C. Alice, who is able-bodied, lives for another year; while Bob, who has no legs, dies this afternoon. D. Alice dies this afternoon; while Bob lives for another year.
The procedure prefers C over D as well. It is not clear to me that this is obviously the right answer. The procedure is asserting that saving Alice's life is more worthwhile than saving Bob's, by dint of Alice having legs.
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. Your intuition is the cases are equal, what would you propose as a way to allocate one life-saving in the case you have two equally valuable lives to save? If this is the worst criticism of my proposal, then it is way better than I expected it to be!
It seems to me that such a procedure will — given constrained resources — prefer to maintain the health of the healthy rather than ameliorate the condition of the sick and disabled. While obviously we do not want a medical decision procedure that goes around allowing people to become disabled when it could be avoided (as in A and B), I don't think that we want one that considers someone's life less worthwhile because that person has already become disabled.
What if you thought of it in terms of being able to afford to keep 1,000,000 people healthy for the same cost as ameliorating the miserable lives of 100,000 compromised individuals, and we don't have enough resources to do both. I have heard of people having babies whos quality of life sucks, which kids will die at young ages, and spending 1,000,000 of public money a year on medical care for these poor creatures. It may not seem fair, but when resources are finite, choices will be made. How would you propose to make those choices if every life is equal in worth?
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 belie...
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.