Sure. On the one hand, everything adhered to the letter of the law. On the other, he used his money to get served before other people in an otherwise similar position would have been able to do.
I personally view that as more of a failing in the system itself (why are there multiple lines to begin with when organ transport is a solved problem?), but it's not unreasonable to look at somebody exploiting that broken system and question their character.
It's the "at the expense of others" thing that makes it more morally grey, and the chain of cause and effect is short enough that people sometimes get up in arms about it.
For some other actions on some sort of badness scale, we have:
- Murdering people for your spare organs. Parts of China do this (somebody survived and escaped recently, so it's stirred things up a bit). Most people think this is very bad.
- Paying for somebody's organs (similar to prostitution at some level, though banned much more frequently than sex work -- if society is structurally so unequal that sacrificing part of your life for a pittance is actually attractive, that reflects poorly on that society, and we try to ban.the rich and powerful from using that power to create scenarios more like my first point).
- What Jobs did. It's technically legal, but he necessarily got an organ before somebody else for no other reason than that he had money. Did that somebody else survive? Who knows. If you factor in that it was actually many people who were displaced, did all of them survive? Unlikely. Organ donations are already fraught with ethical issues and strongly held convictions, and I'm not at all surprised that a number of people would be upset at this.
What’s the point of making a moral judgment about a bit of human nature that literally everyone in earth shares? It doesn’t make you or me superior to condemn it; we would do the same. So… what does “bad” even mean in this context?
Very many people don’t. We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them. We are part of a society that enables us to be what we are, why should we strive to give as little as possible in return?
(And yes, we also don’t send extra money. This is not a contradiction.)
> We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them.
Only because you don't want to put the effort in to pursuing it. If I told you you could reduce your tax bill by 20% by spinning round in your chair one time I doubt you (or anyone else) would decline.
Every entity generally seeks to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. Individuals are generally a little less extreme, in my experience, with corporations being the worst.
My taxes are not a burden on me. While on the other hand, the local politicians have sought tax cut after tax cut, causing the library to limit services, the schools to cut down on teaching staff, infrastructure maintenance delays, less funding for local social services and city events, and more.
My paying an extra 20% wouldn't fix things, as adding to the general budget would end up simply reducing taxes further, instead of everyone sharing the load.
I hate that I've starting getting involved with local politics. I would rather code.
Or, following your self-centric analysis, I would put the effort into raising my taxes by 20% since the collective benefits give me much more than what I can do individually.
There are multiple lines because when an organ comes up, it can only last so long, so a person needs to be able to get to the hospital without a certain period of time. Usually this means driving distance. When you have a private plane, the distance expands. The organ still goes to the most sick person in line, not the one with the most money.
I was at a talk with Martine Rothblatt several years back, who created a startup for 3D printed organs. They ended up also building electric helicopters to transport those organs, because the transportation bottleneck was a huge issue.
I try not to judges peoples character when they’re looking death in the face. No one really knows what they’ll do in that scenario. Most people who can save their own life will. This was the premise of the movie SAW… how far are you willing to go to save your own life? How strong is your survival instinct? Most people are never tested, and it’s easy to sit back and judge, but would you just sit back and die? How do we even know there was someone else in line behind Jobs? It could be that he got an organ that would have otherwise been wasted.
