(Let me give you a hypothetical scenario.
A hospital is on fire. You only have time to do one of two things before escaping - you can save a day-old infant, or you can save twenty petri dishes with frozen embryos for IVF, some of which will be disposed of. You cannot save both the infant and the petri dishes.)
Those dumb scenarios are no basis for the making of public policy. Hey, there are four men on the moon, one falls into a permanent coma. The rocket breaks down and the escape pod can only fit three. Which do you choose? Please.
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Hypothetical scenarios, also known as thought experiments, are one of the oldest and most respected methods for formulating courses of action. In fact, I have a feeling that whenever anyone makes any decision at all, the only thought process involved will be the construction of hypothetical scenarios, aside from a little old fashioned instinct and any pavlovian responses that happen to have accumulated. Perhaps some neuroscientist reading this can help me out here. Tell me, how do you do your thinking, Mr Smith? Do you get by on instinct and Pavlovian teachings alone?
Look the moon people are obviously treating the coma guy well, and the astronauts would've signed emergency release forms when they passed through moon customs. Stop being a racist prick and discriminating against the moon people and their standard of health care.
Just how viable are those frozen petri dishes going to be when you carry them out of a burning building? If I remember correctly, 20 petri dishes aren't that much to carry. Why couldn't you grab all of them and the baby?
RedHunter - They only make an escape pod for three due to budget constraints and the fact that the engineers were a huge fan of musical chairs.
Now, if Wesley was consistent, he'd pull a name out of a hat to determine who stays behind.
Winston Jen said: Redhunter, one of the conditions of my scenario is that there isn't enough TIME to save both the baby and the petri dishes with the embryos in them.
Yeah, I guess. Still pretty dumb though. I doubt the nurses would bug out and leave the babies to fend for themselves. Just having a problem with the whole scenario since I work in a hospital. Maybe the one baby was left by the parents or it was really ugly so the nurses left it behind? ;)
In the case of the burning hospital, I would save neither the infant nor the embryos. I would run around in a spastic state of panic and eventually die in the fire myself.burning building! while carrying a baby.
OK, enough joking. In your spaceship scenario, leave the guy in a coma behind. A permanent coma is, practically speaking, no different from death. There's no point in sacrificing the living to save the remains of the dead.
Now you answer the burning hospital question.
We're waiting.
And while you're at it, answer the spaceship question.
The only reason the thought of "I MUST SAVE PETRI DISHES AS WELL" would ever cross my mind while trapped in a burning building is if it occured to me that maybe there's some really, really important life-saving, disease-curing research or something going on with the petri dishes. But it wouldn't cross my mind, because there's an infant whose chances of living dwindle the more I think about fucking petri dishes.
Hmmm. That might make an interesting moral question, though. Situational impossibilities aside, which would you save? The cure for cancer, or the one infant?
Higher probability of a lawsuit if the baby dies, compared to the batch of IVF embryos.
The astronaut in a coma won't care whether he has a seat...just let him lie on the floor.
Some pilots of single-seat aircraft have been known to carry a passenger in their lap, if they needed to.
On the Petri:
On the Pod:
Oh, and thank... anything... that you aren't planning anything for NASA. Most planners plan on how to save the most lives in worst case scenarios, you plan on how to make a worst case scenario even worse.
permanent coma
Hey, there are four men on the moon, one falls into a permanent coma. The rocket breaks down and the escape pod can only fit three. Which do you choose? Please.
The guy in the coma stays behind. This is nothing new, look up the word "triage". Doctors and medics in battle do it since the dawn of time.
How do I keep the petri-dishes frozen as I run away from the fire? I'd save the infant, as it's sentient and has managed to survive to birth.
Odds are, the escape pod doesn't have monitoring equipment or a respirator for the coma guy anyway, so he'll have to stay. Stupid to have an escape pod that doesn't take all passengers.
Seems to me that Christains are ALL THE DAMNED TIME offering thought experiments that prove God, or disprove evolution, or prove that evolution is a religion, or some such noise.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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