Weighing human lives
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[Deleted User]
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Hello everyone.
I'm not very familiar with much theology so I will be interested to hear practical ways that you untangle this problem from your religious perspective.
Various stories in the news recently have asked people to weigh one set of lives with another. I don't want to talk about Gaza so let me give another example; an inquiry is examining the COVID response and whether lockdowns were necessary. The debate is framed in this instance about the loss of education for a nation's children - with the underlying, unstated (in my opinion) narrative that this was more costly than the impacts on the elderly and disabled of having COVID spread widely.
Of course in various philosophical debates one uses trollies and air-balloon crashes, but these seem to be very theoretical and not a whole lot of use for practical living scenarios.
Governments, particularly in powerful Western countries, tend to go for a "strike back, but harder" approach. As if somehow one can count 10 Afghan or Iraqi lives for every Western loss.
Given so often these same governments claim to be operating from some religious background (often but not always a Judeo-Christian heritage, whatever that means) I'm curious to understand if there is any kind of consensus.
Doesn't it just come down to "me and mine is worth many of you and yours" with religious sounding covering? Or is there some theology I've never heard of where one is justified in destroying others who are (or maybe just in the proximity to) those you say have hurt you and yours?
I'm not very familiar with much theology so I will be interested to hear practical ways that you untangle this problem from your religious perspective.
Various stories in the news recently have asked people to weigh one set of lives with another. I don't want to talk about Gaza so let me give another example; an inquiry is examining the COVID response and whether lockdowns were necessary. The debate is framed in this instance about the loss of education for a nation's children - with the underlying, unstated (in my opinion) narrative that this was more costly than the impacts on the elderly and disabled of having COVID spread widely.
Of course in various philosophical debates one uses trollies and air-balloon crashes, but these seem to be very theoretical and not a whole lot of use for practical living scenarios.
Governments, particularly in powerful Western countries, tend to go for a "strike back, but harder" approach. As if somehow one can count 10 Afghan or Iraqi lives for every Western loss.
Given so often these same governments claim to be operating from some religious background (often but not always a Judeo-Christian heritage, whatever that means) I'm curious to understand if there is any kind of consensus.
Doesn't it just come down to "me and mine is worth many of you and yours" with religious sounding covering? Or is there some theology I've never heard of where one is justified in destroying others who are (or maybe just in the proximity to) those you say have hurt you and yours?
Comments
Thanks,
Doublethink, Admin
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
The traditional (sexist) ranking in a shipwreck was women and children are saved first, and after that ‘funeral order’ i.e. younger are saved before older. Whether it was always observed is another question.
But these sometimes get perverse results - for example I have heard it said by some that regularly washing hands and using alcohol scrubs had a big impact on DALYS during COVID - but not because it reduced that coronavirus. It is possible to justify low impact proceedures (for example a whole population of people do something that reduces the amount of a non-fatal infection) whilst denying something else which makes a big difference to a much smaller group.
Which is a bit boring unless you are the disabled person who is personally affected, of course.
If you want to come up with an ethical decision procedure by assigning values to lives and then doing whatever maximises the total value you're not going to come up with any intuitively satisfactory result. To which some ethicists say so much the worse for our intuitions and others, with whom I agree, say so much the worse for decision procedures.
Using QALYs or some such as a way of assigning scarce resources is more acceptable because you have to assign scarce resources, as long as you don't join the dots for logical consistency.
(If you join the dots in treating disabilities as something avoidable and in choosing which lives to save you treat people who have disabilities as less worth saving, but you don't need to join the dots like that.)
As a chaplain, I was assigned to work with those not expected to live. I would give last rights and just work to comfort the dying.
I was quite fortunate to have been in the service during one of the rare times of peace in the military.
The triage is used when resources are spread thin. It is not because we thought the ones who were not expected to live weren't worth saving, but we would expect better odds of survival for the few rather than the many.
That's a good point, I hadn't considered it in terms of triage. Which is obviously used in many contexts, such as assigning priority to patients in emergency departments.
But in many situations that's really harsh - the poorest and weakest are almost inevitably the most expensive to help and politicians can always claim that resources are in short supply.
When talking about warfare, and especially when talking about warfare waged as revenge for being attacked, the opposite is true. The active decision is about who to kill, not who to save, and the "do nothing" option is to just... not kill anyone.
That's not to say there aren't broadly similar considerations involved in decisions to wage war, or even in decisions about wider healthcare policy where something that would benefit one group would cause detriment to another. But those decisions aren't triage, because they're not being taken in the context of an immediate situation where you have X people who need help and you are only able to help X-Y of them.
For example C.S. Lewis suggests that suffering is intensive rather than extensive - i.e. 100 people suffering amount X is no worse than 1 person suffering amount X, but 1 person suffering 2X is twice as bad.
That seems to be the way these things head. 😞
I think even Lewis' claim falls foul of that central mistake. I don't think there is any such consistent universal measure.
By contrast, some act of mass violence that kills 10 or 20 people at once makes national headlines, and has politicians lining up to talk about how evil the perpetrators are. (Not necessarily to actually do anything useful about it, which is the subject of another thread.)
In the various variants of the "trolley problem", the more you increase the active culpability for killing the smaller number of people, the less respondents are likely to choose it.