’ll find countless tales of doctors not listening or not knowing current info on a condition.
I've been there a few times before. And while inevitably monkeys popping random pills will find something, separating the signal from the noise takes time and studies. The things that doctors pay attention too.
Disclaimer: Yes there are out of touch doctors and yes random medicating has lead to amazing discoveries.
Unlikely. What's more likely is that something else interferes with the absorption.
Anyway, don't just take my word at face value, have a sample tested: liquid chromatography can give you an answer quickly. Also, don't buy on amazon where cheap fakes and inventory comingling make the problem unsolvable.
Grab a monster energy drink: content in L-Carnitine is guaranteed,
I learnt this at a talk I went to about 10 years ago. At the time, in the speakers opinion (who from memory was involved in surveillance testing of these products), some countries did regulate stuff like vitamin supplements, but Australia was the only country that "did it properly". And a major component of this was that their regulations covered ingredients and the supply chains.
A quick search turned up this article: https://www.tga.gov.au/blogs/tga-topics/how-are-vitamins-reg...
Finally, a word of caution given by the speaker: many companies/suppliers try to trick consumers online by selling cheaper versions with identical labelling but no AUST number and shipped directly from overseas so it technically counted as a consumer "importing" on their own. Idk if this loop hole still exists.
I assume you mean COVID home tests and things like that? Call me strange, but if I buy such a thing then I'd like to make sure it's held to some standard of accuracy and safety. I do not have the resources or knowledge to find this out myself. Most people don't, and you can't just rely on "internet reviews" or the like.
Someone has to do this, and while the FDA and government authority may not be perfect, they're the best we've got, and we can at least somewhat hold them accountable through the democratic process (which also isn't perfect, but better than anything else we've got).
... because this is where it starts. The answer to "there are regulatory inefficiencies" is not "get rid of regulations" or "allow industry to self-regulate."
You're implying that all ~332 million Americans are a homogenous and single-minded mass. Please stop generalizing, it's not a good look.
If they knew the extent of it they probably wouldn't.
I don't know where you're from but I'm sure the people there show equal apathy on some subjects.
Like MIR machines? Like blood labs? Like home pregnancy tests? Without the FDA's regulation of medicine we would quickly be back to snake oil and cocaine in everything. It is bad enough that drugs stores are allowed to sell water as a "homeopathic remedy". The snake oil people are out there waiting for deregulation.
Can also confirm. I received CPR which cracked some ribs. I had to sleep in a chair for the first 5 weeks because lying down flat and getting back up again was so painful. Sneezing and coughing were excruciating until I found the trick of 'hugging' oneself just before to reduce chest movement.
It took like ages to let him confidently use the toilet on his own. And I'd always keep the toilet door open 'Just in case'.
The Knee replacement a year later was obviously more brutal given the bypass was only an year back and we were peak in COVID times. He was infected, and I had sleep on the road as I caught it too(couldn't go home out of fear of infecting the family). Pretty much saw hell in bare form during that(weeks in anxiety, walking in COVID wards and suffering every single minute), and of course that recovery took months, as the drugs they gave him caused a huge spillover of issues.
It might just be that as a I child I felt more for my father.
But let me tell you major surgeries like bypass grafts, or knee replacements are nightmarish experiences, even more more so in the COVID times today.
P.S: This is in Bangalore, India.
Fair warning: it's pretty depressing.
https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/how-long-do-transplanted-...
Donors are usually 35-50 at time of donation, so way more than 10 years away from average life expectancy. The donated organs fail for other reasons.
There are many examples of donated organs living past 100 (years since donor's birth) even though the number of humans who live that long is quite rare.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3731752/The-woman...
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200625-the-woman-with-a...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1773764/
Worth watching with subtitles if you do not understand the language.
Let's leave the algae talk out of this!
They seem to have forgotten about this baboon-to-human heart transplant from 1984.
Of note is the disastrous synthetic heart in the 90’s. I was surprised that such a thing was attempted.
https://pharmacy.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/kidney-project-succes...
Even if we did have good digital simulations, someone would still have to be the first human to get it "for real". That's just the nature of things. Someone has to be the first patient of a new heart surgeon. Someone has to be the first person to hire a newly-minted PE to design a bridge that might fail and kill thousands. And so on.
We mitigate these risks to the best of our ability by ensuring rigorous training of doctors and PEs, and stuff like animal testing and computer simulations, but someone still has to be first.
It sounds like this patient was well aware of the risks, and opted to get the procedure since otherwise his death would be a certainty.
why does it need to be? What if Mr. Bennett just wants to live longer? What obligation does he have to you or me or anyone?
God bless Dr mohammad
Now, what is morally licit is not abortion, but also by virtue of the principle of double effect, a procedure intended to save the mother's life that unintentionally and as a side effect results in the child's death. For example, it is morally licit to extract the affected tissue with the implanted embryo during an ectopic pregnancy. This extraction will result in the death of the child, but the death was neither intended nor was the death of the child the means by which the mother's life was saved nor is saving the life of the mother a lesser good than the life of the child (though in this case, both would very likely have perished if this condition had been allowed to continue). Note that the situation must be proportionally grave, meaning you could not licitly perform such a procedure if the risk to the mother was not proportional (like experiencing headaches because of the pregnancy). In those cases, proportional care is permissible.
A bit nit-picky, but while all authoritative documents (like the catechism) unequivocally condemns abortion, there is no shortage of Catholic scholars who are pro-abortion. Just like the Pontifical Commission on Birth Control. The scholars gave it the green light, but not even having “Pontifical” in the name made it remotely authoritative.
AFAIK it is not forbidden for a Muslim to touch pigs, only to eat them. Pigs and dogs are impure, but you can perform ablution afterwards. Muslims normally own hunting and guarding dogs. That would actually be a common problem for Coalition soldiers in Iraq when they tried to enter a village by stealth - lots of barking.
"This impureness nevertheless doesn't imply that one might not touch a pork, but that one might need to wash his hands and maybe even re-do the ablution to be able to pray after touching it."
https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/48791/is-it-haram-...
Dogs can be infested with parasites just as easily as pigs.
It is not the same as "being unhygienic", though it overlaps to some degree. (Faeces etc.)
An interesting example from Judaism is "Tzaraath", which means skin disease, but it could also afflict houses. Today we do not know for sure what it even meant. Mold infestation? Maybe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzaraath#Affliction_of_housing
Science welcomes change when we find a better way to do something. Is assumed that humans can be wrong and learn. Religion will fiercely oppose change because god can't be wrong by definition (and nobody has the authority to fix it). Ideology will oppose also changes that see as a menace, but can be more flexible.
Can anybody offer some insight into what people mean by that? I know that in the 19th century, sharia was basically just a legal tradition, that drew on Islam (just as western legal traditions draw on Christianity, or eastern ones Confucianism). Is it more extreme these days?
Unfortunately, the word has been seized on in western culture to refer to the legal beliefs of militant Islamism. But that's not at all what it means to most Muslims.
Is this true? How would these manipulations be carried out?
Pig: "What was noise?"
Doctor: "The sound of progress, my friend."
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html [1] https://www.healio.com/news/primary-care/20201214/fda-oks-ge...
They do cover this point.
I imagine there's also a consideration for ease of raising. These pigs had to be kept separate from others and tested frequently for disease because of having some aspects of their immune system weakened to reduce rejection risk. This would probably be easier to do ethically for pigs compared to primates.
Best wishes to Mr. Bennett, and hope that whatever happens, it will be a good leap for humanity.
Are you claiming (most/many) humans are closet cannibals? I don’t agree with that.
Also, pigs aren’t particularly close to humans, genetically. In biological classification they even are in a different order (even-hoofed ungulates) than humans, who are primates.
⇒ I don’t think that theory makes sense.
People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no downside from doing this much more often, and a strict upside: a chance to live longer and a definite advance in medicine leading to other lives saved. Sure, it may mean more stress for a dying patient, but quite a few would prefer their death have some meaning. But they can't chose this because it's not "ethical".
Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there - I'd really like to see an argument where we had three major companies create mRNA vaccines, only one failed (harmlessly!) but we shouldn't have used this technology a few years early. mRNA tech is incredibly versatile - it should have applications from curing cold to curing cancer. But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical".
