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?
First: I don't know; but the fact that I don't have a perfect answer doesn't mean that I can't see things wrong with the "disabled people are worth less than able-bodied people" answer — beginning by pointing out that it can't readily be distinguished from the "men are worth less than women" answer or the "poor people are worth less than rich people" answer.
Second: Saving a life isn't a resource. Food, drugs, or a doctor's time are resources. We don't have 1-up mushrooms in our world.
Third: We don't have to stack-rank every two possible scenes in order to have a consequentialist ethical system. By "possible scene" I mean something much smaller than a "possible world", something deliberately disregarding consequences outside of an artificially-defined neighborhood. "Save Alice's life and let Bob die" is a possible scene, not a possible world.
(A possible world in which some life-saving agency prefers to save 901 able-bodied people and allows 1000 disabled people to die might also might include significant consequences such as, oh, disabled veterans firebombing that agency's offices; or (perhaps more realistically) the social status of the life-saving agency being docked for its immorality, leading to fewer people entering the life-saving business, leading to fewer lives being saved.)
Fourth: "Hard cases make bad law" — which is to say, even if one has to make a choice between saving Alice's or Bob's life, you probably can't generalize much from it. The fact that in one particular case, a person might choose to save the life of a person with traits X, Y, and Z instead of a person with traits A, B, and C does not mean that you can safely extrapolate that person thinks that anyone with trait X is more worth saving than anyone with trait B.
Fifth: I'd really suggest thinking about the assumptions that led you to think that "disabled people are worth less than everyone else" was a reasonable solution? Where did you get that idea? What makes you think it's even morally permissible (to say nothing of morally required) to consider someone's leg count as an indicator of their life's value — especially if you wouldn't consider someone's sex or race as such an indicator?
"Hard cases make bad law" — which is to say, even if one has to make a choice between saving Alice's or Bob's life,
What if I have to choose between putting $100 million dollars into specially training gerontologists to extend the lives of institutionalized triple amputees vs putting $100 million dollars into training doctors to use stem cell thearpies to regenerate limbs? These choices get made all the time in society. I just propose we make the consciously and that we at least analyze our results quantitatively, since quantitative analysis is, in my opinion, a significant factor in the success of so many other human endeavors.
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.