Comment on Philosophy has peaked. Checkmate atheists
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week agoWhen 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.
Windex007@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
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.
Windex007@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
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.