We knew from month 1 that the young and healthy are not hit hard by Covid. Mortality in those groups was always comparable to flu, more or less. But we didn't do challenge trials. We wasted ... I have to take a break from typing, tbh, I'm overwhelmed. We wasted almost a year while literal millions died while wondering if Covid is transmitted by touch, aerosols or airborne when we could have fixed this in two weeks with a bunch of 25 year olds. We spent half a year before even realizing masks help, and we still don't know for sure how much and what's the difference between each kind. We had Omicron - we knew it was different, we had good reason to think it's not significantly worse from the start, but we still had a _lot_ of questions. But two years from the start of the pandemic we STILL didn't put a bunch of healthy volunteers through a completely harmless study to find out things early. Because it wouldn't have been "ethical".
This isn't ethics we're talking about. It's pure and unadulterated cowardice. We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for. Joe from the street would be excused from making these decisions, but when you deal with the people directly charged by the society from making these decision, it's just failure to do their job. And in a supermajority of case we're dealing with volunteers anyways.
If you feel like reading more about how stupid the whole system is: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
To do so successfully would require thousands of unacquainted people to coordinate changes (against their backdrop of incentives) simultaneously.
Governments are made for this but after a certain size and complexity, their people get stuck in the same frontier of stuck incentives.
A horribly-written but salient book about this is “Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck”: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B076Z64CPG
When ethics devolves into morals and religion, it gets worse because in that case the "bad stuff" is somebody feeling offended/insulted and when that conflicts with potentially life saving new treatments; that in itself might be considered a bad thing (unethical?). Ethics has this way of contradicting itself.
When you weigh two bad outcomes, the rational thing to do (the least bad thing) might not be the ethical thing to do but some people (me) would still consider that the right thing to do. When letting people die that want to live (an important caveat) is more ethical than doing something to prevent that, something is very wrong. Also letting them die when they actually want to is considered unethical by some.
They (CureVac) failed because they started trials too late, and by then the Delta variant was going around and caused the numbers to not look as good as Pfizer and Moderna's. v If you look back, it's a real shame, because Pfizer's and Moderna's Delta numbers are no better than CureVac's.
[Also, speaking completely anecdotally, but I'm in that clinical trial and thus a recipient of 2 CureVac shots and 2 Moderna shots. I have yet to catch Covid despite taking nearly zero precautions and a lot of high risk contacts. And yes, I get tested constantly. There might be something more interesting yet to discover about this.]
A mere suspicion, impression that doctors are not treating life and health of this particular patient with all sainctity will do a lot more harm than good.
I mean, life is precious, doctors should know this best and act like it is. Recklessness even in words will do a lot of harm. A lot of credit will be lost if standards slip even a little bit.
I know this very well because people around me are not vaccinated yet because they are suspicious of Sputnik-V. Yes, this is reality where I live. People are suspicious and refusing a life-saving procedure.
The patients who don't get the experimental treatment didn't refuse the experimental treatment -- they were never offered it at all which is the problem.
The ethics and regulatory red tape kills any hope for such a treatment before patient consent is even a question.
The problem is not that they can't say "no", it's that they can't say "yes".
The longer response would be that public institutions should be forbidden to use Simulacra Levels over 1 (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qDmnyEMtJkE9Wrpau/simulacra-...)
When people don't feel they are equals in society, the whole "for the benefit of all" sounds pretty cynical.
Also, some governments have a poor record for taking responsibility (e.g. looking after veterans), or making others take responsibility (DuPont), so the people who do come off worse don't necessarily expect to be taken care of.
>Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there
Not quite. While this line of research has been occurring for some time, it wasn't quite at that point yet. It wasn't developed and not being used because testing them would be considered unethical. It was developing technology, and Covid came at an opportune time in that things were close enough for researchers to rush things along.
>But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical".
Yes, we did need testing before we started using it. It could make everyone sick for all we know. Or perhaps only a select few populations. Testing also allows guidance to be developed on what expect, and what doctors need to look out for. If it were to cause bleeding in people with a certain blood type, for example, then just giving it out would result in huge numbers of people rushing to already overworked ER rooms. Which could just worsen the health crisis we were trying to avoid. There are many good reasons to test treatments even when time is limited
>We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for.
Y I'll take this logic further and say why not do some DNA alteration experiments on babies? We may have to destroy the specimens after, but so what? A finite number of lives can lead to saving countless lives in the future. Think of the things we could learn about rare diseases, removing harmful genes, improving human health, etc. The millions, even billions of lives we could save and enrich. It's immoral NOT to do that, when the rewards are so great.
That's the line of thinking that doctors try to avoid, hence "do no harm". It doesn't matter how common sense it seems, some lines you just don't cross. Because if people do cross those lines, eventually some might use it to justify doing immoral things. There's certainly a lot of rigorous debate about medical ethics, but these decisions are the results of groups of doctors and ethicicts. I'm of the belief that the alternatives have indeed been considered in most cases and the best choice has been made.
We're not talking about slippery slope here and "may have beens", we're talking about already having a soft form of worst case scenario, and _still_ not bringing out the big guns. Not doing challenge trials for Covid is just stupid, no matter how you try to push it.
"DNA alteration experiments on babies" - we do that, actually, and I'm seriously considering waiting on having a family until they become mainstream. It's a pretty cool tech, they had the first designer baby out last year. Just putting the scariest form you can think of in writing isn't an argument in itself, you know. You also have to say why it's a bad idea. Otherwise, no offense and please don't take it personally, but it's purely equivalent of somebody saying 200 years ago: "what's the next step, feeding MOLD to BABIES?". Turns out yes, feeding mold to babies is exactly what we're supposed to do. It's just progress - it looks weird until it's in the kitchen cabinet.
The mRNA vaccine not being ready - it's just incredibly improbable that you had three major corporations being able to "rush things along" and finish exactly at the same time. It's 10x to 100x more probable that they were already finished and stuck at some regulatory step.
And a final thought - please don't interpret my comments to say testing and regulation in general is bad. FDA is bad, and probably should be destroyed outright and something else, something much leaner, built instead. But some regulation and a lot of testing are of course necessary. It's just that currently 1. they've gone waaaay beyond what's needed and into pure bureaucracy and 2. the system is such that it ignores major slices of reality and focuses only on what's in front of their eyes, i.e. they don't do challenge trials because it's not ethical for the volunteers, but if they lead to 1% less death overall this means tens to hundreds of thousands saved - which they ignore.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-pig-to-human-transpla...
As long as we treat animals well while they're alive (and why wouldn't you, you want high quality low stress organs) then there's really no limit here, morally.
I'm a vegetarian.
Grow me a goddamned lung pig.
[0]https://modernfarmer.com/2016/05/raising-pigs/#:~:text=Most%....
That's as serious of an answer as I can give. It's the same reason I never neutered my cats, since it felt like a mutilation.
My point is - we are not cats, and cats aren't humans. They deserve good treatment, respect and all the love they can get - but at the end of the day they are not humans and should not be treated as such.
Suppose a cat had fingers, and basic language ability. Would you still feel the same way?
Suppose we didn't slaughter the other five proto-human species (Neanderthals et al). Would you still feel the same way?
The line gets blurrier the more you think it over.
It would no longer be a cat.
That's why "If you (a human) were a cat" is a problem, b/c you need to say what level of human/cat this hybrid creature is imagined to be.
It's like that joke: "Behold! The dog with two heads! and two bodies!"
Your earlier comment mentioned morality without qualifiers; here you refer to your own morality; this seems more accurate. Note that there are people who refuse to eat or otherwise harm animals and they cite moral reasons too.
It comes back to the question if never being born at all is better than some (domesticated) life at all.
> The heart transplanted into Mr. Bennett came from a genetically altered pig provided by Revivicor, a regenerative medicine company based in Blacksburg, Va.
> The pig had 10 genetic modifications. Four genes were knocked out, or inactivated, including one that encodes a molecule that causes an aggressive human rejection response.
> A growth gene was also inactivated to prevent the pig’s heart from continuing to grow after it was implanted, said Dr. Mohiuddin,who, with Dr. Griffith, did much of the research leading up to the transplant.
> In addition, six human genes were inserted into the genome of the donor pig — modifications designed to make the porcine organs more tolerable to the human immune system.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-p...
I mean if you buy a book that's it. You don't get a license to redistribute, but you get an unlimited license to read and use the book for whatever. That's how copyright law works.
It makes more sense to allow a certain portion of your population to die of preventable causes than to make them all happy, as the current net goal is economic productivity, not human happiness. This is demonstrated aptly by the lack of socialised healthcare in much of the world, and where it does exist, the relative paucity of resources provided.
So, while I agree in spirit with what you posit, capitalism and the value axis it brings has to die first.
Aging is a process that affects everyone, the only thing that you can influence a bit is speed thereof.
You see where this is going, right? Oh, what you describe actually might fit the book Brave New World as well.
