A stronger signal comes from the age/life-expectancy of Alice and Bob. But all other things being equal, and in the highly artificial situation that only one of Bob and Alice would be saved, it seems more reasoanble to pick the more functional than the less functional.
"All other things being equal" was not part of the proposal I was critiquing, though.
Other factors which have at various points been used to decide whose life is more important include sex, race, social class or caste, wealth (or willingness to pay for treatment), religious belief, political affiliation, sexual orientation, criminality, the cause of a person's disease or affliction (e.g. "shameful" diseases such as syphilis, HIV ... or leprosy), military or veteran status, and their distance from a medical facility. The proposal above fails to mention any of these, preferring to mention physical disability instead as a "reasonable" basis for choosing who lives and dies.
It is unclear to me that physical disability is obviously a reasonable basis for this decision, especially given that many people today consider some of the above to be obviously not reasonable bases for this decision.
Other factors which have at various points been used...
Very clever and powerful argumentation.
So how would YOU proposwe to allocate a scarce resource like "saving a life" when you have 1 available and have to choose between a few people to do it?
I don't think I can be swayed by arguments against my proposal unless they propose an alternative, or somehow make the strong argument that the necessity to choose how to allocate resources doesn't apply in the case of medical care.
It has been said abou democracy that it is a horrible system that...
In line with the results of the poll here, a thread for discussing politics. Incidentally, folks, I think downvoting the option you disagree with in a poll is generally considered poor form.
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments; responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate.
4.) In general try to avoid color politics; try to discuss political issues, rather than political parties, wherever possible.
If anybody thinks the rules should be dropped here, now that we're no longer conducting a test - I already dropped the upvoting/downvoting limits I tried, unsuccessfully, to put in - let me know. The first rule is the only one I think is strictly necessary.
Debiasing attempt: If you haven't yet read Politics is the Mindkiller, you should.