On the Misery of Bioethics: Good v Evil IV

Opportunities Always Flow Upstream

From the perspective of Bioethics of Displacement, understood as love of belonging, the misery of bioethics lies in the cycles of inequality and the obscurantism coming from intersectionality talibans and the market-will-solve-it crusaders.

Let’s start with inequality. Bioethics usually deals with informed consent but when the finances get involved both information and consent go to hell in a handbasket. I will elaborate it with an example. Plenty of deaths produced by car pollution and tobacco are insidiously imposed: even in well-developed countries the green and public transportation is so scarce many times that they must go to work driving an old used car while smoking, a premature vice promoted by the twenty years ago ubiquitous ads promising a fancy lifestyle. If they had had more info, many heavy smokers wouldn’t have consented to their first puff. Likewise, if we would have more and better info on where our money goes, then greener mobility could be rightly assessed. This mess won’t be repaired by Shell, Aramco and Philip Morris among others, quite the opposite, if you feel identified with the example above there are real chances that your black anointed lungs will be offered as sacrifice to these postmodern biz gods in an operating table that you will pay badly for. Or perhaps not. The support to euthanasia in places like the US is strong today (Brenan, 2018). And it’s not only about dying with dignity, it’s about bending down the cost curve of public healthcare! (Dobken, 2018) Many places have offered physician assisted death: California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Hawaii, Montana, Washington State, the District of Columbia, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Canada (Dobken 2018). The Canadian academic supporters of this policy states that:

However, the money obtained from saving resources in persons hopelessly ill has not risen welfare simply because the end-of-life healthcare burden is not the reason behind the public administration straits when offering medical services (Silver & Hyman, 2018).

The core of financial bioethics is how finances are a pretext for bending down bioethics and stealing vulnerable people its share of healthcare opportunities. It was brightly exposed by Tom Koch when criticised the “lifeboat ethics” parable (Koch, 2012, pp. 77–79). Shortly, it means that public healthcare is like a lifeboat with fewer places than people in the water, so some of them will die. Let’s play with this lifeboat with the parody mode on. The cox always starts up in the lifeboat (likely because her father was a cox, too) and must use his influence in order to obtain the desired crew. In the early versions of lifeboat games the cox hit with a row in the head of the unsuitable oarsmen trying to get or remain into the boat but in some rare cases the cox fell to the sea during the struggle. So, a cunning bioethicist, I mean a better tactician, was employed and the postmodern ruler, I mean the savvy cox, convinced the people floating around to choose those who must be left to drown. Now, the reason why the ship is sinking (does it? really?) and the reason why the lifeboats have no more places is a political capital. It can be spent to blame the people floating in the water for not smiling enough in their part-time job and, as a result, they have attracted a wave of universal-quantum-magneto-psycho-negativism that has put them in the place they deserve (Price, 2008, pp. 19–36; Damien, 2008; Kreidler, 2007).

A man said to the universe: