this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
73 points (100.0% liked)
Science
23819 readers
163 users here now
Welcome to Hexbear's science community!
Subscribe to see posts about research and scientific coverage of current events
No distasteful shitposting, pseudoscience, or COVID-19 misinformation.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're just re-asserting moralism and the discarding of personhood without justifying it in terms of how it improves society more than the alternative. My problem wasn't that you reached the conclusion of systematically killing people, my problem is that you have no real argument to support that conclusion.
Obviously, I have no problem with revolutionary violence, and sometimes the only way to stop an ongoing violent crime for the sake of everyone else's safety is to shoot the perpetrator (and those are functionally the same question), but when you have a massive volume of resources at your disposal and the perpetrator is safely contained, you rarely actually have good reason to kill them. There is much greater social benefit to understanding that they are still a person and can become better, though in some cases it would certainly be more reasonable to keep them away from broader society for the rest of their lives (maybe with occasional directly-monitored and controlled exceptions).
And let us not lose sight of that that's a wildly more extreme case than the non-organ-donor, who again is still a person and whose life still has value even if they are seriously negligent and incorrect on this issue (which I agree that they are).
The thing that really gets me about this kind of thinking is that if you're just stipulating laws, why not stipulate that there should be no choice but to "donate" (outside of religious exemptions, if you'll grant that). You have before you a very obvious option for saving lives and also not socially murdering people and instead you pick the option that saves fewer lives and systematically kills people in addition. It's very characteristics of social contract thinking, in my experience.
Also I fail to see the point you're making about animals. Animals should be rehabilitated too in the cases where such a question even applies.
("Donate" was in quotes because at that point it's basically a tax, not donation, but I'm not saying that's a bad thing. It would be better to have a democratic system of "taxation" with whatever carveouts rather than the current system of donation.)
I suppose I will start at the top. I have no argument for my opinion. Nope. On this I consider myself objectively correct. There's almost never just one person in need of any given organ when one becomes available. If one who does is a listed donor and one who isn't both need the same, say, heart, who do you think should get it, because to me there is no question. But put 'em on the list, just always at the back if a donor goes on the list even after them. A concession for your moral dilemma. Folks with religious reasons not to give organs probably also would not take one for the same reason and don't even enter the equation.
Also, personhood is horseshit. You are no more a person than my cat, nor am I. I have no doubt that you are both sentient, capable of love and hate, and possess a sense of self. Person is just a word humans gave themselves to feel less like animals. Nah. You're an animal and that's a beautiful thing.
We are of an accord on violence to overthrow tyranny that may result in a number of deaths , or in the killing of someone doing a mass shooting or such. Where we disagree is the keeping of captured murderers, rapists, child abusers alive to rehabilitate them. They have already removed themselves from society by breaking such cardinal laws and should be culled, there is no benefit from saving them. It doesn't return or un-harm their victims. Every other social species absolutely will kill, or ostracize (which is as good as killing) the ones that make it worse for everyone. Nature has it right. Man just thinks he's fancier than that.
I think I touched on all of your points. I don't claim to know everything. I just see things how I do.
You missed the part about the question of an organ "tax," but I think I edited that in.
I think the implication here is an unhelpful sentiment, because you can also look critically at what your impulses are, and why you feel them. You did not just produce social contract theory from the aether, and Lockean statements about self-evident moral law are just not worth anything. I am of course reading this implication because of your earlier statements, like at the top:
This is a counterproductive way of approaching the topic. Just declaring that you have access to some immaterial and transcendental truth that you can't justify doesn't help anyone (least of all yourself) and can be dismissed out of hand because you literally have not provided any reason to agree.
Again, why not just mandate organ "donation"? If you want to systematically kill people for this action, you clearly think it's an illegitimate and harmful action (and I agree), so why not just make it mandatory and save more lives while also not engaging in this superfluous systematic killing? In general there are lengthy waiting lists for organs, but there are less common situations where this is more relevant.
This is less concerning than the initial characterization, though this "all things being equal"-type framing might be kind of burying the lede when there are many other factors to consider for a patient, like the likelihood of the operation being a success. If you have a highly viable non-organ donor and an only-moderately-viable organ donor, what then? Shall we take the option that is more likely to result in two deaths than one?
