View source for Should the right to life be contingent on income distribution? Do we agree that the rich have more of a right to live than the poor?

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[[Category:Randoff (pseudonym)]]
[[Category:Slavery]]
[[Category:Markets in Organs]]
[[Category:Failures Of Libertarian Philosophy]]
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{{DES | des = Some basic questions about morailty where libertarianism fails badly. | show=}}
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I don't think that the idea that the rich do not have a right to live more by literally harvesting the organs of the desperate poor ought to be particularly controversial.
Let alone that here we are literally talking about commodifying parts of someone. How much of his body would he have to sell before we can proclaim that at that percentage what we have is slavery?
The questions that should be asked here are: Should the right to life be contingent on income distribution? Do we agree that the rich have more of a right to live than the poor? If so, at what point of poorness do we agree that that person's right to life is alienated and he no longer has it? Do we agree with slavery? If not then how do we justify the sale of a person's part but not of the person's whole? Do we agree that not only should someone's right to his organs be contingent on income distribution, but that someone's right to medical assistance (his position in the waiting list) must also be contingent on income distribution? How are the inequal rights justified? Unless the right to life is not recognised in which case one must argue why that is different from say liberty (considering that he who is born free is necessarilly also born alive, in fact the latter is a precondition of the former what with existence preceding essence and all that jazz). Even if that was conceded then how exactly do we get over the fact that the right to freedom (even in its -in my opinion completely incoherent- negative conception) is entirely contingent on life and that therefore by expropriating one's life he also expropriates his freedom? How do we get over the fact that someone dying due to this (As will inevitably be the case that his life expectancy will be decreased) means that his negative freedom is eventually diminished in favor of someone else's well-being?
Finally if our concern is utilitarian, that we need more organs, then why don't we simply legislate that the organs of those that die are to be harvested for transplantation to those that need them regardless of any disagreement of the formerly living? Such an act would certainly maximise utility and it can not offend the dead (that have no will). If we are to reject this because it supposedly violates the rights of the dead (?) then are we really saying that we consider the dead more important than the living poor so that we'd rather to sent a few more of the living to an earlier grave in order to extend the life of the rich (that they have a right to live is clearly not negotiable) because we consider the value of the lives of the desperate poor to be less significant than even the value of corpses?
This is not about the poor having the right to die faster, for a freedom is something you can discretionally excercise when an act coincedes with your genuine will regardless of external conditions and therefore presupposes a meaningful alternative. It's otherwise an indirectly imposed obligation as it is unavoidable but compelled by necessity and that state of necessity is not natural but the outcome of the specific structure of our society and thus of everyone else's social choices.
Better framed the question is whether it is just for a society to form a series of economic and social regulations that would create a state of necessity that imposes the obligation on the poor to die in favor of the rich. Is it just for society to compel the poor to die for the rich?
This is what this is about. Do persons A, B, C and D have the right to create structure X in which person E is brought to a state of necessity which compels it to decrease its life expectancy in favor of D? Can they impose on E this obligation? Or could this be a natural duty of E towards D, perhaps?
I respond to this that they don't and should they do so, A, B, C and D are all murderers. Not like murderers but actual murderers.
Because there is no difference between dragging a person into a cell wherein it perishes and building a cell around a person, meticulously avoiding directly touching it, wherein it then perishes. Insofar as that cell is formed around it, there is no difference between entering the cell and shooting the victim, letting it starve, or giving it a gun and asking it to commit suicide if it prefers to die quickly and not of starvation. Certainly the choice to die by its own hand rather than die in the trap you made for it does not legitimise its murder.
It certainly isn't any better that you will proportionally benefit from its suicide with all that it will lose.
To say that this would be a pareto improvement would be to make Saw a creative parody of the libertarian conception of the pareto principle.
Neither is the fact that the cell you yourselves created around him exists something that legitimises this one-sided "arrangement" that organically spawns from those conditions. No, that would be a reification of a very unnatural human construct and is in fact merely a reason to tear down the cell.
In conclusion. You can not agree with organ sales unless you concede that 1.) Slavery in nexum is ethical 2) There is no fundamental natural right to life or liberty (either they don't exist, are contingent on external conditions or are only privileges of specific people) 3) the members of a society have the right to organise it in such a way that the death of some of them are structurally ensured. 4) that they further have the right to make use of that certainty to exploit those condemned to death for the benefit of some of their preferred members, adding insult to murder.
Lest we forget, no matter how many people cooperate to create the conditions within which someone must by necessity starve (unless they offer to buy a few pieces of him), their individual guilt will not be extinguished.
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