[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2020 at 5:00 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> What happened to tough love?

Tough love is more a battle cry of conservatives when they want to
ignore some problem, no?

> OK, so some people are not happy. Too damned bad.  It will cost
> lives if we loosen a lot.  There are times when we should ignore
> our empathy and do the right thing, and this is one of them.   bill w

But Bill K is saying some of the shift in attention to COVID is
costing lives. One would have to decide here what's more important:
reducing deaths from COVID versus reducing deaths from these other
causes. Utilitarians might argue whichever saves more lives is the
better policy.

This reminds me of a scenario once laid out by a Navy psychiatrist in
a debate here in Seattle. He said some healthcare workers argued
against taking alcoholics into the ER (A&E) because, after all, they
(the alcoholics) did it to themselves, so it's their own fault if
they're sick. That sounds like 'tough love.' The psychiatrist pointed
out that the same argument might be made for many patients in the ER.
the guy with the heart attack probably brought it on through a
sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. The kid with the compound fracture
from rock-climbing shouldn't have been taking those risks. Etc. They
did it to themselves, in a manner of speaking: their life choices
helped put them in the ER. But would you argue they're taking up
valuable healthcare resources that might be better used for patients
who didn't do it to themselves? (And who would those be? The list
would be fairly short, I think.)

Regards,

Dan
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