> If my contributions were that valuable, I'd wonder if it made sense to keep me on life support just to extract my blood every two weeks.
It's a really interesting somewhat thought provoking idea. To some extent these people are valuable enough that turning them into blood factories after cerebral death is the more moral option?
I mulled over this for a while, thought deeply about it from a lot of angles. I think the only useful heuristic for thorny issues like this is to do our best to balance compassion for self and others, and encourage others to do the same.
I can see it from a "yes" perspective and from a "no" perspective, and I can find reasons to regret saying either. Agency, autonomy and compassion are critical features of the scenarios that have the least regrets.
At the bottom of that article it indicated they've successfully recreated the antibody in a lab, I hope that saves a lot of families from suffering.
On the list of "best options" for my vegetative body, this would rate fairly highly.
But yeah, like assisted suicide, there are people with non-aligned motives who could be incentivized to coerce a decision from weak/befuddled/old patients.
There are many decisions I'd like to make now, while of sound mind and body, that I would like to be respected when I am no longer able to make decisions for myself. The state allows some of them, but not all.
I think the duration makes it different, the ECMO (blood + oxygen being pumped out of the body) record according to Google is something like 554 days. That's much much longer than the typical transplant.
It's a really interesting somewhat thought provoking idea. To some extent these people are valuable enough that turning them into blood factories after cerebral death is the more moral option?