When I read liability, my instinct was contagion. There is absolutely a moral obligation to minimize contagion—we did a whole covid-lockdown thing about it.
Being obese is too self-contained an issue, if it is an issue, I think. The only one suffering, if they are suffering, would be the obese person, and the only externalization of that would be financial costs that are too abstract for people to take personally.
I have the great privilege of living in a society with socialized Healthcare, so these questions do come up from time to time.
The lifetime Healthcare costs for people who have conditions which can be mitigated by lifestyle choices is a real thing. Smoking, being an obvious example much less touchy than obesity. Even if I’m extremely comfortable with the slice of my taxes that go to Healthcare… wouldn’t it be great if we got to spend less on smoking-related issues, and could instead buy more MRI machines. Merely pay for more doctors? Nurses? Expand the treatments we can even offer?
Just because they’re abstract, doesn’t make it any less of a question of morality. I don’t see any moral difference between the contaigen and smoking from the perspective of the personal responsibility of maintaining the overall health of your society. One is just accepted by society.
I don’t see any moral difference between the contaigen and smoking
I don’t understand what you mean.
Smoking isn’t contagious. Smoking might be socially contagious, but that’s a different kind. Smoking and the resulting cancer would be the kind of disease that people “choose” to take on, which is different from being accosted by influenza.
You might be thinking about this on a societal level? I meant interpersonally. Showing up to an event while sick and without a mask is a little fucked up. And covid touches on the societal, but my chief moral complaint is really with people who were neglectful of the community effort to minimize harm during a pandemic, who would choose possibly killing somebody’s grandma so that they could go to the beach. I’m not really thinking about… taxes.
Whether it is ethical for people to “overuse” the medical services their society provides I think depends ultimately on what it is fair to ask people to do, and what the actual consequences of not doing them are.
Like, is it immoral to get a dildo stuck up your arse? Because you’re wasting a doctor’s time. I feel like we might be touching on such austere efficiencies that we’re beginning to lose sight of what a doctor is for.
Harm is harm. If my recklessness gives you covid, that’s harm. I harmed you. If my wanton habits strain the Healthcare system such that they’re expending money on my emphasima instead of more MRIs, and the lack of MRIs mean the diagnostic delays kept you from finding a brain tumor before it became inoperable, that’s harm too. I harmed you.
It’s comfortable to hide behind layers of abstraction. That’s just morality laundering.
If I give you covid, and you die, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you spread it to your grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you give someone else covid, and THEY give it to THIER grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
And if I give… etc etc etc etc. How far down this chain do I gotta go before you say “ah ok, no morality issue there”?
Does it matter if you expose people but none actually get it? Does it matter if people get it, but as a result of the chain reaction nobody dies?
Probably not, right? The irresponsibility of the act has already established that it was wrong, regardless of the dilution along a chain and regardless of the actual outcome. You don’t KNOW what will happen, you just have statistical models.
You might never know WHICH bean made you fart. It doesn’t matter. The collective effect produced a result.
And what if spending money on the MRI for the guy with the brain tumor delays a study on Alzheimer’s disease? And what if that Alzheimer’s study took money that could have been used to further develop gene therapy?
I don’t really understand the point of this.
If a guy has a dildo stuck up his arse, he needs help. …There’s no follow up point, he just needs help.
I would find a medical industry that harbors contempt for the indignity of having to help this guy… pathetic. Like, it’s silly.
[edit] Let me amend one thing, 'cause I reread the original comment.
I think that neglectfully spreading an illness is more morally objectionable than recklessly contracting one. A known one, anyway. Covid is somewhat special because disease vectors and not actually knowing if you had it or how it spread was more on people’s minds.
Kinda, I think we’re in the same zone, but I feel you’re kinda glancing off some important points, and also bringing in unrelated concepts.
What if the money spent on the mri could have been spent on alzheimers?
Well, if at the time it was reasonable to expect that the investment in MRIs was the most effective thing to do for society that’s fine. That’s just a choice made with reasonable expectations of a positive outcome that ultimately turned out to be suboptimal. It isn’t reasonable to expect that smoking won’t statistically be detrimental to your health. It’s a self-inflicted wound, done knowing this was a likly outcome. This is the critical difference there.
Now, as for unrelated topics, you’ve muddled two distinct ideas: “moral evaluation of actions”, and “evaluation of worthiness to recieve care”.
If you need an ER doctor to pull a dildo out of your ass, but didn’t reasonably expect to demand society to end up having to pay for it, then I see no moral issue, just like if someone forgets thier hair straightener on and thier house lights on fire and the firefighters risk thier lives to rescue you.
If you fully expected to require an ER doctor beforehand, yah, morality issue there. If you light your own house on fire on purpose because you wanted to get carried down a ladder, same deal.
Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be helped. Doesn’t imply that you must not, may, or are obligated to feel contempt or whatever. Evaluating the STATE of a moral agent RESPONDING to a moral transgression of another is several steps removed from the ideas of the morality of self-harm in a social collective with finite support resources.
Anyways, long story short… I don’t mean to say that the two cases are morally identical. They’re both actions that needlessly risk degrading the overall health of your society. I think if you want to frame ONE as a moral issue, they BOTH are.
So, to my original point… I don’t know if the public health angle for the moral evaluation is a great one here. I think it’s hard to build a consistent and reliable moral model around.
The only reason that I keep bringing up worthiness to receive care is to reaffirm that idea that the hospital is a safety net. That is the only way I think about it. I’m not looking for efficiencies. Its efficiencies do not affect my moral calculus.
If there were enough smokers that the hospital had to triage the issue to focus on some guy’s brain tumor, that’s fine. That’s a budgeting issue. I would also choose the nicer of two people if both were hanging off either end of a bridge.
Would it be nice to spend obesity money on something else? Sure. It can’t be, though. It’s hard to see obesity and cost as a moral issue when I don’t actually view the obese, nor the smoker, nor the drug addict, nor the suicidal, nor the adrenaline junkie, nor the MMA fighter, nor the venomous snake guy as burdens. Every one of these people “should know” that they will cost the medical industry money; they might be the ones to “kill” a guy with a brain tumor. I’m not bothered by this because these are the very people the medical industry is built to serve. It exists for them.
A medical industry that cannot accomodate obesity is one that is failing its own constituents. It is failing to serve its purpose. So, becoming obese, and costing the healthcare system money, is immaterial. It doesn’t matter.
But, a guy in the supermarket sneezing on people is a burden. Not because he is straining medical services and indirectly murdering in-care patients, but because there are people in the supermarket who now must be burdened with illness.
So this is what my view comes down to:
If a person gets someone else sick, it is their fault for spreading disease.
If a 100-capacity hospital is unable to accomodate a 101st person, that is a systemic failure of the hospital, or its backing government.
This view is useful because it means I am socially equipped to punish people for anti-social and irresponsible medical behavior, but also that I remain sympathetic to victims of the tobacco and sugar industries. And that guy with the snake.
It’s also not that complicated, because my problem is chiefly with anti-social behavior.
How does this relate to necrophilia?.. I don’t know. He probably shouldn’t do that.
When I read liability, my instinct was contagion. There is absolutely a moral obligation to minimize contagion—we did a whole covid-lockdown thing about it.
Being obese is too self-contained an issue, if it is an issue, I think. The only one suffering, if they are suffering, would be the obese person, and the only externalization of that would be financial costs that are too abstract for people to take personally.
I have the great privilege of living in a society with socialized Healthcare, so these questions do come up from time to time.
The lifetime Healthcare costs for people who have conditions which can be mitigated by lifestyle choices is a real thing. Smoking, being an obvious example much less touchy than obesity. Even if I’m extremely comfortable with the slice of my taxes that go to Healthcare… wouldn’t it be great if we got to spend less on smoking-related issues, and could instead buy more MRI machines. Merely pay for more doctors? Nurses? Expand the treatments we can even offer?
Just because they’re abstract, doesn’t make it any less of a question of morality. I don’t see any moral difference between the contaigen and smoking from the perspective of the personal responsibility of maintaining the overall health of your society. One is just accepted by society.
I don’t understand what you mean.
Smoking isn’t contagious. Smoking might be socially contagious, but that’s a different kind. Smoking and the resulting cancer would be the kind of disease that people “choose” to take on, which is different from being accosted by influenza.
You might be thinking about this on a societal level? I meant interpersonally. Showing up to an event while sick and without a mask is a little fucked up. And covid touches on the societal, but my chief moral complaint is really with people who were neglectful of the community effort to minimize harm during a pandemic, who would choose possibly killing somebody’s grandma so that they could go to the beach. I’m not really thinking about… taxes.
Whether it is ethical for people to “overuse” the medical services their society provides I think depends ultimately on what it is fair to ask people to do, and what the actual consequences of not doing them are.
Like, is it immoral to get a dildo stuck up your arse? Because you’re wasting a doctor’s time. I feel like we might be touching on such austere efficiencies that we’re beginning to lose sight of what a doctor is for.
Yeah, that’s basically it.
Harm is harm. If my recklessness gives you covid, that’s harm. I harmed you. If my wanton habits strain the Healthcare system such that they’re expending money on my emphasima instead of more MRIs, and the lack of MRIs mean the diagnostic delays kept you from finding a brain tumor before it became inoperable, that’s harm too. I harmed you.
It’s comfortable to hide behind layers of abstraction. That’s just morality laundering.
