i'm making the moral judgement that if you get sick from a preventable disease that you personally have chosen not to prevent, and medical services are under extreme strain, then you are less worthy of treatment than someone who falls ill through no fault of their own.
So you indeed are saying fat people, smokers and junkies should be denied treatment! Your position is healthcare should be allocated according to worthiness. People
you judge unworthy, who in
your opinion have caused their own illness should be denied treatment, that is clearly immoral and unethical and it also goes directly against your aim of minimizing overall harms.
Many people would judge addicts as being less worthy of treatment when medical services are under strain, because they have not chosen to prevent their addiction. I actually don't take that position, Ethical triage and resource allocation works on whether the patent can be treated and whether that treatment is likely to succeed, irrespective of any moral judgement on the 'worthiness' of the patent. I was taught ethics.
Everyone is equal eh? all lives are equally valuable? Your stated position is clearly that some lives are allocated lesser value to depending on whether the persons is regarded as morally worthy by you. Something to think about.
that's fine, but science states the contrary. i would have chosen to stop being an addict at the age of about 20 instead of staying that way til my 30s. i'm glad you have the luxury of thinking its a choice as it means you have not been through the hell of addiction and i wouldn't wish that on anyone.
"Science states" That old appeal to authority trope, what science?. So you are holding with the idea that addicts have no agency and no choice and are merely victims, passengers along for the ride? The first step to breaking addiction is wanting to break that addiction, that is a choice and that is the addicts' choice.
it is. there is a whole branch of logic (fuzzy logic) that deals exactly with these kinds of scenarios and is capable of quantifying the risks. if you're interested and have the maths skill required to understand it, i strongly recommend the uncertain reasoners companion by jeff paris.
Rubbish. Fuzzy logic deals with partial truths, more/less with uncertainty rather than true/false, Fuzzy logic would apply if someone could be half infected with coronavirus or if someone could partially infect someone else. Status on a continuum. The scenario is actually a multi-conditional scenario,
if such and such is
true and something else is is
true then..... boolean conditional logic, true vs false and therefore probability theory. I am surprised you didn't see that.
You are making judgements based on multiple events that haven't aligned, but may align with a certain probability which may or may not be known accurately.
The important thing is all those have to align to create the harm you are seeking to avoid.
"what if this was true
and then this was true
and then this then became true
then a bad then a thing
would happen. "
If any of those things didn't align, no harm would result. The bad thing has not happened yet and probably will not because you have 4 low probability conditionals in your chain here you are unduly worrying about something that hasn't happened and is actually pretty unlikely to happen. If you reduce it to an individual calculation it is vanishingly unlikely. It is Helen Lovejoys "think of the children." I strongly recommend the early Simpsons, whether you have the math skill or not. You can reverse the math based on your scenario, How much overall harm would result from vaccinating people who personally gain limited or no benefit in order to save one life in your scenario?
That is why decisions on medical intervention are based on the benefit to the patient and not primarily for some higher utilitarian collectivist purpose. If some wider benefit accrues then that is a bonus.
You are actually leaning extremely hard on the precautionary principle. Appeal to the precautionary principle is the refuge of scoundrels who have taken to promoting a position unjustified by the facts on the ground. An extreme application precautionary principle says everyone should routinely have their appendix removed because it might cause appendicitis and fatal peritonitis, better safe than sorry. NNT might be a little high.
I am not trying to change your mind, but it would be nice if people thought things through properly before charging around with the herd,
)
