Tuesday 18 August 2009

A profound moral dilemma!

Annie Fox has a moral dilemma for you:

    You have been given six months to live unless a suitable liver can be found. You are a strange blood type and five months have past - no suitable donor is found - the clock keeps ticking.
    Finally in Wellington a particularly bureaucratic civil servant sticks his head too deeply into the trough, inhales and starts choking. He staggers around his sea-view office until, blinded by his own short-sightedness, he trips over the his latest economic-strangulation legislation and tangles himself in his own red tape. An ambulance is called but he dies a slow, painful death on the way to the hospital, where they find his donor card and harvest his organs - a perfect match has been found.
    So here’s you dilemma: Do you accept his liver?

A dilemma indeed!

19 comments:

Russell W said...

Yes, I’d take the *donation* so can I live & at the same time help them with their atonement.

matt said...

Sorry, what's the dilemma? Isn't this the bureaucrat's one chance to make a positive contribution? I'd consider denying him this chance to save my life why?

I've obviously missed something.

Anonymous said...

I would refuse.

It is against my principles to do otherwise as civil servants are evil people engaging in evil activities.

They are in the same category as concentration camp guards claiming they were 'only following orders'.

To turn around and say "oh, all is forgiven because I may live"..(and ignoring all the tax dollars stolen from hardworking capitalists, all the rules and regulations enforced, all the busybody-ism, all the delight the civil servant took in stuffing up people's lives).. is rather like a concentration camp guard saying "we did not send 50,000 people to gas chambers at the camp, it was only 31,000" and that somehow being a plea for clemency! ha ha!

twr said...

I assume the word "accept" means you have been offered it voluntarily by someone. The bureaucrat has stopped being a human with human rights and is now a piece of meat. I can't see much of a moral dilemma with it, especially if you decide to voluntarily show your thanks to the family who presumably approved the donation by buying them a token of gratitude.

Anonymous said...

The donors family should auction it on TradeMe and sell it to the lib that's prepared to be the highest bidder.

Why fritter around with philanthropy when we have capitalism ?

Adolf Fiinkensein said...

You accept the liver, on the proviso that when next there is a change of government the liver will not suddenly renege and reject you.

sagenz said...

Of course you should. Look on it as a partial tax refund

Willie said...

Take the liver.

Drink copious amounts of whisky.

MacDoctor said...

Ahhh, payback!

LGM said...

What's the dilemma anyway?

LGM

DenMT said...

What a silly question. Would anyone really make a decision based on ideological grounds to reject a donor organ? Hardly.

DenMT

(PS: Night City Elijah... How about you send me an email with the receipt to the donation you sent to the Greens - davedrawslines@gmail.com - no more excuses, eh?)

DenMT said...

The more I think about it, the sadder this is. It is just a blunt foil for sniggering bureaucrat-haters to speculate on how much more superior they are than these lower lifeforms.

I am sure some of you even think you are serious with the above, so consider the converse: Those of you who are donors; would you consider limiting the donation of your organs to a limited cohort of approved recipients? IE no socialists, greenies, etc.

The original post was anything but a moral dilemma. It was just a cheapshot.

DenMT

Oswald Bastable said...

You have to wait for a public servant to die before you harvest their organs?

Fancy that!

twr said...

DenMT - you make a good point. I'm listed as a donor, but I sure as hell wouldn't want any of my organs to be used to prolong the life of a greenie. I'm taking myself off the list just in case.

Peter Cresswell said...

I think Oswald has successfully cut the dilemma's Gordian knot with this comment:

"You have to wait for a public servant to die before you harvest their organs?"

Good point. The question is set up all wrong. We shouldn't have to wait for the bureaucrat to die. :-)

Peter Cresswell said...

DEN: Don't be so bloody precious. If you can't laugh at bureaucrats, then who can you laugh at, eh?

Anonymous said...

Den should realise that Annie Fox had another post about donors which gained a lot of comment from people saying they would not be keen on donating to socialists, poor people, foreigners (etc)

Richard McGrath said...

I agree with Anon - there should be a free market in body organs - which means people could sell off one kidney if they liked. Of course they would want to be confident the remaining kidney was in good working order first.

I would be very wary of transplanting the brain of anyone who worked as a bureaucrat in a non-core government service into another person's head.

Shane Pleasance said...

Heart transplants from civil servants or MP's?