The reason that I was talking about "personhood" is that your argument is predicated on the idea of personhood, specifically the idea of moral patients and agents, with the people who are within the contract being considered persons and the ones outside being disqualified from that consideration. It is not intrinsically linked to being a homosapien and, as you might notice, I mentioned that animals should be rehabilitated in cases where such an idea is even relevant. I am not arguing for anything along the lines of human supremacy as regards who deserves protection and help, etc.
That said, even before you replied, I was kind of going back and forth on using the term, because I think personhood is fine as a legal construct but I was probably tacitly giving too much room to nonsense ideas about moralistic natural law and things like that. There are no natural moral laws, there are only the mechanistic laws of the universe and the social laws of legal systems (and informal social arrangements, which are still based on norms). Morality exists only in the often-contrary ideas in the minds of people and maybe some animals. Anyway, I have no real interest in you agreeing or not agreeing with that, but I wanted to be more transparent about my perspective.
Part of why I bothered with this argument so extensively is that I used to share your opinion (minus the naturalistic fallacy) with basically this same very sicko inflection and it was bad for me and I want to minimize the extent to which other people suffer from it. I'm being very serious when I say that, it's harmful and antisocial and you'd be much better off with a less-moralizing consequentialist view. I shook it off and I believe others can too, but it took me several years so I don't think I'll really persuade you here or anything, I just want to mention some contrary ideas that you can consider going forward.
Anyway, I never said anything about returning or un-harming victims, which I thought was very obvious and usually something to point out to people arguing for the necessity of execution or torture or whatever. I am simply saying that the perpetrators can still be productive members of society (albeit in some cases cordoned off from broader society). People can change for the better, it's a simple fact, and we can observe this all the time with actual criminals actually being rehabilitated (though this is less common in places like the US that don't actually try to rehabilitate people but instead further traumatize them). There are also a number of other practical problems with the death penalty, most notably that courts are not omniscient and being put to death is not reversible in the case of the discovery of new evidence or some miscarriage of justice in the investigation.
This is a blatantly reactionary "argument from nature" that is no more valid than the initial "it's self-evident" style argument. There are countless social species where sexual abuse and a number of other anti-social practices are commonplace, and yet we fight against them, and even if every social species but us overall tended to engage in such practices, that does not mean we shouldn't look at such things critically, because nature gave us minds that let us think and deliberate about how to best organize our society, and we didn't get this far by not using them and just imitating whatever brutal practice we saw chimpanzees engage in (though it's worth remembering that chimpanzees can take umbrage with the brutal actions of other chimpanzees and this can cause revolts, and who gets killed and exiled and the long-term consequences of those actions varies).
As a survival strategy in an extremely uncertain situation with drastically limited resources, it can absolutely be right to just cut someone out for pragmatic reasons, which is why the behavior evolved, because in the wild being in "an extremely uncertain situation" is not uncommon and having "drastically limited resources" is the norm. In the main, I am not arguing against imitating chimpanzees because we are better than them, I am arguing that our conditions are obviously different from their conditions, which means the correct course of action is not necessarily the same. That's why I mentioned that there are absolutely situations (e.g. revolutionary violence) where much greater brutality is totally justified, because those situations have practical limitations that change the equation.
Though I will of course say that we do in many cases have a demonstrably better intellectual capacity to solve problems than chimpanzees, which is how we got in this situation while they have gotten about as far as sporadically developing flaking in the past 7 million years, to the best of our knowledge. That's not a claim about us being worth more or less, but you can't just discard thinking about things out of hand in favor of your completely arbitrary delineation of what is "nature's way" and what isn't when we can see that thinking about things and diverging from the course of other species has had tremendous benefits.
I did not read past your second paragraph. I am far less invested in this than you. I'm not interested in analyzing every aspect of my existence, and I don't care how you feel about what I think. So you go stare at your navel if you are so unsure of your own beliefs while I am going to continue being pretty damn comfortable with exactly who I am.
Have a nice rest of your day, but if you reply to this I won't even bother to read it.
Someone totally didn't become insecure because their beliefs were challenged and now proudly struts their "conviction" as a fig leaf for their total lack of a rebuttal
Whatever lets you sleep at night
I actually do have a problem with my sleep schedule,so thanks