[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6vQTuJ6SA0[/youtube]
that is how eugenics started, people who regarded themselves as “better” than others and decided to dumb down the education. what is the definition of valuable?
Such a thought surely justifies the robot takeover and the ensuing die-offs
I agree with this. Money is often used as a proxy for value, and for many types of goods and services it works OK. But in the case of healthcare, it hardly works at all. There is theoretically a way to make a better proxy, e.g. by making derivatives on people’s health outcomes, but this introduces perverse incentives and unseemly life-value speculating. It seems as though, as a society, we’ve decided that we don’t really want to know how to value people. Maybe in a long-term triage situation, we would want to allow such speculation, since approximating value would be much more important.
This is another part of the problem I described above. People aren’t interested in reasoning about the actual value of their health. Health crises erode the sort of rational decision making that value approximation depends on, so people will appear to vastly over-value their lives, while at the same time undervaluing slow-building ailments like cancer and likely future health expenses. Add to that that they probably don’t know what they should be reporting to their GP, and you have a perfect storm of noise added to any attempt to objectively measure value.
And yet, what if you have to? Because it’s noisy, do we throw it all out? I think we can probably account pretty accurately for a lot the input values. For example, if someone has a job where they need to be on their feet all day, getting them back on their feet has roughly quantifiable objective value, ignoring the value that comes from their happiness and freedom from pain. Perhaps a workable approach would be to ignore their subjective needs, and focus on what work they can do and how much it’s worth.
(I should say also that your comments about your wife’s work made me realize that I’m assuming a sort of omniscient medicine, like a Star Trek tricorder. Adding the uncertainty, so that a given patient’s health can at best be estimated to be 40%+/-20%, makes the situation much more complicated. Likely some patient’s would have lower uncertainty, so that too could be factored in. Reality, ever getting in the way of the best of philosophical thought experiments.)
HaHaHa, are you suggesting that, given that someone is objectively more valuable to society, that person shouldn’t be prioritized when doling out scarce medical care? This seems like a version of the trolley problem. Suppose you have two people, each on a different section of track, and a train barreling toward them. You have to pick who gets hit. But, one person has one vial of precious antidote to a horrible disease, and the other has five vials of that antidote. Who should you send the train towards? I would think any reasonable moral system would compel saving the one with more vials, i.e. more social worth. What’s the alternative?
the entire planet is in a state of GREAT pain (even earth herself from all the ecological destruction), not just the worker who stays on his tow feet hours in a row. Students who finish college with 100-150K debts are too in a GREAT emotional pain.
this selective pain criteria is irrational. Man will never be a commodity. No life (animal nor plant), nor Earth herself can be treated as a commodity. That is the root cause of ALL our ills.
Man’s mind has been fragmented by materialism for 5000 years already and this is why things just go from bad to worse. This idea that money can and will fix anything, including war, springs from this very fragmentation. No leader will ever tell us any of that, although at the very top “they” DO know, because if they ever did, leadership would no longer be necessary. The shabby secret of power!!!
No, I don’t think anybody’s life is worth more than another’s where I don’t entertain notions like prioritization.
Except that quite often, they must be treated as a commodity, in order to efficiently allocate scarce resources. The introduction of markets generally improves conditions for most of society. Trade decreases violence, it tends to discourage war, it creates grass roots support for peace and the rule of law because it makes violence and lawlessness a mutually losing proposition.
In a post-scarcity context, which I think we are rapidly approaching, much of that may go away, and perhaps money will do more harm than good. However, I still think the information spreading function of money would remain, so long as there is any limit on the resources that a single individual can consume.
And while I basically agree with your earlier comment that money corrupts healthcare, I think there are ways it could be useful, and in any case modelling what an efficient market for healthcare might look like helps us to weigh options for allocating scarce health resource, as well as weighing between health and non-health options.
But a person with five vials of antidote can save five peoples lives, while the person with only one can only save one.
We can get there another way: suppose a train is barreling down the track, and on one side of a fork sits a single vial of precious antidote (not held by a person), while on the other sit five vials of the antidote. No people will be killed by the train, but if the train hit’s the five vials, it will be five times more destructive. Again, it seems like any reasonable moral system should favor sending the train towards the single vial, right?
And if so, then putting two equally valuable human lives beside the vials shouldn’t change calculus: we should send the train to the person next to the one vial.
Next, replace the “vials of precious antidote” with “socially beneficial habits and skills” and you get the same question, and the same compelled answer: save the person with “five vials” of socially beneficial habits and skills.
Where do you see this line of argument breaking down?
did you know that debt causes scarcity, first by inflation and then deflation?
sorry, I go along with the zero sum game of Nature, man has a mind to understand Her/this. Speculating on Knowledge is at the core of “selective education and stratification of society”. Until this is not resolved, I assert that all predictions will be proven vain and futile. Man is just not an animal because he has the dominion over Nature. When he thinks he is, that’s when he starts destroying his environment, this knowledge will either cause mass enlightenment or the end of the species. How can we accept that knowledge is only accessible to those who can pay for it? But then having social programs to help out the less knowledgeable… this is absurd. This debunks the Left and the Right all together.
Man as earth custodian… or go extinct.
Death is inevitable to us all where it doesn’t matter in the short term how many lives can be saved or not.
As for your moral system as a nihilist I think you’re already familiar with my perceptions towards it and moreover since you favor some people’s lives over others I would really have to question your moral understanding on things altogether.
Set this aside for a minute though. Wherever it is that you place value, if you have to choose between the destruction of more value and the destruction of less value, it must be better to destroy less value, right?
I have problems with majority centric accepted evaluations in general. Again, I don’t look at people as having more or less value. In fact, I have qualms with utilitarianism in general from where all your arguments seem to be springing from.
I hope this reply make sense where if it doesn’t perhaps you can pose your question differently where I’ll try my best to answer it.