[ExI] Medical power of attorney for cryonicsts

[John Clark]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2014  spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

>> but If you want advice a organic chemist would be much more useful than
>> a ethicists.
>>
>
> > On the contrary sir.  An organic chemist is useless to me, until I can
> be comfortable that what I am thinking about doing here is morally
> justifiable.
>

The entire point of morality is to maximize happiness, otherwise there is
no point in having it at all, so if it works then it's justified, if it
doesn't then it's not. So does bexarotene work? I don't know, you'd need to
ask somebody who knows one hell of a lot more chemistry than I do, and a
professional ethicist probably doesn't even know as much chemistry as I do.
Of course in some cases, this one included, nobody can be certain that
certain actions won't result in more misery not less, so all you can do is
make the most rational judgement you can knowing that because of the
limited amount information available  there is always the possibility that
you are wrong. But if you never took action until you knew with certainty
the full consequences of it you'd never perform any actions at all.

>I could use the advice of a good medical ethicist
>

Why? I'm sure they have opinions, most of them contradictory, but what
actual facts do they know that you do not? I think you do yourself a
disservice, a astronomer knows more astronomy than you do and a chemist
knows more chemistry than you do but I don't think a medical ethicist is
more moral than you are; in fact if I couldn't make my own decisions
because my brain was approaching liquid nitrogen temperatures and there was
a problem of some sort with my cryonic suspension I'd far sooner trust you
to decide what to do next than the most ethical ethicist in the world.

> I already threw out the possibility that if this works and helps Alz.
> patients, others who are not Alz. patients would take the stuff to try to
> get smarter.  But my notion on how this works suggests it wouldn’t help at
> all if you don’t have beta amyloid plaques in the brain, but it would
> destroy some perfectly healthy thyroids, creating a pile of new problems.
>

You can't (or at least you shouldn't) spend your life worrying about how
true facts you have found might effect very stupid people.

> If on the other hand, we run this test on a willing and informed patient
> and see that it does help, I feel morally obligated to report it.  Wouldn’t
> you?
>

Yes, and I'd feel morally obligated to report if it didn't help too.

> The way I envision it, we should be able to create a system of
> simultaneous differential equations to describe the good/bad-ness of
> experimenting with a theoretical therapy.
>

That was the dream of Leibniz, he thought that one day there would be no
need of war or any other form of conflict or controversy, he said "there is
no need to argue about science, art, religion, law etc. Let us take our
symbols, sit down and then say ‘gentlemen, let us calculate’ ". Of course
Leibniz lived long before the discoveries of Godel and Turing.

>  I could use the advice of a good medical ethicist on what I did there
> and what the LA Times did.
>

You did the ethical thing in reporting the error, and the LA Times did the
ethical thing in quickly correcting their error when you pointed it out to
them.

> My questions are these: if I have a candidate who is informed and
> consenting, is it ethically acceptable for me to proceed with bexarotene
> experiments?
>

Certainly, it's his life and if that's what he wants to do then that ends
the moral debate as far as I'm concerned.  And if it turns out to be a bad
decision then it was his bad decision not yours.

> If so, and we find the results positive, is it OK for me (or mandatory
> for me) to publicize the results
>

Yes.

> knowing that it may put some desperate patients at great risk, and invite
> abuse with possibly fatal results?
>

Yes.

 > If yes for the first question and no for the second, do not these two
> results contradict each other?
>

Yes.

> If yes and yes, are those results contradictory?
>

No.

  John K Clark
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