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Thread: I think Sumption's position is rather intellectually dishonest. Medical resources are limited (more so under this government) but they will always ultimately have some limit. We therefore accept that they have to be allocated in some way. They're currently allocated /1
to provide the best chance of saving or improving life, not based on the relative "value" (whatever that means) of a life. The dishonesty in the argument is in saddling the hypothetical medic with a difficult choice- but the choice is always an "easy" one if you accept /2
Sumption's subjective prejudice. The familiar question is of who gets the ventilator, the 90-year-old or the teenager. These comparisons of course lack any specifics about the individual. But we are invited to assume that the teenager has a long life ahead /3
possibly of great personal benefit and of benefit to society and that the 90-year-old, whatever their antecedents, is rightly second in the queue. The premise is that each person therefore has a relative "value" and that that example demonstrates it. /4
The premise ignores the alternative and far more plausible argument for prioritising the teenager: that without treatment both may die and that therefore prioritising the "lower chance" patient (assuming that is the 90-year-old) risks two deaths rather than one. /5
What Sumption is happy to do is to explore difficult choices, but not more difficult ones. If two patients had identical chances (how on earth would we really ever know?) of survival and both were the same age, yet one was a higher rate tax payer, and the other one homeless /6
who then would receive priority? Why should the choice be anything else but random? If it is not random then the choice must be rational. If the choice isn't clinically determined then it must be something else. But what? Sumption must accept that his judgement is /7
one which can only be a highly subjective and fairly meaningless value judgement. Is it about economic worth? What if the homeless person has children and the tax-payer is a criminal? Is it about community? What if one patient has 2 children and another has 3? /8
I don't accept there is any stone cold genius logic going on here from the man with the funny hair. He's using easy difficult examples, readily explicable by other rationales, to make some shock-jock, magazine-style point about "value", which he could not define if he tried. /9.
