Morality

[Daedalus1312]

So i was in class today, and we were discussing the topic of morality, and code of ethics and stuff, and she asked a paradoxical question:

" So you have a loved one who is sick, and the pharmacy has your medicine. But the medicine is a million dollars, and you don't have anywhere near that. Would you go the pharmacy at night, and break in to steal the medicine that your loved one needs. Would you break in and steal it, Even if it was morally wrong? What if there were others that needed it?"

I thought it was a very interesting question, and i'm curious to see what other people say to it :)

[DocHussey]

That's really a no brainer. Jack the meds. The store claims it as an insurance loss and gets it replaced free of charge essentially. Stealing the medicine is a victim-less crime, big pharma charging an exorbitant amount for life saving drugs is a crime.

[Andellmere]

Yes. I would break in and steal it. Because, as this mod shows, the comfort and happiness of oneself is more important than that of others. As long as my loved ones are okay, who cares about Johnny Nobody from down the street?

EDIT: If you want a real moral dilemma, ask them if they'd give it to their daughter or their mother after they've got the medicine.

[August West]

I would definitely try. In my opinion, doing anything I can to save the life of a loved one is so important that it transcends my animosity towards theft as well as my empathy towards other people.

I also do not feel that it is wrong for the doctor or pharmaceutical company to charge a high premium for a much needed drug. It's supply and demand. Plus, a ton of money is invested in medicine. I consider this argument more interesting.

[BinoAl]

Morality, in general, is a rather hypocritical system (assuming modern judeo-christian ideals, at least), and I gave up trying to understand it years ago :)

[The Phoenixian]

Oh, this old morality assessment. Good to see it again.

I believe I would not steal the medicine.

While the medicine might save my loved one and the fact that there is probably more medicine out there means the damage to the lives and livelyhood of others is likely to be less than if I should lose my loved one, the fact of the matter is that it is quite possible I would be caught. If I am caught I am likely to be arrested, and if I am arrested, who's going to take care of my loved one then?

They may be safe for a time, assuming they aren't so sick as to be unable to take care of themselves, but that does not mean that the illness will not arise again or a different sickness or an accident or a thousand other things and if I'm imprisoned there is no longer anything I can do to help.



And now, for my own personal entertainment: A robot's answer.

Although the law must be obeyed and my own well being must be preserved, the first priority is that human life must be preserved. If there is more medicine than just that needed for my loved one it is unlikely to harm other lives more than it will prevent harm to the one in my charge.

Thus, I should steal the medicine.

Morality, in general, is a rather hypocritical system (assuming modern judeo-christian ideals, at least), and I gave up trying to understand it years ago :)

That may be but seeing all the different reasons for which people make their choices is still interesting.

On another note, when you find a set of ideals to be hypocritical or inconsistent why stop at no longer trying to understand? Why not build anew? From scratch if necessary.

[FlowerChild]

You can run in circles about this all day, but unless you're some gigantic exception to human nature and history, when push come to shove: you'll steal it.

Unless a person is in such a situation, theorizing about their ideal behavior under such pressure is a masturbatory exercise.

[BinoAl]

Morality, in general, is a rather hypocritical system (assuming modern judeo-christian ideals, at least), and I gave up trying to understand it years ago :)

That may be but seeing all the different reasons for which people make their choices is still interesting.

On another note, when you find a set of ideals to be hypocritical or inconsistent why stop at no longer trying to understand? Why not build anew? From scratch if necessary.

I guess I phrased that badly, when I say understand, I more mean have a set of rules that lead to a predictable system. For example, you said that life should be preserved, and that it's one of the most important things to protect. However, most of society says that sacrificing the few to save the many is an immoral act. I do agree though,. seeing the reasoning behind the choices of others is still pretty interesting :)

Id definitely steal the medicine, mainly because I couldn't care less about the pharmacy or the people who own it, but my loved ones aren't going to be screwed over by a lack of money. Hell, I've stolen in the past without saving anybody :p

theorizing about their ideal behavior under such pressure is a masturbatory exercise.

Except in bed?

[DocHussey]

I also do not feel that it is wrong for the doctor or pharmaceutical company to charge a high premium for a much needed drug. It's supply and demand. Plus, a ton of money is invested in medicine. I consider this argument more interesting.

