Pinker and Wright: Is Morality Just Something We Make Up?

Peter Singer on Rationing Health Care

Princeton philosophy professor, Peter Singer, appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation and spoke with Neil Conan about rationing health care. Here's just a taste. Click here to read the transcript or listen online.

SINGER: It would have been much cheaper to save extra life there than some of the things that we already do in other cases, where we're spending a lot on drugs, for example, for people in the last year of life who might get a lot of drugs at a vast cost that does very little to extend their life. So that's just another example of how we're rationing now, but we're doing it in an inefficient way that means that many people die unnecessarily because we're not sort of open and honest enough with ourselves about the rationing....
[....]
SINGER: .... U.S. government agencies, like the Department of Transportation, have to put a figure, a dollar figure, on the value of a life because they have to decide how much to spend to, let's say, rebuild a road where there's been an accident black spot, and they can predict that over the next 10 years, let's say, three people will be killed unless they change it. And currently, the Department of Transportation's figure is much higher than that one million that your caller mentioned. It's actually about $5 million to spend to save a life, and often I think we could save many more lives if we covered the uninsured.

And here is Singer's New York Times article from back in July, mentioned in the interview, called "Why We Must Ration Health Care."

Martha Nussbaum on Youtube

It's a relatively old interview (look at how young Bill Moyers looks); but it was just uploaded to Youtube yesterday.

Moyers: What do you take that phrase to mean, the notion of "a livable life"?

Nussbaum: ... life has many different parts... and these abilities and activities are not entirely under people's control at all times....On this view, a person is like a plant, something that is fairly sturdy but is always in need of support from the surrounding society. And the political leader in that image is like a gardener who has to tend the plant. And I think if you see human life that way and you think of the role of politics as providing conditions of support for all the richly diverse elements in a full human life, then that does have consequences for the way you are going to think.

See the video for more.