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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

#201

Post by [deleted] »

_delirium wrote: post #195
mlyle wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a moral judgment: that's a judgment about whether you're likely to not wreck the new organ and have a good outcome.

That's a common rationalization for the moral judgment, but without evidence. "Recent studies have shown similar survival rates among individuals who undergo LT [liver transplant] for ALD [alcoholic liver disease] and those who undergo LT for other chronic causes of end-stage liver disease." [1] [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30018475/

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by graderjs »

nautilius wrote: post #177
unmole wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fines and jail sentences are imposed by courts. It would be weird for a grocery store clerk to overcharge a convicted thief after they served their sentence.

We're talking about the morality of the reaction, not about who imposes it. GP argues that it's morally fundamentally wrong to react to some else's 'misbehavior' by imposing the very same action as punishment.

Well maybe not wrong fundamentally...but it calls into question your stance against the thing you end up doing.

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

#203

Post by mlyle »

_delirium wrote: post #195
mlyle wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a moral judgment: that's a judgment about whether you're likely to not wreck the new organ and have a good outcome.

That's a common rationalization for the moral judgment, but without evidence. "Recent studies have shown similar survival rates among individuals who undergo LT [liver transplant] for ALD [alcoholic liver disease] and those who undergo LT for other chronic causes of end-stage liver disease." [1] [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30018475/

As your link says, there's an association between sobriety and liver transplant outcome.

As your link also says, in most areas, you can receive a liver for ALD; there's just a 6 month sobriety rule.

So we know:

- 6 months of sobriety increase odds of ongoing subsequent sobriety

- Sobriety improves LT transplant outcomes.

Many believe, without strong numerical evidence either way:

- 6 months of sobriety before procedure improves outcome of LT transplantation.

Fewer believe:

- A 6 month sobriety requirement is an unnecessary impediment to transplantation.

Your paper says:

"An interval of sobriety prior to LT is very desirable from a medical point of view. Abstinence may markedly improve liver function"

i.e. in many cases, if people could stop drinking, they might not even need the liver!

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

#204

Post by app_gorilla »

cdelsolar wrote: post #175
decremental wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why are people like you so hyperbolic? How is anything that the OP said demonic? The unvaccinated are literally causing people to die besides themselves. There is nothing hate-filled about that.

what are you talking about? Are you under the impression the vaccines prevent transmission of COVID?

at best, the vaccines reduce your personal chance of hospitalization and death.

for those at risk from COVID, take the vaccine. But pretending you're assisting your community by doing so is ridiculous and unfounded in data. "Fully vaccinated" people appear MORE likely to catch and spread Omicron 90 days post-vaccination.

Source: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.20.21267966v...

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

#205

Post by dragonwriter »

woodruffw wrote: post #59
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. The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements. But the positive/normative distinction is also not important here: medical ethics is a prescriptive and lexical ethics, one that you must follow if you are to practice medicine. It's not interested in what a…

> The majority of ethicists agree that normative statements can express true statements.

Well, yeah, it would kind of be silly to be an ethicist if you didn't believe that, and even if you were it would be contrary to self-interest to admit to it. It’s like polling astrologists on the reality of planetary influence on personality and personal fortunes.

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

#206

Post by achow »

rob74 wrote: post #189
fennecfoxen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.”

...and the next step would be "we're not going to treat you for Covid because you're not vaccinated".

This is not same.

The non vaccinated are actively choosing to be a danger to people around them.

It is like actively carrying concealed unlicensed gun which can silently and anynomously fire at people.

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

#207

Post by krisoft »

BurningFrog wrote: post #190
stult wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We deny people waiting for organ transplants medical treatment regularly. there simply aren't enough organs to go around. Yeah. There is no shortage of pig organs which is kinda the whole point. Rationing limited care is different than denying perfectly available care simply out of retribution. I thought the context made that distinction rather self-evident.

There is definitely a shortage of transplantable pig hearts. This is the first such heart ever.

There is shortage yes in the sense that the heart didn’t come from just any pig. It is a specific, modified breed which made the procedure more likely to succeed. The donor pig was also probably raised in more sanitary conditions than most other pig would be.

There is not a huge supply of these transplantable pig hearts at the moment. But if the procedure proves to be viable and the long term consequences make it favourable we can scale up transplantable pig heart production.

The reason we are not transplanting pig hearts to thousands of patients right now is not because of any such supposed shortage though, but because the procedure is not proven yet. The experiment in question is set out to provide data to help answer that question.

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

#208

Post by skissane »

burrows wrote: post #146
skissane wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thank you for prompting me to reevaluate my position. Initially I claimed, “There are no valid arguments for normative claims.”, I would like to amend my claim. Def: An inferential system is a tuple of axioms and inferential rules. Def: An argument is a non-empty ordered sequence of statements. The last statement is called its conclusion. Claim: If an inferential system produces an argument for a normative claim, the…

You are saying that, a valid deductive argument with a normative conclusion must either have a normative premise, or else rely on a logic whose inference rules permit normative statements to be inferred from non-normative ones.

I agree with you there. But you haven't explained how this (obviously true) statement is relevant to the original discussion, about the morality of providing life-saving medical treatment to perpetrators of serious crimes.

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

#209

Post by Stupulous »

graderjs wrote: post #124
nautilius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, thieves cannot be fined for their crimes (take their money after they took someone else's), kidnappers cannot go to jail (take their freedom after they took someone else's) - because it would undermine, what exactly? That makes no sense.

Well it makes sense to me. Your reading is a little bit uncharitable. Seems almost like you didn't make any effort to understand it, and just rather pretend that it's stupid...Sigh. But I suppose I could have helped you by saying the other part which I think about this: That's why the legal system is so important. We need a way to do these things, that's not about individuals getting revenge. So...you kill Alice, the…

I don't know if this will be helpful to you, but I'm throwing it out there.

In a consequentialist, utilitarian moral system, revenge cannot be a moral good on its own. If a universe where one person gets hurt is worse than a universe where no one gets hurt, a world where two people get hurt must be worse still.

So if you're utilitarian, you believe in justice as a means to prevent crime. Punishing people can act as a deterrent, imprisoning people can separate them from would-be victims, and rehabilitation can prevent future crimes.

Some people aren't consequentialists, but retributivists. They believe that deserved punishment is innately good. A universe that is fair is one in which those that cheat are issued handicaps to balance that out- think the reckless driver who gets pulled over frequently enough that it doesn't buy them any time in the long run. A fair universe is morally preferable to an unfair one. This also makes sense, though it's somewhat at odds with the utilitarian perspective.

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

#210

Post by graderjs »

froh wrote: post #197
graderjs wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing about saying "Do not save those who took another's life" is that you are saying, "The person took a life. That's bad. We should punish them for the bad thing." Then saying, "Let's take their life to punish them." (not saving a life you could being essentially the same as life taking, to me, here). To me, you are undermining your view that life-taking is bad, by engaging in it yourselves. To me, this i…

Thanks for basing the ethical explanation so succinctly on the respect from life. Rarely do I find it put in such a clean and simple and accessible way. Connecting it to the ape-brain level urge for revenge is the icing on the cake. From there I comfort myself with two thousand years it took a truly global institution to fully completely and no more strings attached reject capital punishment, the CCC, Catholic church…

Wow, the positive comments here are really, nice. Thank you! Yes I was rather proud of that as well, I thought it deserved a bit of love--so thank you for sharing! :)

It's nice to get that here after slugging it out with someone who's seemingly misinterpreting what you're saying, so thank you for that support :) xx

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