There is a lot of money invested in the r&d of medicines in general, but how can you begin to justify the costs of a drug that's sole purpose is to save lives? The drug was designed and researched with altruistic intentions by the scientists and doctors, but all that went out the window as soon as Big Pharma gets their hands on it and it goes to the public. Greed supplants the instinctual desire that most people have towards helping their fellow man.
There was a man back in the fifties by the name of Jonas Salk, he created the IPV, Inactive Polio Vaccine. He went after polio, then an epidemic, without regard for money and fame. He wanted to destroy the virus that had destroyed millions of lives, not become rich.
As a former Corpsman, I know the value of antibiotics and other drugs on a deeply personal level. If I had to bankrupt myself to save one life, that's what I'd do, but where's the justice? You come down with bi-lung pneumonia, you need antibacterial or antiviral drugs to get over it before it scars your lungs and quite possibly kills you. If you have insurance, you might only have to cover a small co-pay of $5, but for that woman that works waitressing tables and is trying to go through college and does not have insurance, those same meds will cost her well over $100, in some cases, it could be as high as $650 (true digits here, a dose of Biaxin for massive strep infection cost me $645 plus tax).
I could continue this rant all the way through doctors and insurance companies, but I believe that my point is clear. Big Pharma isn't interested in curing disease, its interested in making money, which no matter what moral fibre you have, its just wrong.

[jorgebonafe]

theorizing about their ideal behavior under such pressure is a masturbatory exercise.

Except in bed?

Especially in bed?

[Kazuya Mishima]

He wanted to destroy the virus that had destroyed millions of lives, not become rich.

The instinctual desire for altruism does not effectively scale in modern society because of memory limits and so structuring society on a basis of altruistic impulse is just not feasible. Anyway the instinctual basis to help one's "fellow man" is predicated in the interest of profit, the profit does not have any financial dimension but a social dimension in the form of reputation.

Prestige of the scope great scientists obtain is rare and most often posthumous. Celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Micheal Jackson are able to extract social wealth and be loved by millions demonstrating the problem of trying to graft a social economy onto a system where memory limits exacerbate an accounting of cooperative endeavors. In this sense the egalitarian ideal of moving away from money somehow exacerbates disproportional accretion of social capital or Weberian "prestige" on a few as society just cannot maintain an effective accounting of hundreds of millions of other people along with teh magnitude or polarity of how much the others helped or hurt society.

As a former Corpsman, I know the value of antibiotics and other drugs on a deeply personal level. If I had to bankrupt myself to save one life, that's what I'd do, but where's the justice?

Many people signal as tremendously altruistic but in truth the fact that most of us spend a few hours a day engaging in recreation rather then living in a tent in Africa handing out aid packets or assisting medics indicates we are not really this altruistic. The truth seems to be that if we were really this altruistic there wouldn't be many people on the internet signaling it would be their intent to deny themselves the benefits of society, entertainment, free time to post on a message board associated with a game that requires a large time investment, to assist society.

Whatever the case there is no reliable index to reference the level of altruism your fellow man has, at best you can only perform this type of assessment locally so we are all in a morally hazardous position when it comes to signalling our virtues to others that can not effectively audit our behavior 24/7

[DocHussey]

There are limits to the altruism of the individual man/woman/tentacled beast from beyond the stars, but it doesn't negate the basic requirements for any sentient being. Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't simply one mans perspective, it's pretty universal, we all need in the second tier security of BODY. That translates pretty easily to medicine. For a society to flourish, these basic needs need to be met really for all members of said society. Without these being met, there is a stratification that becomes more and more apparent, which leads to strife and eventual collapse of said society. Look historically. Rome, France, Russia, Iraq. Basic needs were continually not met, so there was a revolution, which in some cases made things better, but some made things worse. The over-commercialization of America is going to bring us to yet another revolution because there's such a disparity between those that have and those that have not. Americans would rather shell out for a passport and go to CANADA for health care than spend the ridiculous fees for our own medicine.

[FlowerChild]

Russia, Iraq.

Keep politics out of this man. You're talking about modern civilizations there, and ones that were heavily interfered with by external sources, so they're poor examples of what you're talking about to begin with.

[DocHussey]

Politics... Ugh, the beginning and the end of all crap... My apologies FC.

[FlowerChild]

Politics... Ugh, the beginning and the end of all crap... My apologies FC.

No worries man. Just keep in mind these are international boards, so there's a decent chance when talking about modern countries, that there are forum members from there that may not appreciate a foreigner commenting on the state of their nation, or why it came about.

I also know that you're pushing buttons in terms of representing a viewpoint which is at the center of much political debate and hostility in your small corner of the world...which is a no go on these forums.

