And my point was to investigate the value-system behind that claim. Why value "functionality" in terms of physical disabilities — and not in terms of any of the other things that people have made this decision on — such as social status, reproductive potential, earned income, skin color, belovedness by others, moral virtue, or purity of soul?
First, I never based it on PHYSICAL disability. For me, the paradigm disability is reduced mental status, with vegetative state being worth nothing in terms of keeping alive. But why limit myself to mental disability?
Second, I never stated, and would not agree, to make it illegal for people to spend their own resources on keeping alive anybody who wanted to be kept alive. Perhaps I am a billionaire willing to spend $1 million to keep my extremely sick 95 year old mother from dying from her cancer for another 3 months. Whoop de do for me. All I'm saying is that when totting up the value of the medical system, more accomplishment is measured from keeping a healthy 20 year old alive for an extra 3 months.
Third, it seems that underlying your case is something like, "all human life is equally valuable." My problem with this is it denies the value of taking a risk of dying in order to improve a life. If I have someone who is willing to risk a shorter life in order to cure paralysis (maybe some sort of stem-cell spinal cord treatment that has an 80% chance of improving things and a 5% chance of killing you), then I want the improved functionality to show up in my plus column, which they don't if "all human life is equally valuable."
Fourth, In my opinion, it is not intellectually honest to say "all human life is equally valuable, even disabled" and "it is a great improvement in life to cure a disability." Either disability is not as valuable an outcome as ability, or it is. To pretend it is both it seems to me can only lead to suboptimal policy and mistaken conclusions.
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.