Harland Harrison wrote BH> If taking them from that particular patient is literally the only way to save multiple innocent lives, then I suspect that a majority of people would, like me, reluctantly approve. <BH
HH> No, Brian Holtz, the majority of people will not approve of a doctor killing a patient to steal her organs! <HH Argument by exclamation. You've offered no evidence against my statement above. I stand by it. HH> You are advocating murder. <HH No, I'm advocating homicide. Murder is unlawfully killing someone with malice aforethought. I have no malice toward the innocent fat man. HH> Thomson's Transplant Problem talks of an organ donor with "the same, relatively rare, blood type". By contrast, in the TP there is only one innocent on the planet whose death can save the others, and you have zero role in picking out that innocent. <HH HH> Thomson could not find anybody at all who would approve of the doctor killing one patient to harvest her organs for others. Nobody. Did you see the link? Do you still dispute this? <HH I quoted from Thomson's paper, so it's inane for you to ask whether I "see the link". I stand by my observation that Thomson's Transplant Problem is not equivalent to the Trolley Problem. HH> Most people do live by a zero aggression principle. Worldwide rejection of forced organ donations proves it. <HH No, that only proves that most people oppose most aggression. Worldwide acceptance of the necessity of coercive taxation proves that most people reject the zero aggression principle. Again, your use of the indefinite article in "a zero aggression principle" is addled. If you think that there are significantly different kinds of zero aggression principles, can you explain the difference between some pair of them? HH> People react in horror at a doctor killing somebody, even if he does save others, because people value non-aggression. <HH You have zero examples of people "reacting in horror" at a doctor making a forced choice as in the Trolley Problem, because no doctor has faced that choice in human history. If one had, then there would be no TP literature, but rather a literature about that real-world example. HH> You do not own her life. The doctor does not own her life. <HH I didn't say otherwise. Did you hear me say that I or the doctor could make a chattel slave of the patient? HH> If you think that the government owns the lives of everybody <HH I don't. Got any other pathetic strawmen for me to diagnose? HH> then you are extremely Statist. A fascist government will kill people for its own convenience. Taking organs from one of your slaves to heal some other slaves only makes sense in that context. <HH Here we go again. If you think that my position on the TP is fascist, then have the moral courage to say so directly, and spare us the innuendo about slaves and fascism. HH> She may want to live for the sake of her children, for her clients and employees, or even for her service to her faith or her country. <HH In all these cases, she wants to sacrifice a net total of four innocent lives in order to maximize her personal utility. The only way she's not acting self-interested here is if she has justifiable true belief that her living and the five innocents dying would eventually result in a better world than otherwise, e.g. by her later saving ten more innocent lives than the five would go on to save. HH> I do not promise to kill anybody under any circumstances. Some people would, but many would not. However, this is a religious kind of value. It is completely wrong for politicians to criticize anybody for believing differently. <HH BH> Like when you criticize Tom Lantos for believing that attacking the leadership of Hamas will save innocent lives? <BH HH> As for Tom Lantos, he may think that killing an old man in a wheel chair is an acceptable act of war. He might think of it as a summary punishment. But it certainly is not a religious belief. I do not criticize people for their religion. <HH Make up your mind. First you said that decisions about killing the few to save the many are about a "religious kind of value". Then when I mention the name Tom Lantos, you change your mind, and now you merely decline to "criticize people for their religion". It's so bizarre to claim that religious belief should be immune from moral criticism that I won't even bother to explain why. HH> But shooting a paraplegic from a US-made helicopter is not a religious issue, and he did not say it was. You distorted both his words and mine. <HH I never claimed that Lantos called it a "religious issue". I merely quoted you saying that such decisions involve "a religious kind of value". Don't try to obscure your backpedaling by laughably claiming that my quotes constitute multiple "distortions". HH> The US government and its allies really do commit murder and torture. They can kill Moslems with impunity now. Will atheists come next? Will Libertarians follow? <HH BH> This is silly. Who has the US government ever tortured or killed solely because the person was Muslim? <BH HH> I accuse the US government of torturing people who happen to be Muslim, not of torturing people "solely because" they are Muslim. You distorted my words. <HH The clear implication of your statement above is that Muslims can be "killed with impunity" because they are Muslims, and that next it might be the case that atheists could be killed with impunity because they are atheists. I defy you to find anybody who wouldn't read it this way. HH> After 9-11 the US government rounded up 2300 men on visas from certain Middle East countries, Muslims, not Jews. They threw some against walls, kicked them, abused and humiliated them. <HH Unless some of them were kicked to death or humiliated to death, this allegation does not rescue your silly statement that the U.S. government "can kill Moslems with impunity now". HH> The Transplant case and the Fat Man on the Bridge pose exactly the same dilemma, despite your claim about picking the victim. Many fat men walk the Earth, but only one sits on the bridge where you can push him. Many people have the same rare tissue type, but the surgeon can only get one of them under his knife. <HH The Thomson paper does not actually say that. It says: "David is a great transplant surgeon. Five of his patients need new parts-- one needs a new heart, the others need, respectively, liver, stomach, spleen, and spinal cord but all are of the same, relatively rare, blood-type. By chance, David learns of a healthy specimen with that very