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Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

irishtimes.com

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Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#161

Post by decremental »

yboris wrote: post #105
emptyparadise wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“The key principle in medicine is to treat anyone who is sick, regardless of who they are,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University. “We are not in the business of sorting sinners from saints. Crime is a legal matter.” This is so simple and newspapers trying to make it into a matter for debate is actually compromising that.

Side-comment that doesn't apply in this case, but worth mentioning: "regardless of who they are" seems like a shitty blanket principle to have. For example, hospitals are overstuffed with COVID patients means regular patients die as a result. In many cases, "The overwhelming majority of the patients had COVID-19, and 98% of those needing acute critical care were unvaccinated." This means people who choose to not take…

Why are so many vocal advocates for the covid vaccine such demons? Is the rhetoric surrounding the covid vaccine so toxic that it turns otherwise normal people into people who are so hate filled, or are such hate filled people simply predisposed to being influenced by such rhetoric?

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#162

Post by hiptobecubic »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #126
chana_masala wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I can add some nuance as a vegan (I'm vegan btw, and I use Arch btw). I think that it's amazing that this is possible, but where it seems unethical to me is that there still are many other ways we could route heart transplants from willing humans. I think the only way I'd find this ethical is if the pig died from natural causes. But that probably complicates using the heart. If a pig is killed for food and then…

Animals eat each other alive in the wild, they kill on a whim for the pettiest of reasons. Dying at the hands of another animal is as natural a cause as you can get. Because we're human we don't treat animals badly while alive, that where our ethics come in. Obviously if there enough hearts to go around no one would be looking at pigs.

We generally consider killing something to be treating it badly.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#163

Post by bawolff »

skissane wrote: post #100
burrows wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key principle in medicine is to treat anyone who is sick, regardless of who they are. The victims family is saying “Our principle is that people who stab Ed should not get a heart, therefore David should not get a heart.” The doctor is saying “Our principle is that we don’t use the patient’s past violence or convictions to determine whether they should get a heart or not, so the stabbing doesn’t disqualify Davi…

> Neither party can offer a valid argument as to why their principle is true, because both of their principles are normative. Can you offer a valid argument for the truth of your own principle, that it is impossible to offer a valid argument for the truth of any normative principle? I think your own position is a normative principle, and hence your position is self-refuting. To call an argument "valid" is to make a n…

Not being able to use emperical evidence to prove a normative claim is a very common (albeit not universal) belief. Probably because nobody has really convincingly done so in thoussands of years.

> To call an argument "valid" is to make a normative claim; it is to claim that a rational agent ought to accept it.

Idk, it could just be a claim that the argument can be expressed in a logical system, combined with the normative axiom that rational agents should only trust arguments that can be validly expressed in such a formal system.

Regardless this seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Nobody has put forth any arguments for either position that are emperical in nature. Is there really a practical difference between impossible and possible but nobody knows how?

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#164

Post by TulliusCicero »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #155
TulliusCicero wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PETA hates anything that makes animals useful to humans. It could solve world peace and they’d be arguing that surely there’s a better way.

I don't think peta would consider it "world peace" yet.

Was it not clear I was talking about a hypothetical?

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#165

Post by joshuamorton »

creato wrote: post #106
stult wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems pretty damn simple to me. If you wouldn’t put someone to death for a crime, you shouldn’t deny them medical care in a manner that will kill them for the same crime. It’s functionally and legally the same as putting them to death. Withholding necessary medical care is the same as withholding food, water, air, or shelter.

We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly. there simply aren't enough organs to go around. In the case that people are already having life saving organs withheld from them, it makes sense to prioritize. I think people have the ethical issue in this case backwards: the reason this guy got this transplant is because it was an experiment . We effectively used an ex-con as a guinea pig. (Pe…

> We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly.

Yes, but not for their moral failings. We deny care for health reasons, as generally speaking the goal is to optimize for additional healthy years of life.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#166

Post by selimthegrim »

smrtinsert wrote: post #79
emptyparadise wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“The key principle in medicine is to treat anyone who is sick, regardless of who they are,” said Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor at New York University. “We are not in the business of sorting sinners from saints. Crime is a legal matter.” This is so simple and newspapers trying to make it into a matter for debate is actually compromising that.

Is there a limit to this impartiality? Should we have saved Hitlers life with a breakthrough transplant?

I have some bad news from you about where anesthesia data came from...

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#167

Post by hiptobecubic »

chana_masala wrote: post #77
pkaye wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a vegan what is your view on testing drugs on animals and do you refuse to use those medicines?

I was hospitalised for a month and didn't ask any questions, because I couldn't - I was dying. But if I had more capacity I would have requested vegan options. Once I came to I did refused any non vegan hospital food - which meant I only ate plain boiled potatoes. So I was grateful for the medicines I received then that may have been tested on animals or may have had animal ingredients. But I still advocate and prefe…

I don't get what is so difficult for people to digest in discussions like these. Someone says something like "I try to do the best I can to minimize the unethical treatment of others," and it's a tidal wave of angry finger pointing and fallacious appeals to nature.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#168

Post by Hnaomyiph »

benatkin wrote: post #5

His victim's family (yes, really) doesn't like that he was the first to get a heart transplant. https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/historic-pig-heart-recipient-w... PETA doesn't like that anyone got a pig heart transplant. https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/first-heart-transpl...

I’m surprised to see such irrelevant and sensationalized information being pushed to the top of the comment section of a hn post. Does a crime that happened 34 years ago, and a sentence served for said crime, hold any at all relevance to the medical breakthrough posted here? Does a questionably-ethical nonprofit’s viewpoint matter on said medical breakthrough? No to either.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#169

Post by drenvuk »

mapme wrote: post #156
drenvuk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pigs reach slaughter weight at about 6 months[0] and the lifetime of a domestic pig is 15 to 20 years. Their breeding age is 8+ months. So we kill them before they reach the prime of their life most of the time. Killing them at their prime might be less of a moral issue than what we do currently. [0] https://modernfarmer.com/2016/05/raising-pigs/#:~:text=Most%... .

That is an interesting comparison to other reasons why we kill animals, however, the point wasn’t a relative moral comparison to animal slaughter for food purposes but that it’s not zero cost morality wise to kill an animal in its prime.

It's not zero cost morality wise to kill anything at any point in their lifetime; from bacteria, to worms, to flies, to pigs each has its own weight on a person's conscience be it nil or hefty. I mean that. But a pig is not human so it's acceptable to me.

Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

#170

Post by renewiltord »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #69
mlyle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is so simple and newspapers trying to make it into a matter for debate is actually compromising that. Even if one were to consider moral character when allocating organs in general: the researchers needed someone who was sick and likely to die, ineligible for human organ transplant (here, because of severity of condition), and not so sick that there was no chance of success or useful data. So, we're already pi…

Yeah, the Post complaint (echoed elsewhere) is basically a call for having a social credit score that can say “you’re not a good person, so we’re not going to let the doctors save you.”

We already have that laundered through something else. Like if you’re a drinker you won’t get a liver.
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