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Calm your horses. His body was donated to science by the family, I'm sure they knew what he wanted and did just that.
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Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
471–480 of 527 posts
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Not particularly! There are ethicists who believe all sorts of silly things, if you think "self-defeating" or "undermining" qualifies as "silly." For example, there are plenty of ethicists who think that moral statements are really just preference statements, putting "killing is bad" on the same epistemic level as "I don't like peanuts on my sundaes."
This all works out because it isn't actually contrary to their self-interest: academic philosophy doesn't care whether your position undermines some grounding claim, because there's no universal consensus around that grounding claim to begin with. You'll find plenty of moral philosophers who think that morality is a purely preferential mental phenomenon; they don't mind admitting that because there's still plenty of interesting work to be done if that's the case.
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#473From the article: "[pigs] they can be genetically manipulated to produce organs less likely to be rejected on transplantation." Is this true? How would these manipulations be carried out?
It is also becoming more common in drug research. It is fairly common to adapt animal genomes to be closer to that of humans so that the drugs will work in similar ways.
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fav…
Yeah, I don't think we disagree about anything real.
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#475Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's a slippery slope.. I think the uneducated are less likely to be vaccinated and it doesn't seem right to refuse service to someone because they believed something that was incorrect. Say there were people with mental handicaps that fell in this camp, it would be even worse. And where do you draw the line for who gets help for stuff unrelated to covid? Having a do no harm type moral code seems like the best way to…
Counterpoint: it's not the uneducated that don't vaccinate, it's the cynical - and the "educated" are often ignorant of all the ways it's reasonable to be cynical because they haven't been screwed over as much.
At the end of the day, understanding the benefit of a vaccine requires trusting information, and I think that information, and trust, has been compromised. You could equally hate on anyone deciding that smoking was bad for you, not long ago, because of how thoroughly compromised the "science" around it was.
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#477I've said this before here and got downvoted for it, but bioethicists as a profession are responsible for more death than pretty much anything else I can quickly think of. People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no…
I respectfully disagree. It is patient's right to refuse any medical procedure. A mere suspicion, impression that doctors are not treating life and health of this particular patient with all sainctity will do a lot more harm than good. I mean, life is precious, doctors should know this best and act like it is. Recklessness even in words will do a lot of harm. A lot of credit will be lost if standards slip even a litt…
>It is patient's right to refuse any medical procedure.
The problem is not that they can't say "no", it's that they can't say "yes".
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if we really ran out of health care capacity, it might make sense to prioritize people who took preventative measures over those who didn't. Especially with COVID: if you're at the point of triage and rationing resources, you need to consider likely outcomes, and people with the vaccine presenting at hospital are more likely to survive than those presenting without. It seems like we're not going to bump into…
> people with the vaccine presenting at hospital are more likely to survive than those presenting without In my opinion, that logic is flawed. The currently available COVID-19 vaccines vastly reduce the likelihood of developing severe symptoms from a SARS‑CoV‑2 infection. They also somewhat reduce the risk of getting infected in the first place. So, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 makes you far less likely to nee…
> Now, it could very well be possible that being vaccinated improves your outcome even once you've already developed symptoms sufficiently severe to require hospitalization. However, I'm not sure there's conclusive evidence suggesting that is indeed the case.
Current data seems to show that fully vaccinated people who require hospitalization have hospital stays that are 33% shorter and are also about 33% less likely to die (despite having more comorbidities on average than unvaccinated hospitalizations).
So, if you have one bed left, and can put either an unvaccinated or vaccinated person in it-- all else being equal-- the vaccinated person is less likely to die with hospital care, and is more likely to free up the bed for someone else soon.
(We don't know, though, if you deny hospital care to both what the death rate for each would be-- here's where you have to guess. If you assume both die without hospital care, then you should give the bed to the vaccinated patient).
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to have very strong views on this and I don't but as a natural follow up from your arguments, how do you propose we deal with the obesity crisis under the lens of people who don't self preservate and have all sorts of cardiovascular issues and bring healthcare costs to unbearable highs for everyone else? To be clear my position is that you should treat everyone, fatties, smokers, antivax, whatever, merely be…
This is not that complicated: Is a heart attack going to infect your provider? Is neck cancer going to infect your provider? We have a vaccine that significantly reduces the odds of putting our healthcare providers at risk and becoming part of the group of people crippling our ability to provide emergency medical care... if you don't take it not because you're ineligible, but because you've decided you know better, y…
I understand your point about infectiousness I think it's good and I agree.
My comment was as a follow up to your statement: "Vaccines help reduce severity in some capacity", there's a lot of behaviors that reduce severity in some capacity, and doing those would translate in lots of time savings and less pressure on the healthcare system in the same way as the vaccines do, the vaccines just have the extra "bonus" of being able to infect healthcare workers, so their negative effects compound. But if your argument is about first principles, any sort of self preservation has the same problem. So I was just commenting on that.
You're right the bit about feeling strongly was probably a subconscious dig, sorry about that, but I was amused at the "shame on you" and had a moment of weakness, my bad.
Also I didn't intend much with the fatties, I find it eandearing and have been a fatty myself at times in my life and have many I like, if that offended I'm sorry and I wish I hadn't used the term, but that's life and these are just internet comments.
Re: Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that graderjs is not saying that there could not be other morally justifiable reasons for calling for the death of someone. What they were saying is specifically that arguing that someone who takes a life should be punished in a life ending way because of the severity of taking a life is undermining that argument's own central claim of the severity of taking a life by at the same time arguing for ending a life.…
The analogy is not flawed because the comments you made are precisely my point: it's not a general, fundamental, moral conundrum -- it's that the death penalty is its own special beast. Graderjs argues from a general perspective using the example, but not limiting his arguments to, the death penalty. And then, as you and I point out, it simply does not hold up. It's the severity that makes it stand out, not the overa…
I think you read way too much into the comment that is not justified by the actual text of the comment.