Anyway yeah I know what you mean, this is why things like education, well-paying low-stress jobs, housing, health care, access to food are so important. They encourage an overall healthy and happy population without imposing on them.
But the US is a bit of a shithole in that regard; low paying jobs, food deserts, financial worries, crippling debts to pay for a lifestyle that people can't afford but need, etc. The country and its policies are self-destructive, and, dare I say it, a kind of economic eugenics - if you're too poor to afford health care you'll be removed from the gene pool.
Yes, a slippery-slope argument that all gene manipulation leads to eugenics.
Here's the counterpoint: The Nazis (and eugenicists / race-scientists in general) used the authority of science, but didn't actually do good science (and slipped in a lot of stuff that was pure ideology); so actual science is automatically different.
We have a really, really, horrible history of treating animals. It's obvious we wouldn't treat them well.
Similarly, I guess, I was vegan but I had to stop that diet as it caused severe health problems for me.
That wouldn't be a lot of pigs, true, and a pork chop of that origin would be pretty expensive.
I mean the value of various parts like organ meat varies by what it's used for, but eventually everything is used up. A lot of offal ends up in animal feed, for example. And their hooves end up in keratine supplements for the gymbros.
I also would not ban meat consumption if I was a dictator, but I would enforce extremely high ethical standards, carbon neutrality and proper management of agricultural effluent. I suspect that would make a pork chop pretty expensive too.
PETA doesn't like that anyone got a pig heart transplant. https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/first-heart-transpl...
For the first one, I can totally understand what the victim's family must be going through, but doctors aren't (and shouldn't) be in the business of making moral judgements on who should and shouldn't get to live. There is an established process in place for organ transplants (time on the wait list, viability of the transfer) and that's all that needs to be followed.
Frankly, I could care less what the family thinks. If they feel so strongly, then they should advocate for some legislative change. Most families would kill if given the option, and also the luxury of having someone else do it for them.
Why would anyone want to add complexity to triage would be my knee jerk wonder, it’s supposed to be a quick process
Would the hospital need to wait for the legal system to get back to them before treatment can begin? How would you know if the patient has committed a crime without waiting?
This is literally what they are all about. It's like complaining that the IOC keeps whining about athlete doping just to try to stay relevant.
That said I have though about it more than once, simulation in the head style and a world were PETA wins turns in to a uglier world in most cases.
Note: this is specifically about PETA, some other animal rights/welfare organizations are somewhat reasonable.
Hey PETA, source?
I don’t think changing the name of what happened from “treatment” to “experiment” tells me anything new. If another person with a roughly identical health status but without the violent history is also willing to accept the pig heart, then the decision must be made to use the scarce resources to treat Ed or the “non-violent” person.
> we'd find ourselves regarding this operation as his sacrifice for the greater good.
I agree that people may be talking about the transplant and Ed differently had he died on the table.
And in any case: seems like the man served his time.
This is so simple and newspapers trying to make it into a matter for debate is actually compromising that.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/health/heart-transplant-p...
Even if one were to consider moral character when allocating organs in general: the researchers needed someone who was sick and likely to die, ineligible for human organ transplant (here, because of severity of condition), and not so sick that there was no chance of success or useful data.
So, we're already picking someone who doesn't meet the normal rules.
And, of course, considering moral character when allocating organs probably isn't a great idea.
Naturally it was corrupt
As your link also says, in most areas, you can receive a liver for ALD; there's just a 6 month sobriety rule.
So we know:
- 6 months of sobriety increase odds of ongoing subsequent sobriety
- Sobriety improves LT transplant outcomes.
Many believe, without strong numerical evidence either way:
- 6 months of sobriety before procedure improves outcome of LT transplantation.
Fewer believe:
- A 6 month sobriety requirement is an unnecessary impediment to transplantation.
Your paper says:
"An interval of sobriety prior to LT is very desirable from a medical point of view. Abstinence may markedly improve liver function"
i.e. in many cases, if people could stop drinking, they might not even need the liver!
[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/articles/destigmatizing...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_for_End-Stage_Liver_Dise...
The non vaccinated are actively choosing to be a danger to people around them.
It is like actively carrying concealed unlicensed gun which can silently and anynomously fire at people.
[Edit] And if you meant active in context of 'Active shooter', then still use of the word active is not wrong. Virus laden body is like carrying a concealed gun which is on 'auto pilot', it is actively spraying bullets; it IS active all the while.
> The non vaccinated are actively choosing to be a danger to people around them.
> It is like actively carrying concealed unlicensed gun which can silently and anynomously fire at people.
What about giving a life extension to someone who stabs other people?
The recipient of the heart transplant, David Bennett, actively chose to be a danger to people around him.
Ideally there would be two beds, and everyone would get the care they need, but reality means choices have to be made. Refusing a vaccine should send you to the back of the queue.
You won't be denied tramua treatment for a gunshot because your doc told you to stop playing with guns.
You won't be refused heart medicine because you didn't stop eating bacon when your doctor told you to 5 years earlier.
You won't be denied ER treatment because you were drunk when you crashed your car.
There is no rule where we have to treat all patients equally (including mass murderers) except those who didn't accept n earlier-offered treatment or who did something that caused their own medical condition (i.e which probably includes most medical conditions).
Medical care is not an exploding offer.
Honestly - shame on you for trying to sneak in an absurd exception just so you can abuse the medical system to hurt people you don't like. That's not what hospitals are for.
Especially with COVID: if you're at the point of triage and rationing resources, you need to consider likely outcomes, and people with the vaccine presenting at hospital are more likely to survive than those presenting without.
It seems like we're not going to bump into those limits, though, so it's moot.
In my opinion, that logic is flawed.
The currently available COVID-19 vaccines vastly reduce the likelihood of developing severe symptoms from a SARS‑CoV‑2 infection. They also somewhat reduce the risk of getting infected in the first place.
So, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 makes you far less likely to need to be hospitalized, should you contract the virus, which apart from of course being beneficial to yourself also helps with keeping the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.
However, if you've already been hospitalized, it is because you've developed severe symptoms, which in turn means that, in that situation, for you, the vaccine has failed.
At that point, all other factors being equal, your likely outcome is no different from that of a person who hasn't been vaccinated. Therefore, using vaccination as a criterion for triage (which - like you said - is all about rationing resources, not passing judgement) doesn't make sense.
Now, it could very well be possible that being vaccinated improves your outcome even once you've already developed symptoms sufficiently severe to require hospitalization. However, I'm not sure there's conclusive evidence suggesting that is indeed the case.
Current data seems to show that fully vaccinated people who require hospitalization have hospital stays that are 33% shorter and are also about 33% less likely to die (despite having more comorbidities on average than unvaccinated hospitalizations).
So, if you have one bed left, and can put either an unvaccinated or vaccinated person in it-- all else being equal-- the vaccinated person is less likely to die with hospital care, and is more likely to free up the bed for someone else soon.
(We don't know, though, if you deny hospital care to both what the death rate for each would be-- here's where you have to guess. If you assume both die without hospital care, then you should give the bed to the vaccinated patient).
Only because people who got the vaccine are significantly less likely to require hospitalization though. At the start of the pandemic there was a very real possibility that we'd actually run out of ICU beds and ventilators. Much of the 'flatten the curve' effort was to protect healthcare services.
If having your head split open in a DWI accident was contagious you would.
Like 99% of the arguments against vaccination this isn't nearly as pithy as you think.
After seeing what going through the initial wave of COVID in a medical provider in the ER did to my mother I could not care less about how many loopholes in efficacy people want to tout.
Vaccines help reduce severity in some capacity. If you can be vaccinated (and not everyone can), and you chose not to because you know better, ask your YouTube doctor of choice to patch you up.
Honestly - shame on you for treating self-preservation as some sort of moral judgement against people someone doesn't like. People don't like to risk their lives for people who won't help themselves.
That's an entirely reasonable position that I can understand - my advice to those people would be to avoid careers in which they are required to risk their lives for people who won't help themselves.
There's a good reason I'm not a police officer, doctor, fireman, etc. The risk/reward payoff in those careers is far, far too low.
Comparing armed police sent in to deal with possibly armed suspects... firefighters who get sent into infernos... with doctors.
The risks doctors normally face from one patient to another are identical, so it was nonsensical to say they were risking their life for a specific patient. Especially since we've known how to protect from _normal_ bloodborne and airborne pathogens for a long time. The difference is COVID had no vaccine and treatment was limited at the time, it was repeatedly a death sentence.
That's why COVID already forced a rethinking of how far we expect providers to go to save someone: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCOUTCOMES.120.006...
There's a good reason you're not a doctor, let's leave it at that.