If I give you covid, and you die, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you spread it to your grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
If I give you covid, and you give someone else covid, and THEY give it to THIER grandma and she dies, that’s bad.
And if I give… etc etc etc etc. How far down this chain do I gotta go before you say “ah ok, no morality issue there”?
Does it matter if you expose people but none actually get it? Does it matter if people get it, but as a result of the chain reaction nobody dies?
Probably not, right? The irresponsibility of the act has already established that it was wrong, regardless of the dilution along a chain and regardless of the actual outcome. You don’t KNOW what will happen, you just have statistical models.
You might never know WHICH bean made you fart. It doesn’t matter. The collective effect produced a result.
And what if spending money on the MRI for the guy with the brain tumor delays a study on Alzheimer’s disease? And what if that Alzheimer’s study took money that could have been used to further develop gene therapy?
I don’t really understand the point of this.
If a guy has a dildo stuck up his arse, he needs help. …There’s no follow up point, he just needs help.
I would find a medical industry that harbors contempt for the indignity of having to help this guy… pathetic. Like, it’s silly.
[edit] Let me amend one thing, 'cause I reread the original comment.
I think that neglectfully spreading an illness is more morally objectionable than recklessly contracting one. A known one, anyway. Covid is somewhat special because disease vectors and not actually knowing if you had it or how it spread was more on people’s minds.
Does this touch on anything you’re saying?
Kinda, I think we’re in the same zone, but I feel you’re kinda glancing off some important points, and also bringing in unrelated concepts.
What if the money spent on the mri could have been spent on alzheimers?
Well, if at the time it was reasonable to expect that the investment in MRIs was the most effective thing to do for society that’s fine. That’s just a choice made with reasonable expectations of a positive outcome that ultimately turned out to be suboptimal. It isn’t reasonable to expect that smoking won’t statistically be detrimental to your health. It’s a self-inflicted wound, done knowing this was a likly outcome. This is the critical difference there.
Now, as for unrelated topics, you’ve muddled two distinct ideas: “moral evaluation of actions”, and “evaluation of worthiness to recieve care”.
If you need an ER doctor to pull a dildo out of your ass, but didn’t reasonably expect to demand society to end up having to pay for it, then I see no moral issue, just like if someone forgets thier hair straightener on and thier house lights on fire and the firefighters risk thier lives to rescue you.
If you fully expected to require an ER doctor beforehand, yah, morality issue there. If you light your own house on fire on purpose because you wanted to get carried down a ladder, same deal.
Doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be helped. Doesn’t imply that you must not, may, or are obligated to feel contempt or whatever. Evaluating the STATE of a moral agent RESPONDING to a moral transgression of another is several steps removed from the ideas of the morality of self-harm in a social collective with finite support resources.
Anyways, long story short… I don’t mean to say that the two cases are morally identical. They’re both actions that needlessly risk degrading the overall health of your society. I think if you want to frame ONE as a moral issue, they BOTH are.
So, to my original point… I don’t know if the public health angle for the moral evaluation is a great one here. I think it’s hard to build a consistent and reliable moral model around.
The only reason that I keep bringing up worthiness to receive care is to reaffirm that idea that the hospital is a safety net. That is the only way I think about it. I’m not looking for efficiencies. Its efficiencies do not affect my moral calculus.
If there were enough smokers that the hospital had to triage the issue to focus on some guy’s brain tumor, that’s fine. That’s a budgeting issue. I would also choose the nicer of two people if both were hanging off either end of a bridge.
Would it be nice to spend obesity money on something else? Sure. It can’t be, though. It’s hard to see obesity and cost as a moral issue when I don’t actually view the obese, nor the smoker, nor the drug addict, nor the suicidal, nor the adrenaline junkie, nor the MMA fighter, nor the venomous snake guy as burdens. Every one of these people “should know” that they will cost the medical industry money; they might be the ones to “kill” a guy with a brain tumor. I’m not bothered by this because these are the very people the medical industry is built to serve. It exists for them.
A medical industry that cannot accomodate obesity is one that is failing its own constituents. It is failing to serve its purpose. So, becoming obese, and costing the healthcare system money, is immaterial. It doesn’t matter.
But, a guy in the supermarket sneezing on people is a burden. Not because he is straining medical services and indirectly murdering in-care patients, but because there are people in the supermarket who now must be burdened with illness.
So this is what my view comes down to:
This view is useful because it means I am socially equipped to punish people for anti-social and irresponsible medical behavior, but also that I remain sympathetic to victims of the tobacco and sugar industries. And that guy with the snake.
It’s also not that complicated, because my problem is chiefly with anti-social behavior.
How does this relate to necrophilia?.. I don’t know. He probably shouldn’t do that.