I’m guessing none of you has seen Jupiter Ascending. A key plot point in the movie involves harvesting life essence so that the elite can stay young and healthy. I think outright harvesting is immoral, but if I could shorten my life by a few years and help my child? I would do that.
I’ve seen it. It is based on a true story that occurred a decade ago in Romania, not Russia.
I’m kidding, of course. For me, this type of movies are as forgettable as the popcorn I eat during the show.
Lots of times, the popcorn is far more memorable.
Jesus, I was just considering editing that part so that the reply should not sound too harsh and then your answer popped up. Discourse gets scary sometimes.
So does discourse.
[shudder] No, an unconsenting infant would be evil, not grey. If one were to volunteer onesself, that would be fine, voluntolding a convicted criminal/political prisoner [like apparently China takes organs from the prisoner population. As an AB Negative, I would not trust myself to stay alive and unharvested if I ran afoul of the law in China and ended up in jail…]
Now if one was on death row, and then decided to donate themselves to someone specific who paid for it to the family [running afoul of our no profit from crime thing] that would be different.
I can only imagine the amount of PAC and lobbyist money ensuring that the death penalty be instituted in every possible jurisdiction, and how low the bar would be for crimes to be eligible for the death penalty.
And when you run out of the ones who are obviously detrimental to society, but still want to live forever, do you keep upping the crimes to which “draining” is a punishment?
What if you tweak the idea to remove the one-to-one aspect?
Every person has this mysterious ‘essence’ that can be used to heal every disease. The good part is that the properly harvested and processed essence from a single person is enough to cure ONE HUNDRED people.
The bad part is that the harvesting necessarily kills the donee.
Would we as a society be willing to ‘harvest’ the people on death row if we can save one hundred lives per dead prisoner?
Is it a humane way to die? If the death row inmates are going to be killed anyway, you may as well do it in a way that saves other lives.
Of course we would. We as a society are willing to do a great many things that we shouldn’t do. Your question would be better if it was “SHOULD we as a society…?” And the answer to that is no - it’s far too slippery of a slope in putting people on death row that don’t belong there.
However, I think if we’re set on finding sources of essence to harvest, the terminally ill would probably be our best bet. And that can become pretty slippery when we start determining what “terminal” or even “ill” means.
Sure, and we, as a society, would also make sure that there are enough people on death row to keep all the “law abiding” healthy.
Don’t we already deal with these issues with organ transplants? I don’t see widespread problems with people being terminated for their organs.
Not that death is involved, but otherwise that’s basically the premise (indeed, the whole story) behind The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Which I am sure was a fine story in its day, but is presently only considered great because people have been told it’s great, and if you were to try and submit something like that to a sci-fi/fantasy magazine today, you would receive a form rejection after about six months of going unread in the slush pile and thirty seconds or less of cursory review. Unless of course you’re famous, in which case you can write whatever you want, get it published, and have it be called brilliant.
Sorry, what were we talking about again?
Oh, right. This kind of moral quandary, in one form or another, is neither new nor relegated to fiction. As I said up thread, this draining of the life force from many so a few can prosper could be taken as a metaphor for many aspects of human society going back to pre-history and up until the present (and most certainly going into the foreseeable future at least).
Unfettered free market capitalism, for instance.
I was thinking more along the lines of intelligent beings of higher intelligence such as other human beings.
You do make an excellent point however that we are in fact draining a type of life from other beings. With that said not many people thinks its and ethical dilemma to eat a nice tasty cheese burger.
I think what your talking about is more physical nutrients though. I assumed in the film and tv show that what was being drained was their spirits or souls not just the physical body.
Count me as one who thinks it is an ethical dilemma to eat cheese burgers. If we have no problem eating animals, why do we have a problem eating humans? Is it because animals are too ‘dumb’ to complain?
If the Skeksis from the Dark Drystal need some kind of ‘life-force’ to support their own lives, maybe they should domesticate animals of some sort and drain them, instead of bothering the Gelfings and other sentient races. Or they could just go vegan and drain the life-force of plants…
We have a problem with humans being eaten because the slippery slope from there to me being eaten is pretty darn short. Persons willing to eat sentient nonhumans are pretty dangerous too, because maybe to them eating people is eating people and we’re all people. From there the less sentient/personlike the thing being et is, the longer the slope to eating humans is and the better it is. A person isn’t likely to start eating humans just because they’re eating cows.
If we are to presume that the universe presented is a logical one, the approach you describe would be easier as well, since crops don’t run away from you. Which suggests that using crops wouldn’t work, otherwise they’d be using them. Presumably their process needs a minimum amount of intelligence or ‘soul’ to be present to work properly.
That, or they’re just evil.
I wonder how much of the plot was borrowed from Larry Niven’s stories about transplantation and ‘organlegging?’ Of course, Niven probably got part of the idea from someone else too.
Anyway, in that world, transplants were easy, error-free, and the key to eternal life. The flip side of that was that damned near every crime had the death penalty.
I was curious about death row inmates in the US donating organs. Apparently it is not specifically illegal but there are a number of practical problems that makes it next to impossible to achieve. There have not yet been any transplants approved for someone given the death sentence. One of the main issues is that the organs need to be harvested while they are still viable and that makes it difficult to define the cause of death as being from the lethal injection rather than the removal of the organs. If the cause of death is considered to be from the organ removal, that puts the surgeon in a tricky spot.
What would be evil is if they could easily sustain themselves by harvesting the ‘life-energy’ of crops, and they just hadn’t tried it.
A bit like meat-eating, really.