To be clear my position is that you should treat everyone, fatties, smokers, antivax, whatever, merely because I don't know when I'm going to find myself in one of the "wrong" groups and I'd like to get treatment then, so I think they should get it too.
Is a heart attack going to infect your provider?
Is neck cancer going to infect your provider?
We have a vaccine that significantly reduces the odds of putting our healthcare providers at risk and becoming part of the group of people crippling our ability to provide emergency medical care... if you don't take it not because you're ineligible, but because you've decided you know better, you should not be a priority.
And really this is already how it works. When ICUs get overwhelmed, people with COVID who code might not get resuscitated.
The massively increased risk to the provider combined with the chances of recovery mean you will just die:
https://www.cdha.nshealth.ca/system/files/sites/documents/co...
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And I guess saying I have strong feelings supposed to be some backhanded ad hominem? I mean clearly you have strong feelings as well, writing tirades about the "fatties", the difference between us is what I write is based on reality
My comment was as a follow up to your statement: "Vaccines help reduce severity in some capacity", there's a lot of behaviors that reduce severity in some capacity, and doing those would translate in lots of time savings and less pressure on the healthcare system in the same way as the vaccines do, the vaccines just have the extra "bonus" of being able to infect healthcare workers, so their negative effects compound. But if your argument is about first principles, any sort of self preservation has the same problem. So I was just commenting on that.
You're right the bit about feeling strongly was probably a subconscious dig, sorry about that, but I was amused at the "shame on you" and had a moment of weakness, my bad.
Also I didn't intend much with the fatties, I find it eandearing and have been a fatty myself at times in my life and have many I like, if that offended I'm sorry and I wish I hadn't used the term, but that's life and these are just internet comments.
Problem is that there is not enough capacity for curative treatment only. In this case it would make sense to allocate some hospital capacity for people without vaccination, and more capacity for people that have been vaccinated (maybe in the same ratios as population vaccination).
And also allocate some hospital capacity for people with other diseases so they're not impacted by the fact that some people refuse vaccination.
Yes, you would. Doctors refuse to give people treatment until they've lowered their weight, reduce their cholesterol, given up smoking or drinking, or increased their level of exercise all the time.
There is no point giving someone life-saving medical treatment if it isn't going to work because of some other factor. That's a waste of time and money. In every case the patient has to show that they're willing to do their part. Medicine is not just popping a few pills or turning up for surgery. There's effort required in order to get better.
In the case of Covid, having the vaccine is part of that effort. Someone who hasn't tried to improve their long-term health by, for example, giving up smoking, and someone who hasn't tried to improve their long-term health by having the Covid vaccine are basically the same - they're both putting their health at risk unnecessarily. Doctors should consider that when they're prioritizing treatment.
Although some might argue that there was a certain correlation between the two.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-tee...
In the case of ties, the question of who “deserves” the organ is relevant to the board members. Uncomfortable but true.
Also doesn’t really apply here as this guy had a last ditch experimental operation. The family in the article just wanted revenge.
For lack of a better word, they are maximising the duration of the organ.
Genuine ties do happen though, and at the end of the day the board is human.
The victims family is saying “Our principle is that people who stab Ed should not get a heart, therefore David should not get a heart.” The doctor is saying “Our principle is that we don’t use the patient’s past violence or convictions to determine whether they should get a heart or not, so the stabbing doesn’t disqualify David.”
Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative.
That question makes the more-topical issue When the ER fills up, should unvaccinated people be treated by administering carbon monoxide in the hospital parking garage? look trivial to resolve, in comparison.
I think people have the ethical issue in this case backwards: the reason this guy got this transplant is because it was an experiment. We effectively used an ex-con as a guinea pig. (Personally, I'm fine with that, he was fully aware and consented, it was his only chance.)
If this guy had died due to the experimental heart failing, we'd probably be seeing a bunch of op-eds about our moral failure to prevent exploitation of a vulnerable (ex-)prison population.
Yeah. There is no shortage of pig organs which is kinda the whole point. Rationing limited care is different than denying perfectly available care simply out of retribution. I thought the context made that distinction rather self-evident.
There is not a huge supply of these transplantable pig hearts at the moment. But if the procedure proves to be viable and the long term consequences make it favourable we can scale up transplantable pig heart production.
The reason we are not transplanting pig hearts to thousands of patients right now is not because of any such supposed shortage though, but because the procedure is not proven yet. The experiment in question is set out to provide data to help answer that question.
Yes, but not for their moral failings. We deny care for health reasons, as generally speaking the goal is to optimize for additional healthy years of life.
On the contrary, you’re probably massively overestimating how much the society at large cares for convicted felons.
The sad reality is it’s not a lot.
Which is why I doubt we’d see a single op-ed about it.
If you have one hospital bed and two COVID patients that are looking like they will die if they don’t get admitted you treat the one with the greater chance of survival. Being vaccinated is predictive of a higher survival rate…
The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.
But the positive/normative distinction is also not important here: medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine. It's not interested in what any individual does thinks should or shouldn't be the case: you do no harm and you always render treatment in accordance with your means.
What do you think is a good candidate for such a statement? My impression is that arguments must proceed from axioms, positive axioms aren’t helpful because the statement is normative and normative axioms just reproduce the issue.
> medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine.
What is the meaning of “lexical ethics”? Google didn’t return anything helpful.
I believe the essence of the claim you are making is that, “There is a powerful enforcement body that will only permit doctors to practice medicine if they do no harm and render treatment in accordance with their means.” I think this a positive claim about human behavior, a proposition potentially belonging to the set of sociological or historical facts.
I suspect the family is talking about the way things ought to be, “Heart transplants should go to good people”. And you are pointing out that the doctors are responding with a positive claim, “That’s not what we do here.”?
Here's an intuitive one: "you shouldn't kick puppies." Most people think that expresses a true statement (not that "most people" is itself indicative of truth value).
In terms of my own ethics: "act only in a way that you can will be universal law." Of course, not everybody agrees with that one, but I think it's an awfully good candidate.
We can talk about if and how those proceed from axioms, but I suspect that'll be a long thread :-)
> What is the meaning of “lexical ethics”?
Sorry: lex is in lex, legis, "law." Medical ethics don't concern themselves with normal moral objects or even moral laws in the deontological sense; they are literally a book of rules that doctors (broadly) are not allowed to disagree with.
So yes, I think it's correct to read the doctors' responses as a positive claim: they're pointing out that it's a category error to appeal to their (potentially true!) moral beliefs.
They’re allowed to disagree, as long as they still follow them.
Dura lex sed lex and all that.
Worth pointing out that truth is a pretty complicated word in this case. The statement is intuitively true in the sense that it is a command that ought to be followed, but it's not a factual truth statement in an empirical sense. Likewise often truth statements or commandments are reframed emotional stances, say "you should not look at porn!" expressing simply disapproval.
Lay ethics discussions conflate truth claims a lot so it's hard to draw any conclusions from it. Also there's a deep cultural aversion to argue that moral statements have no truth value, despite it being a common philosophical position.
Well, yeah, it would kind of be silly to be an ethicist if you didn't believe that, and even if you were it would be contrary to self-interest to admit to it. It’s like polling astrologists on the reality of planetary influence on personality and personal fortunes.
This all works out because it isn't actually contrary to their self-interest: academic philosophy doesn't care whether your position undermines some grounding claim, because there's no universal consensus around that grounding claim to begin with. You'll find plenty of moral philosophers who think that morality is a purely preferential mental phenomenon; they don't mind admitting that because there's still plenty of interesting work to be done if that's the case.
With an indirect death penalty attached, yes. Can’t think of how this could go wrong at alllllllllllll
Funny how a lot of problems work themselves out when swift justice is delivered. This whole thread doesn’t exist in that alternative, more just world.
If we take that into account, then do loners without friends/children/family not deserve the same consideration?
To me, you are undermining your view that life-taking is bad, by engaging in it yourselves. To me, this is a paradox. You seem to be standing up for your belief in the badness of life-taking, by doing something against those who do it, then you do something which goes against the very thing that you are trying to protect--which, to me, makes it seems like you are merely pretending to protect.
So, to me, their moral claim (?) that they are somehow "better" than this life-taker, and therefore have a right to say/do this life-save withholding, is completely undermined by their action of said withholding (or proposal to do it).
On the other hand, my ape-brain very much endorses the logic of revenge and sees no problem with an eye for a eye. It will teach people a lesson, let them know they can't mess with us, and let them know there are consequences if they try. Hopefully, my ape brain says, that will make us safer and rest easier, in future.
But the logical/rational part of me trying (but maybe failing) to consider this from an ethical or moral point of view, says, "Nah, that doesn't work."
