imagin that a year from now it was discovered ‘life force’ was a real thing and could be stored and transfered. so you could take a year of life out of one person and give it to another.
what would be the moral implication of such a development? would it be moral to ever transfer any lifeforce for any reason?
would ‘blood drive’ style events be ethical? take 6 months from people who willingly participate to give to dieing people.
would ANY buying or selling of lifeforce ever be acceptable? bill gates giveing some guy 50 million for 50 years probobly seems unethical… but him giveing several thousand people a million.
any other ethical questions this raises? any other comments?
This would presumably be subject to legislation and ethical analysis similar to organ donation.
We’ve had ethics of Highlander, a life-ray and God-knows-what-else recently. Is this a competition?
If so, may I enter with an “Ethics of Peter Pan holding within him Spock’s Soul fighting pre-crucifixion Christ with one foot tied to the off switch of a life-support machine sustaining a baby Hitler” thread?
But from one viewpoint, the older you get, the more valuable time is to you, so the more you’ll pay. Imagine an 80 year old man paying 1 million dollars for .1 years from 10 people. Would you sacrafice 37 days of your life for 1 million dollars? I probably would. Then I’d by time from people younger than me:
Older people have more money and less time and younger people have less time and more money. It seems like there could exist a life-force market with arbitrage. People who strike it rich in the market could live 500 years and those who loose will die soon (now!).
It seems like it would be hard to prevent a market from forming if this ever happened. If you are 40 and you sell a year to an 80 year old for 1 million and you then buy a year from a 20 year-old for 500k, then wouldn’t you do it?
Maybe it could even be like a whole money system. Time is money, right? You go to a bank and get a loan of some time, but you better make good use of it or else you’ll end up loosing time from interest.
Would people create babys just to extract their life-force and take it all? Then that would certainly flood any market and would promote bad ethics (killing babys). Every time you bought life-force you would be contributing to the killing of babys. you could get 75 years from a normal baby, so that would be good, right?
So, I think it would be an interesting thing economically, but if baby-killing ensued then that would be bad. Reproduction would drop but it wouldn’t be so important because nobody would die. You could have a couple of kids and then have a few to keep. But the sort of mantenance needed would be strange. Every 50 years or so you’d have to have two children and kill them to survive. Very sick.
Big difference between this and giving blood, more bllod is made by the body, hence a renewable source. In your situation the life force is not renewable. If something like this were to come about I think it would made illegal for that reason alone.
would it be illegal though? over each and every circumstances? maybe casualty, but as a medical tool it would be the biggest advance ever…
and what if it could revive the newly dead? how would that effect the sentenceing of murderers? seems more just than the electiric chair… you kill a person… if your caught they get your life instead of you. but what if you were a serial killer?
(and yes, this can be an analogy from everything from stem cells to organ donation to meat eattting, thats why I brought it up… its a good general topic that can bring things to light about more mundane topics)
I’d make a fortune by discovering a way to use turnip tops and cotton wool to synthesise the life force energy, then I’d sell the secret to the Martians for One Meee-lion pounds.
That would be pretty cool, if it worked. (Hey, why not? The life-force ray idea pretty much threw reality out the window.) Raise a cow to adulthood, then withdraw most of its lifeforce right before you turn it into hamburger. We’d have vast livestock/lifeforce farms. Sweet!
Jeff