Machete234 wrote:So there is allready a tax on alcohol and cigarettes and exactly the people who use alc+cig have to pay it.
Isnt this more just than to deny somebody with bad teeth a free treatment. (You cant really say what is the cause of the bad teeth)
You could give everyone free dental care. In a perfect world, resources wouldn't be limited. But the cost for helping those with bad teeth probably dramatically increases the expenses of the dental care sector..so unless resources were unlimited, you could probably help more people if you chose to charge extra from those who neglected their toothbrushing.
You made a good points about exercising, but of course there are ways to exercise(like in 1984) which are so boring, that you couldn't really hurt yourself doing it.
Licho: A computer has no free will because it's not self-aware. Most animals are incapable of reasoning because that takes self-awareness imho. Most animals are not actually self-aware. To test self-awareness, you put a creature in front of the mirror. Can the creature understand that it is seeing itself, or does it think that it sees another one of its kind?
Some animal species have passed that test, those are, all the great apes, elephants, orcas, dolphins, and the european magpie(pretty cool since it's a very common bird, crafty little bastards if you ever watched them for long).
With sufficient common sense(those things we all take for granted, e.g. 1+1=2) you could make decisions based on reasoning. Most people think they are abundantly gifted with common sense, give a man 3 wishes and he would probably never wish for more common sense. The most common wishes would probably have something to do with the groin region, wallet region or satisfying a desire.
Now common sense is more or less the same as reasoning, it's then unlikely that everyone is wrong about having it, which would mean that everyone is equally gifted with it, and the main difference is how we choose to use our reasoning.
This implies that we could all make the same kind of good choices, but some choose not to, probably out of hereditary reasons or because of their environment. But the act of choosing one option is in itself only possible if you have free will. In animals without self-awareness, you don't see one animal running in the opposite direction of the rest of the herd when they see food, everyone runs in the same direction. Likewise a non-quantum computer, being a certain machine state and given one input, should and can only produce one output(at least in theory, if no component fails, and the computation executed is proven to be formally correct, that is, no human error). But humans, having free will, could react in any number of ways, if we were machines, we would be flawed in that way. This is not because our instincts are so much more complex than other animals, it's because we have some processes going on in our brain that allow us to reason with ourselves, and others of our kind.
I am with you there that nobody would survive very well on their own, of course everyone is contributing in their way, and must get something back. That is what money is good for. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, we have been cooperating since when we first came on this planet, because cooperation increases our total productivity = output of the human race. More productivity for us then means more chances for procreation(usually the goal of an organism).
But money is actually more than just a tool, it's also maybe the closest thing we have to a measurement of an individual's productivity, or at least how much society deems fit to reward that person for their perceived productivity. If the purpose of cooperation is heightened productivity, and if then money is an expression of productivity, why should any other individual who is less productive, dispose of the money of those more productive? The productive man/woman, being a productive person, would use his/her money to maximize productivity better than the less productive. So then in a society, any event where a more productive member gives up their money for the rest, is an example of altruism. If so, then he would actually be surviving better not quite on his own, but with a subset of the population, containing other productive persons who could also imagine surviving without the rest. So it's not actually true what you say that everyone needs the rest of society to survive.
Teutooni: Of course the rich man should share, but he should also get tax deductions if he chooses to indulge in a healthy lifestyle. He will be less of a burden on society than his copy the rich man who doesn't live a healthy lifestyle.
The last question you had, is very good, I haven't quite decided yet. Probably the addict should/could never be held responsible for anything he/she does, since his/her reasoning would be too impaired from being addicted. The individual's own application/lack of application of reason being the criteria for deciding who gets free health care.
Machete234:
I am actually making the case that you guys are the ones with the simplified theory, because you are assuming that we have the resources to give everyone free health care, but if we did, there would be no need to discuss about it. Nobody would let someone else die unless they had no choice. The system I am in favor of is a system that is moral in 3 ways, 1) it makes the individual responsible for his conscious decisions 2) it helps the greatest amount of people. 3) promotes quality before quantity, so really really sick people(who are not to blame for their sickness) would get the best care possible.