That's why the legal system is so important. We need a way to do these things, that's not about individuals getting revenge. So...you kill Alice, then society takes it up with you, through their legal/punitive officers--rather than Alice's family.
But even so...that doesn't fully resolve it for me, the paradox I see there.
But at the same time, I get your point of view. I mean, what that means we can't punish anyone? Because we don't want to seem bad, by pushing back against the bad people? Are you saying we just turn the other cheek? That's crazy.
Yeah, I get that...But I think it's important...You do some crime, and I say, "I have to get back at you". But no, I'm the one that has to be moral. Individuals have to be moral. The state doesn't have to be moral in the same way. But we can't let that spill over to individuals otherwise everything collapses.
I mean, I'm not saying I can resolve this right here--and your strong reaction to what I said, indicates that I have raised a complex, subtle point that's not easy to resolve. People face stuff like that, it's difficult, so they react strongly, or emphatically, like you did.
So I think we need the state, the organs of the state, to be able to enact this violence on our part (take their money, their freedom, their life--maybe? I'm not sure about the last one). Then we can afford to be moral and live up to that, and that's good overall. It's not perfect but then what other options do we have?
My interpretation is not uncharitable, it's precisely the same argument you are making, and, to me, it makes no sense - as shown by my examples. Clearly, you have no problem with fines for thieves and prison for kidnappers, and why should you - so you agree with me.
I think the resolution to the problem of 'punishment' is exactly the one you point out at the end: we hand over the monopoly of violence to the democratic state.
Thus the point you're making is wrong: the problem is not at all whether we punish by exactly the same measure that we're punishing for. The simple truth is that the death penalty is a qualitative very different kind of punishment (which I find barbaric, just for the record).
Edit: I don't really see where I react strongly or emphatically. I'm just pointing out that your logic does not hold up.
> But at the same time, I get your point of view. I mean, what that means we can't punish anyone? Because we don't want to seem bad, by pushing back against the bad people? Are you saying we just turn the other cheek? That's crazy.
> Yeah, I get that...But I think it's important...You do some crime, and I say, "I have to get back at you". But no, I'm the one that has to be moral. Individuals have to be moral. The state doesn't have to be moral in the same way. But we can't let that spill over to individuals otherwise everything collapses.
I mean doesn't that look like I'm making an effort to understand your POV? That's exactly what I'm doing? What does that look like to you? How did you take that?
---
Second thing:
> My interpretation is not uncharitable, it's precisely the same argument you are making
Well I'm saying it is uncharitable. I think you think that it's the same, but maybe you don't see how you've misinterpreted.
In my first post (GP?) I don't mention the state. Now, it's understandable if maybe you thought I was talking about that (use of possibly ambiguous "you", or "their", or "yourselves" to refer to who I was saying claimed they could punish like this), but to me I was clearly replying to the ancestor phrase "The victim's family is saying:" Maybe that was not clear, but I thought it was. Sorry, maybe that was what confused you?
So, in that context where I am talking about it (what I said up there), the context is: when people say they want to respond in the same way. That is different to the point you're making, I think. I think you're saying, that I'm saying:
"We don't have a right to punish people, because if we do, we are not moral. And we shouldn't punish people in the same form as their transgression."
That is what I'm saying...but I'm also genuinely trying to explore it and being more modal than, "well it is 100% like this." I'm just saying what I said up there.
But I think your mischaracterization is that your meaning is maybe like this:
"You are referring to the state. You are saying the state cannot punish people because it would undermine its moral position somehow. This is obviously nonsense. You are wrong. Because then we do not punish anyone. Also, what's really wrong with punishing in the same form? It's not even a point. Also wrong."
Let's leave aside the "same form" thing because that's, probably, you know, something else. But I just think your mischaracterization is to mischaracterize or misinterpret, the who of what I'm talking about. And that part's understandable maybe--ok?--because I didn't make it explicitly clear. But what you're saying I'm saying, is not exactly the point I'm making, and it is uncharitable because it doesn't seem to try to see it from the point of view where it could be true...your mischaracterization throws out the stuff I'm saying about the seeming moral paradox, and reduces the modal exploratory aspect to an absolute one, ignores the part where I'm making an effort to consider your PoV, and seems to deny that considering this as a moral problem is a valid consideration. Also, saying "You have no problem with punishing" is a complete mischaracterization, stripping off the subtlety of what I'm trying to explore, which is that, to me, these things are moral issues like I said above.
I mean one basic point is, if what you're trying to do is prove me wrong, then having to misinterpret and reduce what I'm saying in order to prove it wrong, is invalid...it doesn't touch what I'm saying. So you've only proved wrong, if you have, your misinterpretation of what I'm saying. And sort of validated what I'm saying and the difficulty of proving it wrong, by avoiding dealing with it.
Now maybe you don't see it like that, and I get it. Maybe you just genuinely think your interpretation was totally valid, and I'm just shifting the goal posts to avoid being pinned down by the formidable pincers of your immaculate logic...or some stuff like that, whatever. Or maybe you are doing it deliberately...or maybe it's just a blindspot and you don't realize you're doing it? Maybe?
For me the far more important point tho, is about how people interact in discussions, not the proving wrong. And it just seems like you're saying, what I've said is all invalid and wrong. It kind of hurts. Because it does hurt. And also because I'm dealing with the topic genuinely, and curiously. And it just feels like you just want to prove a point, and you don't care who you misinterpret, like you don't care how you misinterpret what someone says into some form you can say "it's wrong" because it seems you only care about saying "it's wrong." rather than about hearing or dealing honestly and respectfully with what someone is saying.
I mean you could have just said, "Well maybe it's right, how could this guy be meaning in a way that's right? What could they be trying to say here that's not the obvious rebuttal I can make or what I might be misinterpreting? Maybe they're more subtle than that?" Because when you do that, you know, mischaracterization and say "you're wrong", I feel a bit sad, because it seems like you're saying, "This person is stupid." Because you're assuming the stupidest interpretation, the one that obviously doesn't make sense. Is that what you think I'm saying? Why do you need to look down on me?
And I just think that's a bit sad. I'm engaging genuinely, but it seems you just wanna prove someone wrong...and you don't care who you hurt? I was a little scared to reply you because I got the feeling you might do that...but, I gave you a chance.
I picked up the strong reaction in your first answer, and I felt scared you would try and just do that, and you did. It was a feeling, but some points in the text you could link it to are: "undermine what exactly? [[ your point about undermining is invalid, there's no complexity here ]] That makes no sense." It was my feeling about your intention but those words are even pretty strong to me. I get that maybe you don't see that...sad to say, but I think that not seeing it might be obvious. Maybe you can think about how that might come across...
---
Third thing: I mean if you want to take some overly literal editorialized misinterpretation of what someone said, and pretend it's their logic that doesn't make sense, rather than your interpretation (because I guess that helps you feel smart(er?) for seeing the flaws in their logic, but it's a little unfair and twisted to foist your perverted misinterpretation on what they say, just to get your rocks off by feeling they're wrong and you're smart, right?), I mean it's actually not that difficult to do that...so how does it feel,
"My interpretation is not uncharitable...so you agree with me...Thus the point you're making is wrong"
I mean I can do that, and be like, "Gotcha. If I'm wrong, but I agree with you, then you're wrong too?"
Clearly a more simplistic misinterpretation than your more subtle misinterpretation, but of the same kind, and seemingly the same intention. The thing is, that kind of stuff, doesn't lead to interesting or fun conversations, I think...because then we got to waste time maybe going back over like, "i didn't mean that," "you didn't mean this", it's a time saving effort if you just respond to the strongest position. And even if I didn't mean that strongest position, then maybe I can rise to it (I mean--you see me as capable of that, right?) then we could have had a more fun and interesting conversation, right? but to do that you have to surrender the temptation of seeing someone else as stupid, and what they're saying as wrong, so you can feel smart(er)? because if you don't surrender that temptation, it's just for you then, it's not a contribution to the community. maybe you feel as if your contributions will not be appreciated, so you fall back to this. getting your jollies in this "taking" way (and in this current context, kind of immoral, because nobody took anything from you at the first, at least not here~~not saying you had an easy time online tho...but does that mean you keep being unkind/uncharitable?). because when you do that, it hurts, because you're devaluing what other people are saying. I hope you see that, or reflect on it, and maybe try to be better to others...please.
And let me help you with another thing you are confused about [0]. So, in essence your argument is that I am wrong because I am answering to what you wrote rather than what you thought you wrote or wish you wrote, and that's what you call 'uncharitable'.
