“Preventing a death is equally important irrespective of age” strikes me as a genuinely insane position, although I guess maybe the 63% agreeing with it have something saner in mind that is closer to it than giving an exact age.
No one would be indifferent between extending someone’s life by an hour, even a very valuable hour, and extending another person’s ordinary life by 30 years. But it’s just really strange to endorse that, but not apply the same logic to saving a 20-year old person over a 100-year old person. Does anyone know of any actual arguments people give in favor of it?
As someone who is not a bioethicist but interacts with many through work (though certainly not as many as Leah), I think that this position for many likely derives from a general opposition to treating people differently based on their intrinsic characteristics. In other words, If I know it’s bad to be ageist, I might interpret the thought experiment that nudges someone to save a younger life as ageist (I’ve heard this argument from one person in bioethics before, but, y’know, n=1) and reject the premise of the question. So for that subset of bioethicists it may not be a serious argument in favor of the proposition but rather a strong preference against making moral judgments involving people that touch upon their intrinsic characteristics.
Yeah, it’s just transparently stupid stuff like “Each life counts for one and that is why more count for more. For this reason we should give priority to saving as many lives as we can, not as many life-years.” (Harris 1987, ‘QALYfying the Value of Life’.)
I discuss a bunch of arguments along these lines in my 2016 ‘Against “Saving Lives”’ paper.
My general sense is that academic standards in bioethics are extremely low, and that much of the discipline just serves to launder conventional intuitions to create an appearance of “expert” support.
Speaking only for myself (not coauthors), I agree it’s a surprising result! That said, I think their position may be more nuanced than is evidenced by their responses to this question alone, because their responses to a related question are as follows:
When deciding which patients are eligible for an expensive treatment, it is permissible to consider:
The patient’s expected post-treatment quality and length of life (71%)
The patient’s expected post-treatment quality but not length of life (8%)
The patient’s expected post-treatment length but not quality of life (9%)
Neither the patient’s expected post-treatment quality nor length of life (12%)
I think the apparent discrepancy between respondents’ answers to these two similar questions may be partly explained by the fact that people found it difficult to choose between, e.g., a 25-, 10-, and 1-year-old, and so basically treated “equally important” as “unsure.” To put this slightly differently, I suspect if we had asked “Is preventing a death equally important irrespective of age?” and had given “yes” and “no” as answer choices, a much larger percentage would have said “no.”
Hm, something like this confusion could be boosting numbers, but I do have a professor who holds a position like this (I haven’t spoken to her about it, so I don’t know her exact justification). I find the position extremely implausible, but my steelman is probably something like this:
It is better to give someone twenty more years of life rather than two more years of life, but it is also better to give someone a million more dollars rather than a thousand.
We don’t think, however, that it is right to give preferential treatment to saving a millionaire’s life rather than the life of someone living paycheck to paycheck.
We infer from this that when we are making life or death decisions, we typically should not think in terms of deprived additional wellbeing at all, but rather the loss of something basic to autonomy/rights any being with certain minimum properties already has.
There are more details I could go into about theories that are skeptical of a deprivation account of death but this is sort of an attempted gloss of where they might be coming from, I recommend Shelley Kagan’s book “Death” for anyone interested in an accessible treatment of this and other nearby issues. Again, I do not endorse this view, I think whatever commonality you find between all deaths, it is still very hard to deny that the deprivation is an additional consideration that is important enough to be decision-relevant. I just want to provide the steelman.
How far are they willing to push it? Is there are much reason to save someone who’ll be dead from another cause in five minutes as someone who’ll live another 40 years?
I’m not sure, again I haven’t really spoken with my professor about this, and agree with Leah that the numbers are likely inflated. On the one hand Some ways of spelling out this position just seem to imply that yes, these deaths are as important to prevent. On the other hand, speaking less generously and more meta-philosophically for the moment, my impression is that people most likely to be comfortable with the age-neutral position in the first place also tend to be the ones willing to weave arbitrarily elaborate networks of moral cruft for themselves in order to avoid biting almost any bullet.
“Preventing a death is equally important irrespective of age” strikes me as a genuinely insane position, although I guess maybe the 63% agreeing with it have something saner in mind that is closer to it than giving an exact age.
No one would be indifferent between extending someone’s life by an hour, even a very valuable hour, and extending another person’s ordinary life by 30 years. But it’s just really strange to endorse that, but not apply the same logic to saving a 20-year old person over a 100-year old person. Does anyone know of any actual arguments people give in favor of it?
As someone who is not a bioethicist but interacts with many through work (though certainly not as many as Leah), I think that this position for many likely derives from a general opposition to treating people differently based on their intrinsic characteristics. In other words, If I know it’s bad to be ageist, I might interpret the thought experiment that nudges someone to save a younger life as ageist (I’ve heard this argument from one person in bioethics before, but, y’know, n=1) and reject the premise of the question. So for that subset of bioethicists it may not be a serious argument in favor of the proposition but rather a strong preference against making moral judgments involving people that touch upon their intrinsic characteristics.
Yeah, it’s just transparently stupid stuff like “Each life counts for one and that is why more count for more. For this reason we should give priority to saving as many lives as we can, not as many life-years.” (Harris 1987, ‘QALYfying the Value of Life’.)
I discuss a bunch of arguments along these lines in my 2016 ‘Against “Saving Lives”’ paper.
My general sense is that academic standards in bioethics are extremely low, and that much of the discipline just serves to launder conventional intuitions to create an appearance of “expert” support.
Speaking only for myself (not coauthors), I agree it’s a surprising result! That said, I think their position may be more nuanced than is evidenced by their responses to this question alone, because their responses to a related question are as follows:
I think the apparent discrepancy between respondents’ answers to these two similar questions may be partly explained by the fact that people found it difficult to choose between, e.g., a 25-, 10-, and 1-year-old, and so basically treated “equally important” as “unsure.” To put this slightly differently, I suspect if we had asked “Is preventing a death equally important irrespective of age?” and had given “yes” and “no” as answer choices, a much larger percentage would have said “no.”
Hm, something like this confusion could be boosting numbers, but I do have a professor who holds a position like this (I haven’t spoken to her about it, so I don’t know her exact justification). I find the position extremely implausible, but my steelman is probably something like this:
It is better to give someone twenty more years of life rather than two more years of life, but it is also better to give someone a million more dollars rather than a thousand.
We don’t think, however, that it is right to give preferential treatment to saving a millionaire’s life rather than the life of someone living paycheck to paycheck.
We infer from this that when we are making life or death decisions, we typically should not think in terms of deprived additional wellbeing at all, but rather the loss of something basic to autonomy/rights any being with certain minimum properties already has.
There are more details I could go into about theories that are skeptical of a deprivation account of death but this is sort of an attempted gloss of where they might be coming from, I recommend Shelley Kagan’s book “Death” for anyone interested in an accessible treatment of this and other nearby issues. Again, I do not endorse this view, I think whatever commonality you find between all deaths, it is still very hard to deny that the deprivation is an additional consideration that is important enough to be decision-relevant. I just want to provide the steelman.
How far are they willing to push it? Is there are much reason to save someone who’ll be dead from another cause in five minutes as someone who’ll live another 40 years?
I’m not sure, again I haven’t really spoken with my professor about this, and agree with Leah that the numbers are likely inflated. On the one hand Some ways of spelling out this position just seem to imply that yes, these deaths are as important to prevent. On the other hand, speaking less generously and more meta-philosophically for the moment, my impression is that people most likely to be comfortable with the age-neutral position in the first place also tend to be the ones willing to weave arbitrarily elaborate networks of moral cruft for themselves in order to avoid biting almost any bullet.