blood-type. David can take the healthy specimens parts, killing him, and install them in his patients, saving them. Or he can refrain from taking the healthy specimen's parts, letting his patients die." It does not say that David has no hope and no time to find another donor who might be willing to volunteer. HH> Your "zero choice rule" is creative but has no justification. Not personally choosing the victim is no excuse for killing him. <HH I never said that it is permissible to kill a person merely because circumstances have arranged that she is the only person available to be killed. Instead, I suggested that when one must choose which innocent must die in order to save five others, that is a significantly harder choice than the classic TP with its pre-determined victims. HH> It sounds like the "clean hands" motivation you view with such scorn. <HH What I scorn is anyone who would consider having clean hands to be more important than saving 298M innocent lives. When one has to choose a single victim from among a set of innocents, there is no net savings of innocent lives available. HH> But let's consider your strange ethics in detail. <HH You'd let 298M innocents die to keep the blood of one innocent off your hands, but it's MY ethics that are "strange"? LOL. HH> if two fat men sat side by side, you would have to make a choice, and so could not push either one. <HH I never said I couldn't push either one. If I had no time, I'd choose randomly. If I had time and it didn't endanger the extra innocents, I'd talk it over with the two and give each a chance to volunteer or explain why he shouldn't be the one sacrificed. HH> You keep referring to "minimizing aggression" at the same time you advocate throwing a man off a bridge in front of a trolley. You do not understand the word. The word "aggression" refers to the behavior, not the resulting injury. <HH I once asked you: "Do you claim that pushing a button that nukes a city is no more aggression than pushing a button that kills a single innocent?" You answered "yes", and I replied that "the sheer silliness of that response merits no follow-up by me". I stand by that statement. HH> When you say a doctor should kill a patient and take her organs, that is aggression. If somebody ties people to a trolley track, that is aggression. <HH These statements are true. They do not imply that no act of aggression is ever of larger magnitude than any other. HH> Do not claim to minimize aggression by pushing an innocent man to his death. <HH Under your absurd ethics, more aggression has occurred in the case where only one innocent ends up murdered instead of five. To describe your position is to refute it. HH> We may not have a libertarian government yet. However, we do have a Bill of Rights. <HH Yes, and it says that innocents may be coerced into attending trial as witnesses for the accused. That's aggression, as I explained to you here <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/966> . You never replied. HH> It says the government cannot kill anybody without due process of law. I expect a Federal official, who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, to honor the Bill of Rights. <HH I'm glad that you're willing to violate the Zero-Aggression Principle so that the accused may "have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor". HH> The Constitution makes no exception for killing a person for much needed organs, nor for killing one person to save the lives of others. If you cannot put aside the conflict with your unique personal morality by taking the oath of office, then you should not be a Federal official. <HH I still don't agree that one's personal sense of principle and morality should never trump one's belief in the rule of law. Regardless of whether I were a federal official, if I had to commit a TP homicide, I would then turn myself in and gladly face the verdict of a jury of my peers. You can fantasize that my morality is "unique", but I'm utterly confident that a jury would look more kindly on my saving of four innocent lives than on your negligent sacrifice of 298M innocent lives. I close with a sampling from my last post of questions you didn't answer and comments you didn't dispute: _____ In the TP I always choose to save the maximum number of lives. You don't. If I thought the TP was not possible in our universe, why would I use the word "currently" above? HH> You can never accept killing as an end in itself. How barbaric. <HH How obtuse. I have never said that killing is an end in itself. I have always said that the end in the TP is to minimize the loss of innocent life. HH> You should not get these temptations to commit war crimes, or condone transplant murders. <HH You should not get these temptations to torture bunnies or misrepresent my positions with misleading disjunctions and deceptive over-generalizations. HH> I already answered your trolley questions in previous messages, but I will do it again, here. <HH False. I ask you for the sixth time: "So the hand of a bystander pushing the fat man's chest and thus causing him to die is strictly forbidden, but the hand of a bystander pushing a switch and thus causing him to die might be allowed, even though in both cases the bystander knows that the push will cause the fat man's death?" I challenge you to either give a yes or no answer, or to identify some beating-your-wife premise that you think the question is smuggling. I asked you whether there were any number of innocents that would make you switch your answer to be that the bystander is morally obligated to sacrifice the one innocent to save the many. You didn't answer the question, but instead just said that if the number exists it's higher than 298M. I call that evasiveness "mumbling". HH> But I will tell you again: the answers do not change no matter how many people get tied to the track. <HH I could find no record you ever telling me that no number of innocents could change your answer. I challenge you to quote yourself doing so. HH> Most people actually live by a non-aggression principle. They give the same answers as I do. <HH Wrong. Most people would be willing to sacrifice one innocent to save 298M innocents. HH> They will not push a man in front of a trolley, no matter what. The philosophers argued over why people would not push him, not whether people should murder him. <HH I asked you before to quote a philosopher "saying she thought nobody would ever opt for pushing the fat man". You still haven't supplied such a quote.
