Organ Theft

[WiglessBidaar]

To say that we have competing moral claims here is to traffic in tautology. All ethics revolves around competing interests from abortion to euthanasia to organ donation. If there is no opposing interests, a thing is not a moral dilemma.

Do you accept my thesis that the distinction between killing and letting die, in purely moral terms, is illusory?

i see were you are going with this..
you could also make the same case for this scenario..

You have a loved one that needs an expensive operation that you cannot afford to pay for, nor can they .
By not doing anything you are saying that it would be morally the same as killing them.

do you also make the case for robbing a bank and in the process killing others, or committing multiple armed robberies or even smuggle hard drugs like coke, heroin and amphetamines to fund the operation?

Gurey, how many bundles of jaad have you gone through? Slip me a bag my kindred.

The key distinction between my analogy and yours is harm. Nobody comes to any grief when a man has a kidney of his given to another whereas bank robberies entail harming someone.

Where there is no harm done, and nobody contests that one can enjoy a vigorous and healthy life with just one kidney, the act is morally justified. Do you accept this?

[gurey25]

harm was committed you transgressed the persons rights and stole his property.

[WiglessBidaar]

Of course the surgey is a transgression. But that is distinct from impairing someone's life. No such loss is visted on the unwary donor. His life does not change at all.

[WiglessBidaar]

There is an imperishable work by one of my cherished philosophers James Rachels called The Elements of Morality or some such where he posits that our traditional thinking about active and passive killing is unsustainable.

Is there a difference in moral terms for instance between sitting in front of a starving child on the verge of death as you wolf down a burger with ketchup running out of it without giving him a bite, and actively killing the kid yourself?

In both cases the consequence of the action remains the same. The callousness is the same. The power to act differently remains the same. Sez me: The distinction between killing and letting die where a party can alter the net result is the difference between a prossie and a porn star. Two labels, one reality. It's what physicists call Conservation of Symmetry.

[gurey25]

so you admit the surgery is a transgression?

now the question is how do you do the maximum good with the minimum bad.
this is the moral equation that the doctor would have to do..

there are few moral absolutes, you are old enough to know this..
the world is full of grey, not black and white..

[WiglessBidaar]

I am not seduced by the gaudy charms of relativism. The only thing grey is the wig on my head.

Of course taking possesion of another's property is in normal circumstances wrong, but if the person has no use for that property, and if somebody else would die for lack of it, the injunction against theft is superseded by the imperative to save a life just as a homeless person would be justified in squatting in some abandoned building for shelter if its owner had no use for it.

The distinction between killing and letting die, like my bladder, does not hold water. What say you?

[gurey25]

the analogy is not accurate.

doing nothing is not the same as doing a crime to save a life.

i would say that since saving the patient would mean committing a crime,
the doctor is off the hook morally...

this is how gurey sees the world..

[WiglessBidaar]

But the crime is not malum in se. A thing may be outlawed without being immoral like polygamy. It's only a crime because the law has not caught up with rational ethics.

What if the crime is not ethically speaking a crime at all?