The main problem with your 'argument' is that you make absolute statements, but then are not able to back them up, getting upset when someone points that out. It's simple engineering practice to check how things hold up at the limits. Not 'punishing' someone with the same thing they did does not hold up in the limits of simple wrongdoings, e.g. taking away some property. What this should tell you is not that you require a more charitable interpretation and special rules for the fringes to rescue your argument, but maybe that the overall logic is flawed. And it is: as I wrote in the other comment, the simple truth is that the death penalty is a different beast altogether.
[0] What's with that condescending tone with all your replies? Can you not simply make a statement that stands on its own two feet?
In a consequentialist, utilitarian moral system, revenge cannot be a moral good on its own. If a universe where one person gets hurt is worse than a universe where no one gets hurt, a world where two people get hurt must be worse still.
So if you're utilitarian, you believe in justice as a means to prevent crime. Punishing people can act as a deterrent, imprisoning people can separate them from would-be victims, and rehabilitation can prevent future crimes.
Some people aren't consequentialists, but retributivists. They believe that deserved punishment is innately good. A universe that is fair is one in which those that cheat are issued handicaps to balance that out- think the reckless driver who gets pulled over frequently enough that it doesn't buy them any time in the long run. A fair universe is morally preferable to an unfair one. This also makes sense, though it's somewhat at odds with the utilitarian perspective.
That's interesting. And I don't know much about that, but your comment is going to help me look into that, when it's time for me to do so: consequentialists, retributivists, and utilitarianism. Thank you :)
It's an interesting, seemingly two valid perspectives that are in contradiction. Thank you! :)
They say that the specific argument that life-taking is bad is undermined by arguing for life-taking.
This does not preclude other arguments for why life-taking may be bad, nor other arguments for why it may be justified in specific circumstances.
Note that graderjs' very own comment gives examples of other possible arguments for "eye for an eye":
> It will teach people a lesson, let them know they can't mess with us, and let them know there are consequences if they try. Hopefully, my ape brain says, that will make us safer and rest easier, in future.
As such it's very clear that graderjs is not making any sort of claim to absolute morality, but addressing the weakness of a specific line of argumentation.
What they were saying is specifically that arguing that someone who takes a life should be punished in a life ending way because of the severity of taking a life is undermining that argument's own central claim of the severity of taking a life by at the same time arguing for ending a life.
Your analogies are flawed for two reasons:
1. there are other justifications for punishments that may (or may not) be valid. One argument may be that it is preventative, for example.
2. in neither example would most people argue that we're imposing a particularly extreme sentence because the action was particularly extreme, and this is central to the argument made by graderjs.
In the case of the theft example, if anything we'd tend to argue a fine is not a very serious punishment. In the case of kidnap, we argue for serious sentences because of the seriousness of the crime, but a prison sentence would not be seen by most people as equally cruel as the uncertainty and fear and trauma imposed on both the victim and their loved ones, and most people would argue that the prison sentence is not just a response to the seriousness of the crime committed.
Some people might nevertheless find it hypocritical to argue for prison sentence on the basis of the seriousness of kidnapping, and its their right. But that in itself does not make a prison sentence unjustifiable even if you agree with them, because you may have many other arguments, such as e.g. risk of reoffending, or signal effect to others.
The point is in other words not that a given punishment can't be justified, but that if you choose to argue that something is particularly severe and then in the same breath argues for inflicting that same thing on someone because of that perceived severity, you're undermining that argument.
Graderjs also makes no argument about other justifications of 'punishment', and, again, I'm with you. Note that I often write 'punishment' in quotation marks. I don't believe (and the numbers between countries support that) that revenge is a productive reaction from a society.
From there I comfort myself with two thousand years it took a truly global institution to fully completely and no more strings attached reject capital punishment, the CCC, Catholic church law, closed the last loopholes allowing capital punishment only very recently.
We need to be patient with some nations to get there... Patient and persistent. As you were with your comment. Thanks again!
It's nice to get that here after slugging it out with someone who's seemingly misinterpreting what you're saying, so thank you for that support :) xx
r/im14andthisisdeep
I like to point to this page from Franquin's Idées Noires (finally in English as "Die Laughing", only a few decades late) [1], which makes much the same point as you. (The whole book is very much worth it if you like dark humour - it's a crime it took so long for it to get translated to English given how many other languages it's been translated to decades ago)
Translated the speech bubbles are roughly:
"The law is clear: Every person who voluntarily kills another will have their head cut off. Let the executioner do their job."
"Over here, my friend."
"And so a good deed done..."
"Sorry, but the law is clear: Everyone who voluntarily kills another..."
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/474x/c5/3c/45/c53c451e1fea4fd04ea6cf674...
Can you offer a valid argument for the truth of your own principle, that it is impossible to offer a valid argument for the truth of any normative principle? I think your own position is a normative principle, and hence your position is self-refuting.
To call an argument "valid" is to make a normative claim; it is to claim that a rational agent ought to accept it. To call an argument invalid is to claim that a rational agent ought not accept it. Rationality has as much oughtness as morality does, and hence is a normative discipline just as morality is.
Initially I claimed, “There are no valid arguments for normative claims.”, I would like to amend my claim.
Def: An inferential system is a tuple of axioms and inferential rules.
Def: An argument is a non-empty ordered sequence of statements. The last statement is called its conclusion.
Claim: If an inferential system produces an argument for a normative claim, the system is either inconsistent or permits inference from positive statements to normative statements or the argument proceeds from normative axioms.
Proof. Suppose S is a consistent inferential system and that A is an argument in S from S’s axioms to a normative conclusion. If S has only positive axioms then A makes inference from positive to normative statements. QED
Corollary: There are no arguments for normative claims that don’t proceed from normative axioms in consistent systems that don’t permit inference from normative to positive statements.
I agree with you there. But you haven't explained how this (obviously true) statement is relevant to the original discussion, about the morality of providing life-saving medical treatment to perpetrators of serious crimes.
My original point was in response to the claim that “the key principle in medicine is to treat anyone who is sick, regardless of who they are”. I took this to be an ought and wanted to point out that its truth isn’t established anymore than the ought indicated by Ed’s family, and that in fact there would be serious difficulties with establishing either one for the reason given by your last post:
> a valid deductive argument with a normative conclusion must either have a normative premise, or else rely on a logic whose inference rules permit normative statements to be inferred from non-normative ones.
But also I think that this poster makes a good point that the doctors are actually making a positive claim.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30081152
> To call an argument "valid" is to make a normative claim; it is to claim that a rational agent ought to accept it.
I think I had in mind a textbook definition I had read.
An argument is called valid if it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. And then we say that an argument is sound if it is both valid and has true premises.
Which seems like a useful pair of definitions, and in that context I was confused about the terms.
I actually haven’t ever thought about or heard of this idea of ‘when is a rational actor committed to accepting claims’. But yeah, seems interesting to me.
I think your overall point is, you are expressing scepticism about claims to know the truth of some particular moral proposition, grounded in a more general scepticism of the possibility of any moral knowledge at all.
I think that kind of general moral scepticism is (usually) a form of normative scepticism. The big problem I see with normative scepticism, is that attempts to argue for it logically and rationally turn out to be self-refuting, because logic and rationality are themselves normative concepts. Furthermore, if one understands knowledge as having a normative component, normative scepticism collapses into radical scepticism (there is no such thing as knowledge), which obviously ought to be rejected.
I don’t have any sense for the various properties of inductive arguments. So to the extent that moral arguments are inductive, I have nothing to say. Thanks for pointing out that I’m assuming moral arguments must be deductive. Any recommendations for an introductory text on inductive arguments?
> That’s why I read your statement as intending “valid” informally rather than formally, since in its informal sense the term is not restricted to purely deductive arguments; and informally it is very much a normative concept (formally, I think it has multiple formal senses, some of which contain more normativity than others)
Understood.
> I think your overall point is, you are expressing scepticism about claims to know the truth of some particular moral proposition, grounded in a more general scepticism of the possibility of any moral knowledge at all.
Yes, that is my point.
> I think that kind of general moral scepticism is (usually) a form of normative scepticism. The big problem I see with normative scepticism, is that attempts to argue for it logically and rationally turn out to be self-refuting, because logic and rationality are themselves normative concepts.
This is the first time that I’ve heard of normative epistemology, which I gather is what you are talking about. One thing I will say though, thinking about this seems smoother than thinking about normative morality because (I think) I don’t have as many childhood memories of people telling me what I ought to think compared to those of people telling me what I ought to do.
