| >Oh, sure. If you mean donating blood, then by all means that's great. I thought you were talking about donating a kidney or part of your liver or something that could decrease your potential to live a long and able life and which wouldn't make much difference if you donate now or later. I was talking about organs. Kidney, liver, and at least one lung lobe, possible more then one; they're all eligible for living donation it is something that they will not let you do on a whim; interviews, psychological evaluations. I didn't try to; I might have been able to muddle my way through and tell them what they wanted to but it would've also drawn unwanted attention to myself. And that's a risk I wasn't willing to take. Blood donation is mindlessly trivial to accomplish, all you really do is fill a questionnaire and then just lie there with a needle in your arm for an even shorter period of time. And then you get cookies. Amusingly I did consider suicide in a hospital. Walk in the door with an organ donor card and a gun, sign it in front of the receptionist and end it with a bullet through my head let them hook up my brain dead self on a ventilator. Silly unworkable idea of course... doubt many people would react particularly well to seeing that. Not least of which the receptionist. >I don't see how it became a trolley question. That's about valuing the lives of others relative to themselves. It's not about valuing the life of oneself relative to others. It's only in very few and exceptional circumstances where anyone would argue against always valuing their own lives above others', and even then it's always a valid choice to choose oneself. If we follow the presumption that all people are equal, then that logically continues it is the n > 1 lives must always be more valuable then any 1 life. Under that it becomes a simple numbers question. In which case it's valid to say that I'm being selfish in valuing my own life over others. If instead we say that it is fine to value your own life over 6 others, inherently the idea of equality must be false. >No, you're not. You're always bringing other people and society into your own life's valuation. When valuing your own life, the wants and opinions of others don't matter.
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>You seem confused in thinking that things have just 1 value. That's wrong. Everybody puts value on things based on how much they personally gain from it. When valuing things in the interest of others and "against" one's own, one feels a personal gain through empathy, or they can feel or imagine the love from others, or they gain validation of their sense of justice or responsibility, etc.
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>In personally valuing your own life's existence, you should only think of your personal gain. What do you gain? You gain everything! You gain the ability to gain! In not valuing your life and always bringing other people into the scope, I can only think that your sense of empathy is too strong. That it blinds you and prevents you from forming your own wants and appreciations of what you have. You should care less of others and enjoy whatever you can of the world for yourself. Does it really matter what I want? It's always seem to prove irrelevant. Even in this thread I have to wonder because no one really stopped to asked, "Do you want to die?" Not even you. To answer; maybe, I don't know. If the answer was yes then you would be off doing whatever it is you do on a Friday night, and I would already be cold in the morgue. If the answer was no, then why dwell on it? But do you now why I don't typically put much thought into what I want? Would you still say I should be selfish and form my own wants if that answer started sliding towards, "Yes I want to die?" |