[Kazuya Mishima]

tentacled beast from beyond the stars,

Space faring cehpalopods ?

I’m not denying humans have needs but I am concerned that a system based on altruism applied globally or at least non-locally is problematic. Institutions like the family or small communities amplify the behavioral recursion of altruism in that you give aid to community member X, other people witness this transfer and you also are aware of this transfer. Community member X is then re-evaluated as having a debt or becoming an obligee in the social sense. If community member X begins to receive more and more aid from various sources resulting in total dependency this information can be effectively aggregated by donors of the aid and they will likely become hostile that X is not reciprocating in any form. X knows he’s being monitored for this very reason and will probably adjust his behavior or incur some future social cost, exile, assault, aid embargo. X’s behavior is regulated by the proximity of other community members inducing him to give back to that community that aided him. X is additionally regulated by a high population viscosity; he cannot exit the social system without incurring massive costs like dying in the wilderness.

In MODERN society these two environmental forces that stabilize altruism are basically INVERTED. People can enter an exit social systems rather rapidly with very low costs, in fact one has to question if we even have social systems of the like that where necessary for the evolution of calculated reciprocal altruism to begin with. People tend to isolate in their homes and much of the food, protection, entertainment comes from people you will never meet. There are also memory limits, we all cannot know and evaluate each other on a consistent basis and so altruism should be expected to break down under these environmental conditions.

So with modern society we have expanded our ability to cooperate with others but we have not proportionally expanded the system that provides a reckoning of all societal action that is either beneficial or socially destructive.

This allows a free-rider to go effectively undetected in a society that provides aid in a non-local sense, that is you do not even interact with the recipient. In small communities the recipient and the donor actually form a relationship; they get to know each other and this can become mutualistic. In modern societies the recipient of aid, if we are talking about non-local aid based institutions, is effectively invisible to the donor. The donor and the recipient never meet alienating both of them from the true foundation of altruism to begin with.

Hostility toward aid based systems takes the form of an acknowledgement of asymmetric information in that the recipient has more information than the donor. AI was always a problem even in tribal systems or primate communities but it’s exacerbated by the complexity and partitioning in modern social structures.

Those that advocate for increased altruism in society may have a genuine concern but that isn’t even evident in the sense that you could advocate for increased altruism extending the level of beneficence in a community (you’ve successfully convinced others to act this way) but at the same time be subject to being designated a hypocrite when you take the benefits of increased altruism of a society, that you yourself induced, because you are detected by members as not practicing what you preach. Altruistic communities would likely have positive feedback systems where altruism is advocated to further strengthen the communities and it would seem reasonable that this might arise from chemical events associated with experience of love for community or others, or other forms of empathy triggered by mirror neurons in some fashion. In modern society the advocate of altruism, whether it’s general concern, primal urge, or deceit that impels him cannot be effectively audited for his consistency.
If there is a shortage or an abandonment of altruism and compassion it seems a reasonable contraction based on total absence of environmental inputs that foster or stabilize the trend. If you wish to restore such a system one would have to design society to restore those inputs. That would obviously require a rather dramatic restructuring of society.

By the way I would likely steal the drug also, if only because the family member is extremely valuable to me. I would not steal the drug for a person who I never met though an risk societal retaliation.

[Daedalus1312]

These are actually very interesting answers - regardless of if we're running in circles. I'm excited to take these to class tommorow, and see what my classmates say in response.
Who said learning wasn't fun!

[Svartwolf]

The OP question is worded pretty badly IMO. you say that the life in line is someone you really care, and you are presenting the options in a way you do to understand that you can steal the drug, but the only thing that is impeding you is your perception of "right" and "wrong". which kinda leads me to ask if the question is "it's ok to preserve a life at the expense of the value of an object you are forcefully taking from other?". and to speak truth, it kinda worries me a little that the question can guarantee some discussion.

different would be the case if what you need to take is equally important to preserve something of similar value, for example, say you are stealing an organ, where what you are destroying have similar value of what you are trying to preserve? or if the scenario is more complicated, like the drug is guarded by an armed man, where the chance of succes is slim, and both failure or success could mean a life getting destroyed.

but if you ask me what i give more value, the life of a close one, or a small piece of the capital of someone, the answer for me rather obvious. we kinda put a little too much value on diverse capitals, and putting more value in that than in persons tends end in stuff like starting a war for getting profits of the armamentistic industry since there is a new-found demand of our product.