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You get it, if you reduce and equate “human life” with medical system in your assumption, then the rest of the stuff follows. You treat the system as human life, so everyones perogative is to serve the
human lifemedical system. I refuse this equivalency to begin with.But I am not surprised that for instance utilitarians think this way, it is the same idea to sublimate/identify values into something else like utils, and then just follow the calculation to its inevitable and logically sound monstrosity.
The medical system is human life.
How can you not equate those two?
If the medical system goes down, you immediately get loss of human life.
See, for me the human life is about enjoying life, meeting your family and friends, being able to grieve for your lost parents or even putting yourself through some tough events subtracting some supposed utils to achieve one of the myriad of goals you may have. Medical system is down there on the chain of what human life represents to me. I thought most people implicitly understand it, but that is apparently not the case.
I’m having trouble distinguishing your responses from just garden variety selfishness to be honest. Of course you like the good things in life.
The people who die due to lack of medical care usually like the same things too, so we don’t have to redefine the meaning of human life or anything here. It’s just that since they (in this example) have died due to lack of medical care that now they cannot enjoy those things.
Me behaving slightly differently for a few weeks during a triage event in the local hospital is a pretty small price.
A small bit of sacrifice for the wellbeing of others is a relatively common human characteristic, but there are definitively also a number people who don’t come equipped with that chip.
Of course you would have such a trouble, you worship the system. And now we are back to 2020 shaming, the modus operandi during lockdowns: "no, going to funeral of your grandmother and meeting with three or more people is selfish, we are now saving
human lifemedical system". The point is, I don't care about monsters trying to shame me anymore. That is what I realized. Some people just have different moral assumptions. I am sure that there were people in some Aztec village shaming their neighbors, who refused to offer their children to rain god Tlaloc. Do they wish drought and calamity upon good people of the village? We are trying to save lives here! Sacrifice to the system at once! It is a small price to pay.Oh, your moral highness deems it a small price to pay, so everybody should do the same. Please talk more about selfishness. I will not even comment on "for a few weeks" part, yeah the famous two weeks to stop the spread lie to drop-feed the measures .
Sometimes I wonder if part of this is that where I lived during COVID, the measures taken by the government were extremely lax.
Life wasn’t really disrupted all that much, we were told by the governor to go outside and enjoy the open air and hiking trails, although social gatherings were discouraged, I don’t think much of anything of the sort was ever actually banned. There was no curfew, nothing like this. Although there were some limits placed on in restaurant capacity for a while.
When I say “a few weeks”, I’m talking specifically about the period of time in which the local hospital was at max capacity. Since measures of reduction of community spread were mainly up to the individual, then the result here is just a simple question: my community is currently in a wave of a new pathogen and there’s a shortage of beds to treat people who got very sick.
Given that, should I hang back and not go to a big party right now?
For me that’s a simple yes, it’s relatively easy for me to put myself in the place of not having enough beds to treat the sick.
Does that mean I behaved like that during all of the year or so of COVID times? No, I more or less lived normally during most of it.
I do also empathize with people who had their lives severely restricted by the government too, and I do believe that given the nature of the disease what we did was overkill. I remember I visited Peru in late 2021, and wow, in the capital they had implemented a whole host of very strict measures. (To be fair to them, they did have the highest morality rate in the world). Overall our response may have been more appropriate for a Spanish Flu type scenario but COVID ended up being much milder.
My perspective may be biased somewhat in that during COVID for me, I pretty much lived normally and very little changed or was restricted for me. So to the question of “hey the hospital is currently at capacity, would you modify your behavior a bit to put a damper on community spread of this new virus until the surge starts to fall a bit?” … my response is pretty much, yeah. Not much of a problem.
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