Wednesday, August 04, 2004

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | To urgh is human: "The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight"

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

"I had a one-in-four-thousand chance of dying," Kravinsky says. "But my recipient had a certain death facing her. I'd be valuing my life at four thousand times hers if I let consideration of mortality sway me." The young woman who got Kravinsky's kidney, a twenty-nine-year-old African-American, tells Parker, "It was so surreal. You're going about your life, and then you get this phone call.... It was such an overwhelming thing, such an awesome thing, I wanted to meditate on it on my own." When Kravinsky went home, four days after his kidney was removed, Parker reports, "he was wondering if he should give away his other kidney"—and live on dialysis. [...] Through it all, Kravinsky has kept up his intense scrutiny of what makes a life worth living. "It isn't that I think people are evil" for not acting altruistically, he says. "But it's a fact that our actions, in some sense our thoughts, let some people live and some people die."

There is also a brief interview with Mr. Kravinsky at CNN:
CNN.com: Kravinsky Transcript

Here is another profile for the Associated Press:
SF Gate: Zell Kravinsky