You can easily find a lot of resources on this topic, but I can't think of any to particularly recommend. To give my own high-level summary, there are three main types of logical arguments:
- Deductive arguments: from the premises, the conclusion necessarily follows. If the premises are true, and the argument is valid, the conclusion must be true. These are the kinds of arguments found in mathematical proofs, and classical syllogisms such as "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal"
- Inductive arguments: from many particulars, infer a generalisation. If all swans so far have been observed to be white, it is reasonable to conclude that "All swans are white" – and the more observations you make, the stronger the conclusion becomes – but that conclusion can never be certain, only probable, because maybe tomorrow someone will discover a black swan, proving the conclusion to be false after all–which is of course what actually happened, when Europeans came to Australia and found swans which were black. (Also, confusingly, "mathematical induction" is a type of deductive argument, not induction in the logical sense.)
- Abductive arguments: from a situation, infer the truth of its most plausible explanation: If I walk into a room and find toys spread all over the floor, I am going to conclude that our four year old did it. Now, maybe some crazy stranger broke into our house, threw toys everywhere, then left – not absolutely impossible, but far less likely than it being our four year old.
The big difference: in deductive arguments, if the argument is good, and the premises are true, the conclusion must be true; in non-deductive arguments, the argument can be good, and the premises can be completely true, and yet the conclusion can still be false. A deductive argument which produces a false conclusion from true premises is by definition a bad one; a non-deductive argument which produces a false conclusion from true premises can still be a perfectly good one, provided that unfortunate outcome is improbable.
The natural sciences use all three, but rely heavily on induction and abduction. Historians primarily use abduction – induction works best for repeatable events, whereas many of the events historians study are essentially unique and unrepeatable (World War II was in many ways a unique event in human history, nothing quite like it had ever happened before, even World War I was different in many ways, and if World War III ever happens it is going to be very different again).
I think a lot of moral reasoning must be non-deductive, because deductive arguments generally deal with certainties, whereas it is quite natural for people to say about moral issues "I think it is probably wrong but I'm not 100% sure". I think moral reasoning often involves some degree of induction – if you repeatedly encounter particular situations which offend your conscience, you are likely to adopt a moral principle which condemns whatever those particular situations have in common – generalising a principle out of particular cases, which is essentially what inductive reasoning is. But, as in all inductive reasoning, you can never be sure that there will not be some case which might convince you that your generalisation needs an exception – a moral black swan.
> This is the first time that I’ve heard of normative epistemology, which I gather is what you are talking about.
Yes, exactly. A lot of the concepts traditionally used in epistemology appear to be normative. For example, in the classical definition of knowledge as "justified true belief", justification appears to be a normative concept – a belief which is justified given some evidence is a belief which one ought to hold (or, at least, one is permitted to hold) given that evidence, a belief which is unjustified given some evidence is a belief which one ought not to hold given that evidence.
> One thing I will say though, thinking about this seems smoother than thinking about normative morality because (I think) I don’t have as many childhood memories of people telling me what I ought to think compared to those of people telling me what I ought to do.
I think a lot of people grow up exposed to conservative religious approaches to morality, which they often experienced as being pushed on them inflexibly and never with any convincing justification–and it is unsurprising many such people become attracted to the idea that "morality is subjective". However, I wonder, is that "throwing the baby out with the bathwater"? Most of these people would feel strongly that genocide, slavery, apartheid, torture, child abuse, theocratic totalitarianism, etc, are immoral – yet, having accepted "morality is subjective", those moral positions they endorse must be just as subjective as those which they've rejected. Subjective morality weakens their own moral positions. Indeed, once you believe that morality is subjective, you can no longer claim (in any objective sense) that anyone else's morality is wrong, including that of various religious conservatives – the most you can consistently say about their morality is that you don't like it – but why should they (or anyone else) care about what you like?
> To call an argument "valid" is to make a normative claim; it is to claim that a rational agent ought to accept it.
Idk, it could just be a claim that the argument can be expressed in a logical system, combined with the normative axiom that rational agents should only trust arguments that can be validly expressed in such a formal system.
Regardless this seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Nobody has put forth any arguments for either position that are emperical in nature. Is there really a practical difference between impossible and possible but nobody knows how?
You can argue that one will lead to a preferable world than the other.
Of course, we may have different preferences, so we may not agree even if we agree on that extrapolation. But often basic human preferences like not wanting to be the victim of unprovoked public violence do align.
Example of application: Consider "It is always immoral to have children". Obviously, if humanity universally obeyed that principle, human extinction would inevitably and quickly follow. Therefore, that principle is false. From which obviously follows: "It is moral to have children (at least sometimes)".
Now, I would propose we accept that meta-moral principle as an axiom. To me, and to many others, it seems self-evidently and intuitively true. Who seriously doubts or denies this axiom? Well, most of the people who doubt or deny it, do so not due to its specific content, but due to a philosophical objection to accepting any moral axioms at all. The number of people who are happy to accept moral axioms but would refuse to accept this particular one appears to be rather small. It seems as good a candidate to be an axiom as any other. So why not accept it as an axiom?
The term "valid" has both formal and informal senses. I agree some of its formal senses are non-normative, but I think its informal uses have a strong normative element. The original comment to which I was responding wasn't very clear about in what sense it was intending the term, but when people aren't clear, it is not unfair to assume they mean a term informally rather than in some specific formal sense.
> Regardless this seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Nobody has put forth any arguments for either position that are emperical in nature. Is there really a practical difference between impossible and possible but nobody knows how?
What is the proper role of empiricism in human knowledge, including moral knowledge? You seem to be making some assumptions here which you are not making explicit.
If one accepts moral sense theory – that moral intuitions are a form of empirical knowledge – then we can have direct empirical knowledge of the truth or falsehood of moral propositions.
If one accepts pragmatism – that beliefs can be justified by the pragmatic benefits of believing them, and that pragmatically justified beliefs can constitute genuine cases of knowledge – then empirical evidence can be used to establish the pragmatic benefits of a moral belief, and hence (indirectly) to establish its truth.
One may believe that some axioms are self-evidently true, and that one's knowledge of the truth of those axioms is innate rather than empirical – in which case, if one accepts that for non-moral axioms, how about accepting it for moral axioms as well?
>Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative.
I'm pretty sure someone mentioned that the Dr's pov is that the doctors don't punish crime. Someone else does that. If they have a crime worthy of death, someone else determines that and administers that punishment. The Dr's stay out of that conversation.
As long as there is no such law, it's not for doctors to impose such restrictions.
The first one “Our principle is that people who stab Ed should not get a heart, therefore David should not get a heart.” means that there is no rehabilitation for ex-cons, that doctors have the power to condemn people to death based on their past by refusing a life saving procedure and that in the case of new research like this one, doctors cannot have access to the best candidate.
Extrapolating the second principle means living in a society where the judicial system decides the punishment and people pay their due afterward, potentially reducing recividism. It means that when doing an experimental procedure that requires very specific candidates, the doctors have to pass on an ideal candidate delaying discovery.
No.
> Should we have saved Hitlers life with a breakthrough transplant?
Yes.
It really is not complicated: Doctors are not in the business of judging their patients.
That isn't intentional or desirable though. It's a flaw. Doctors are people and people are imperfect.
To the top of the transplant list immediately pushing others down or “ohh.. awkward. we’ll treat you fairly from now on”?
Doctors making moral judgements and withholding treatments based on their patients lifestyle has a pretty ugly history.
We have a justice system to make these calls. Let the doctors treat everyone and the justice system decide who lives and dies.
Let the legal profession handle how to deal with criminals. Punishment and medical care have no place existing together.
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/health-care-pri...
And where do you draw the line for who gets help for stuff unrelated to covid? Having a do no harm type moral code seems like the best way to navigate and avoid the minefield of deciding who deserves care in what circumstances.
It may be the case that implementing a policy of vacating beds of burn victims is too challenging, but that doesn't undermine the "should" in the "we should vacate beds of voluntarily hurt when accidentally hurt need the beds".
At the end of the day, understanding the benefit of a vaccine requires trusting information, and I think that information, and trust, has been compromised. You could equally hate on anyone deciding that smoking was bad for you, not long ago, because of how thoroughly compromised the "science" around it was.
But, and this is a really important but, the way to punish that behavior isn't to deny them care in the hospital. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that not every unvaccinated person is unvaccinated by choice. But more generally because applying any sort of moral standard to who lives and who dies in an emergency gets incredibly murky incredibly quickly.
If you want to punish people for failing to get vaccinated, I'm all for it. But do so outside of a hospital.
at best, the vaccines reduce your personal chance of hospitalization and death.
for those at risk from COVID, take the vaccine. But pretending you're assisting your community by doing so is ridiculous and unfounded in data. "Fully vaccinated" people appear MORE likely to catch and spread Omicron 90 days post-vaccination.
Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...
As a soon to be triple vaccinated healthy adult I wish we could soon admit that we do this for our own good and to not be away from work.
By now it is very clear that about the only thing the current vaccine does against Omicron is lessen the consequences for the individuals who take the vaccine.
I still recommend it but it won't save anyones life except those who take the vaccine.
as a result of what? Failure to isolate COVID patients?
Someone who has served their time in prison and is now released is considered to have paid their debt to society.
You may think, as I do, that this man served nowhere near what he should have for the crime he committed. However, the law has been followed and he is no longer in prison.
If the people the New York Post is targeting think that he should still be punished, then he should still be in prison. The problem is that the type of people clamor for these people to stay in prison also are at the forefront of refusing to pony up the money to pay for that prison.
The bigger issue IMO is that the killer never paid any of the monetary judgement against him to the victims family.
For example, felons in the US are banned from owning guns even after they served their time.
Do you consider that good or bad?
I'm not a big fan of that, but I would prefer that it reflect the harm done from the crime and the statistics surrounding recidivism.
A simple drug possession offense should not warrant banning you from voting or guns when you are done. If you were convicted of an armed robbery, maybe the guns should be banned.
I really don't like the idea that once you're done with the justice system it continues to punish you. Once you are done with it, you should be done--especially if the crime was "victimless" (ie. something like drug possession where the only harm would be to yourself).
This becomes a significant issue in, for example, sex offenders. Some places have so many restrictions on sex offenders that, for all intents and purposes, they cannot comply with probation and cannot function in society. Well, if you're going to do that, at least be honest that you are simply "executing them on the cheap and out of sight" and either keep them in prison or execute them explicitly.
This is one of the problems with low-level drug convictions--the "felony" conviction becomes a poor man's "social discredit" system. And most of us from Western democracies understand pretty solidly why "social credit" systems are pernicious.
I suspect that quite a lot of people would support denial of medical care to sinners. For example, the sentiment of "triage against the unvaxxed" seems to be pretty strong.
(For the record, I am fully vaxed but do not support mistreatment of people who believe in conspiracy theories.)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/twitt...
Glad Doctors don’t discriminate based on past actions of an individual. Would be a very dystopian society if we did.
It probably depends on what you mean by 'accurate'. They almost certainly do not believe this person has repayed a debt to the victim, the victim's family or society in general. Phrasing the issue as one of repaying a debt is problematical when it is beyond the means of the perpetrator to make amends.
Note that this is not an argument for the doctors doing anything different. All else aside, it is in the best interests of society as a whole that they should select the most medically-suitable candidate available for this research.
I could see him being all over the press being annoying for the victim's family, but I don't see this as him being rewarded with anything. What he got is one of the worst option, though the fact that he's survived this far makes it better in hindsight. Then again 2 weeks means nothing, let's see if it actually lasts.
I know what a concealed weapon is, but what is 'openly carrying a concealed weapon'?
A gun is just a tool. It can be used for both good and bad purposes.
Also, the NY Post article says; "To some families, it’s an outrage that a person convicted of a violent crime would be awarded an organ others so desperately need. But doctors often disagree and there are no laws prohibiting someone with a criminal history from receiving a transplant."
Elsewhere in the same article, it says; "A jury found him guilty of battery and carrying a concealed weapon but acquitted him of of intent to murder. Washington County Circuit Judge Daniel Moylan called the stabbing a case of “extreme violence” and sentenced him to 10 years behind bars."
The facts of the crime are not given, but apparently a jury did not believe he intended to kill, and since the victim did not die right away, there was no killing to prosecute.
In particular, ‘openly’
I know of people who were legally openly carrying a firearm and got convicted of carrying a concealed weapon because of a jacket. The laws vary by state, so such a thing is possible in some states.
I don't like the wording of that charge(if it even really exists), but that's all I can come up with.
I'm glad that he wasn't refused the kidney transplant simply because he was incarcerated, although I'm sure it happens.
He was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 10 years behind bars, probably served less so it’s likely that he’s been a free man for 25+ years.
It’s been over 30 years since the incident. Give the man a break.
Lets say a man goes to prison for 25 years for murder, and upon release the victim's husband kills him. The victim's husband gets revenge, but is it just?
Justice shouldn't be subjective, imo.
Also justice can't be objective. Put n people in a room and ask them what is just and you'll get n different answers.
When push comes to shove, how many of them even expect to get out alive? Is death penalty really just in such a situation?
The US just puts them in ADX Florence where they are tortured mentally (complete isolation, no end in sight, basically no human interaction at all). Which is probably what they deserve, but it’s still torture.
> how many of them even expect to get out alive?
What I would want is suffering for a long time. Now is that justice or vengance? I say it's both.
> Which is probably what they deserve
Is that not what you would describe as just?
Just kidding, I think I know what you mean.
I think the main problem is not the life saving but the good publicity the guy gets. I'm not going to publicly agree or disagree with either article right now, though - I'm conflicted about each of them.
I'm not either, but at least this was a case where the personally arguably "needed" it. Usually we treat animals like garbage just for fun.
Look. I am a Muslim. That means, by religious scriptures, we are programmed to avoid pork. why? Simply because "god told us to avoid pork". No other thing. Abstain from eating pork and people follow that.
Now, when it comes to saving a life, those religious considerations do not stand because a life is at stake. Same for " consuming wine is prohibited" but if alcohol is necessary as a medicine, its allowed because the intention is not to get drunk but to get treated. That is important.
Now, when it comes to using a pig heart as a replacement, I am pretty sure no resonable person, from any religion would have problems with because the end goal is to save a human life.
These PETA people are keeping themselves relevant by being the dissenting voice that nobody has to listen. Yeah, if PETA or their supporters are reading this, again, fuck you. Let us save lives and your organization can watch us do it.
Given that their chance of survival is so slim, choosing to use a person for whom such small odds give more information to science, rather than do moral good by helping this person survive, seemed a reasonable tradeoff.
Is this too cynical a read on the choice they made?
FTFY. PETA is a shit organization.
pass me the steak.
Using complex routes to secure organ donations isn't a great option, because the viability of organs decrease as time goes on, so there is an effective limit on how far they can travel. It also doesn't help people who are currently ineligible for organ transplants, because their current scarcity means that only prime candidates can get them (otherwise it would be wasteful).
We could change the organ donation system from opt-in to opt-out, but I get the impression that wouldn't be as ethical from a vegan point of view. That also doesn't help the afformentioned distance problems.
Lab grown organs could be a great solution that would actually be better than animal organs, but they're not a viable option yet.
Basically, if we had good options other than xenotransplantation, I would probably agree that it's unethical to use their organs. However, we don't have better options right now (especially ones that can scale to treat everyone that needs an organ), so in my opinion, xenotransplants are better than nothing.
(Also as a side note, a pig that died from natural causes wouldn't be viable for organ transplantation. The pig needs to be physiologically alive for the organs to be viable, and it needs to be genetically modified to not have animal proteins that the immune system can detect).
So I was grateful for the medicines I received then that may have been tested on animals or may have had animal ingredients. But I still advocate and prefer medicines to not be tested on animals and to not contain animal ingredients. I think we have a vast amount of untapped technology that could avoid that.
Maybe because the vegans people have met, are the obnoxious ones that want to push their eating disorder on everyone else, so they just point out the hypocrisy when appropriate.
When I've engaged with discussion about this with them (usually because I asked), I've found their arguments personal and convincing.
> As of 2018, the most common procedure is to take a functioning heart, with or without both lungs, from a recently deceased organ donor (brain death is the standard) and implant it into the patient. [1]
> There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant, driving scientists to try to figure out how to use animal organs instead.
> Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the surgery, said the patient’s condition — heart failure and an irregular heartbeat — made him ineligible for a human heart transplant or a heart pump.
- https://apnews.com/article/pig-heart-transplant-6651614cb9d7...
Dying at the hands of another animal is as natural a cause as you can get. Because we're human we don't treat animals badly while alive, that where our ethics come in.
Obviously if there enough hearts to go around no one would be looking at pigs.
It's ok to now breed animals for parts; However if someone questions the ethics of that, it's bad? Ridiculous...
Because they don’t say anything. They announced their belief and wandered off. Post could do with a “because” and another sentence or two
Can’t speak for everyone ofc but that was my reasoning. Nothing to do with the opinion my side, standard downvote behaviour for contentless comments
If a single downvote matters, it doesn't matter
Your objection sounds like squeamishness, and in that case I'd avoid looking at medical procedures in general.