Harvest organs from living, healthy, poor donors. Go to a poor country and find batches of 100 people earning $1 a day who are willing to give up their lives with probability .01 in return for 20 years wages. You will have to pay out $730,000 per batch, but in return you get the healthy organs from a living donor which should be worth a lot more than this. Run the operation as a charity to reduce negative publicity, and truthfully stress that the prime goal of the charity is to help the poorest of the poor.
Most people do not consider “perform a single step which has an X chance of death” and “perform two steps, one of which is an X chance, and another of which kills with certainty the person chosen in the first step” to be equivalent.
Why does my idea violate deontological ethics if I get the legal approval of the relevant governments and individuals? Would it violate deontological ethics for me to build a factory in a poor country in which workers are knowlingly exposed to a small risk of death?
Deontology is funny like that. Making a one-in-a-million chance of each of a million people dying is fine, but killing one is not. Not even if you make it a lottery so each of them has a one-in-a-million chance of dying, since you’re still killing them.
Would it violate deontological ethics for me to build a factory in a poor country in which workers are knowlingly exposed to a small risk of death?
You can’t treat “deontological ethics” as if that phrase gives specific rules. It refers to an entire class of ethical systems.
However, you can look at various real world systems and cases to make predictions about how your factory would be received. It is common in a situation like this for people to believe that if you know that there is a risk, and you do not tell people about the risk, then you are morally (and often legally) negligent. If you do tell people of the risk, and then people get hurt, people will find you morally (and often legally) negligent, because most people actually hold teleological ethic beliefs on an emotional level.
tl;dr—neither of these cases necessarily violate deontological ethical systems. Get a good lawyer anyway.
tissue typing is difficult and rare to find a match.
this would probably discourage the creation of synthetic organs that would actually solve the problem without a need for removing the organs of other people.
What do you do when the ‘winner’ of the lottery runs away? The people who sign up will be weighted towards those who believe that they can escape, and once you have won the contest, the calculation becomes a risk of 100%, not 1%, so the motivation to escape is high.
Politically, asking people from a very poor country to accept that people from rich countries (or perhaps even worse, a rich upper class) are taking their countrymen apart for spare pieces is almost certainly going to increase the risk of public unrest.
And finally, while this is a solution, it is probably not the best or most workable. I suspect that you could get nearly equivalent outcomes in ROI and end up helping more people in both countries if you either paid people for becoming organ donors registered at the local hospital and with a contract specifying that you get the organs, or alternatively, paid families post-death for rights to organs. This might result in a delay in getting your first batch, and would mean more paperwork and more in depth ties with the local medical systems, but would cause much less social/political brouhaha.
However, I do support you setting up your foundation simply so that when someone proposes the solution in the above paragraph, people consider it to be the sane option :-)
What do you do when the ‘winner’ of the lottery runs away?
Before I give anyone money I inject him with something that’s either harmless or incapacitating. I immediately put an incapacitated person in a chemically induced coma, and he never regains consciousness.
However, I do support you setting up your foundation simply so that when someone proposes the solution in the above paragraph, people consider it to be the sane option :-)
Fly the whole living, healthy, poor person to the rich country and replace the person who needs new organs. Education costs are probably less than the medical costs, but probably it’s wise to also select for more intelligent people from the poor country. With an N-year pipeline of such replacements there’s little to no latency. This doesn’t even require a poor country at all; just educate suitable replacements from the rich country and keep them healthy.
Even if we ignored the ethical problems with this system, imagine the horrifically creative ways people would find to abuse it. Especially as those countries are usually also famous for high corruption and occasional ethnic cleansings.
Harvest organs from living, healthy, poor donors. Go to a poor country and find batches of 100 people earning $1 a day who are willing to give up their lives with probability .01 in return for 20 years wages. You will have to pay out $730,000 per batch, but in return you get the healthy organs from a living donor which should be worth a lot more than this. Run the operation as a charity to reduce negative publicity, and truthfully stress that the prime goal of the charity is to help the poorest of the poor.
Most people do not consider “perform a single step which has an X chance of death” and “perform two steps, one of which is an X chance, and another of which kills with certainty the person chosen in the first step” to be equivalent.
Most of the world has deontological ethics, not consequentialist.
Why does my idea violate deontological ethics if I get the legal approval of the relevant governments and individuals? Would it violate deontological ethics for me to build a factory in a poor country in which workers are knowlingly exposed to a small risk of death?
Since when “legal” == “ethical”?
No. What violates deontological ethics is not you running this program—it’s the actual killing at the end that matters.
Deontology is funny like that. Making a one-in-a-million chance of each of a million people dying is fine, but killing one is not. Not even if you make it a lottery so each of them has a one-in-a-million chance of dying, since you’re still killing them.
You can’t treat “deontological ethics” as if that phrase gives specific rules. It refers to an entire class of ethical systems.
However, you can look at various real world systems and cases to make predictions about how your factory would be received. It is common in a situation like this for people to believe that if you know that there is a risk, and you do not tell people about the risk, then you are morally (and often legally) negligent. If you do tell people of the risk, and then people get hurt, people will find you morally (and often legally) negligent, because most people actually hold teleological ethic beliefs on an emotional level.
tl;dr—neither of these cases necessarily violate deontological ethical systems. Get a good lawyer anyway.
EDIT: Fixed typo.
Several issues;
I didn’t think that many organs were needed.
tissue typing is difficult and rare to find a match.
this would probably discourage the creation of synthetic organs that would actually solve the problem without a need for removing the organs of other people.
Leaving aside all that ethical stuff....
What do you do when the ‘winner’ of the lottery runs away? The people who sign up will be weighted towards those who believe that they can escape, and once you have won the contest, the calculation becomes a risk of 100%, not 1%, so the motivation to escape is high.
Politically, asking people from a very poor country to accept that people from rich countries (or perhaps even worse, a rich upper class) are taking their countrymen apart for spare pieces is almost certainly going to increase the risk of public unrest.
And finally, while this is a solution, it is probably not the best or most workable. I suspect that you could get nearly equivalent outcomes in ROI and end up helping more people in both countries if you either paid people for becoming organ donors registered at the local hospital and with a contract specifying that you get the organs, or alternatively, paid families post-death for rights to organs. This might result in a delay in getting your first batch, and would mean more paperwork and more in depth ties with the local medical systems, but would cause much less social/political brouhaha.
However, I do support you setting up your foundation simply so that when someone proposes the solution in the above paragraph, people consider it to be the sane option :-)
Before I give anyone money I inject him with something that’s either harmless or incapacitating. I immediately put an incapacitated person in a chemically induced coma, and he never regains consciousness.
Generalized, this can be my life’s work.
Fly the whole living, healthy, poor person to the rich country and replace the person who needs new organs. Education costs are probably less than the medical costs, but probably it’s wise to also select for more intelligent people from the poor country. With an N-year pipeline of such replacements there’s little to no latency. This doesn’t even require a poor country at all; just educate suitable replacements from the rich country and keep them healthy.
Even if we ignored the ethical problems with this system, imagine the horrifically creative ways people would find to abuse it. Especially as those countries are usually also famous for high corruption and occasional ethnic cleansings.
This proves too much since it’s a reason to not trade with poor people in poor countries else they be made slaves.
You mean like calling for a boycott of products made in third-world sweatshops? :-D
Healthy people earning 1$ a day? How certain can you be of your choice?
Medical exams. And sadly there are parts of the world where healthy young adults do earn $1 a day or less.