CIN wrote: ↑July 4th, 2022, 7:14 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑June 26th, 2022, 9:49 pm
CIN wrote: ↑June 26th, 2022, 7:11 pm
Leontiskos wrote: ↑June 24th, 2022, 12:33 am
CIN seems to think that if we ignore someone who needs help then we are failing to treat them as an end in themselves. Rather, the truth is that when we ignore someone we are not "treating" them at all. We are not treating them as a means or an end.
You are failing to treat them as an object deserving of moral consideration. Since they do deserve moral consideration, your failing to so treat them is immoral.
Whether or not it is immoral, it is not failing to treat them as an end in themselves, and that is what we are discussing. As @Good_Egg rightly pointed out, failure to treat someone as an end in themselves occurs when we treat them as a means (and we usually think of this happening in an overtly selfish way).
I think we may have to abandon this discussion, because you and I cannot agree on what it means to treat someone as an end in themselves. I hold that treating someone as an end in themselves means taking into consideration the effect on them of our actions when choosing how to act. By my definition, you are failing to treat the five unhealthy patients as ends in themselves, because you ignore the effect on them of not taking the healthy patient's organs.
I would consider an alternative view, according to which treating someone as end on themselves means acting in their interests. In that case your position would still be wrong, because clearly if the choice is between acting in five people's interests or one person's interests, you should act in the five people's interests. What it would boil down to, on this definition, is that the surgeon cannot in fact treat everyone as an end in themselves, so he should treat as many people as ends in themselves as he can.
Frankly, I do not understand what you mean by treating someone as an end in themselves: it seems to entail that you advocate leaving people to die when you could save their lives. Suppose you were standing by the road next to a blind man, and he stepped off the kerb into the path of a speeding car. My view is that you should pull him back to safety. You apparently would disagree, since you do not seem to believe we have a duty to save people's lives when we can do so.
There is no controversy or ambiguity about what "treating someone as an end in themselves" means. What you are doing is redefining words willy-nilly, and this form of dishonesty is a sign that you are unwilling to engage in real dialogue. Thus the conversation was over long ago; approximately when you claimed that one can murder someone for their organs while simultaneously treating them as an end in themselves.
A means is something we do for the sake of something else. An end is that "something else" we are aiming at. See
BBC - An End in Itself.
Murdering someone for their organs is a paradigm example of treating someone as a means rather than as an end in themselves. In that case the murderer is treating them as a means to the proximate end of organ harvesting, and to the remote end of organ transplants. I have explained all of this above, and I fully expect that you understand the point being made, despite all of your evasion.