Peter Singer to the elderly: Drop dead, why dontcha?

Peter Singer Endorses Medical Discrimination Against Elderly in COVID Crisis

No surprise from a man who has argued chimps should have more legal rights than human infants.

At what point is the cure worse than the disease?

A "bear any burden, pay any price" approach analogous to Jack Kennedy's idiotic though popular Cold War extremism is clearly absurd.

But that does not settle whether we have already gone too far, as some claim.

And how do you measure that, anyway?

A few paragraphs on the topic are in this piece.

It's too vague, too sketchy, and anyway contestable, but if both the manner of measuring and the estimated impact are right (both of which I doubt, though of course the conclusion might still be true that we have already gone too far even if the premises are not) my impression is we're already paying too high a price.

Coronavirus: How to understand the death toll

The lockdown, itself, however could cost lives.

Prof Robert Dinwall, from Nottingham Trent University, says "the collateral damage to society and the economy" could include:

• mental health problems and suicides linked to self-isolation
• heart problems from lack of activity
• the impact on health from increased unemployment and reduced living standards

Others have also pointed to the health cost from steps such as delaying routine operations and cancer screening.

Meanwhile, University of Bristol researchers say the benefit of a long-term lockdown in reducing premature deaths could be outweighed by the lost life expectancy from a prolonged economic dip.

And the tipping point, they say, is a 6.4% decline in the size of the economy - on a par with what happened following the 2008 financial crash.

It would see a loss of three months of life on average across the population because of factors from declining living standards to poorer health care.

Death panels

In a manner of speaking.

Who lives and who dies, in general, in a crunch.

A letter from a Michigan hospital system details who would get life-saving resources if equipment runs short during the coronavirus pandemic

"Because of shortages, we will need to be careful with resources," reads the letter, which is addressed to patients, families and the community. 

"Patients who have the best chance of getting better are our first priority."

"Patients who are treated with a ventilator or ICU care may have these treatments stopped," it says, "if they do not improve over time."

The letter goes on to say patients with severe heart, lung, kidney or liver failure, severe trauma or burns, or terminal cancers may be ineligible for a ventilator or ICU care. 

These patients will instead receive "pain control and comfort measures."

"This decision will be based on medical condition and likelihood of getting better," the letter says.

More will die if they don't do this, and hardship will be greater for survivors. So.

Is utilitarianism so appealing when you know in advance you are in the losing group?

Maybe not so much.

But maybe enough.

How much do you love your grandchildren?

Let them die!

Everybody heard it.

At a GOP forum, during discussion of trying to overthrow Ocare, a panelist asked what to do about those who depended on Ocare, whose lives would be put at risk.

Someone in the audience called out "Let them die!"

Democrats have used this episode to good effect.

All the same, they themselves are perfectly clear that politics is mostly about people voting "the pocket-book", "the family budget", or "the wallet".

And they alternately complain or marvel that so many working class people vote for Republicans in pretty clear defiance of their own best interests.

Pretty much everyone in America not living under a bridge could give to charities in such a way that lives would be saved, somewhere, without himself dying of the sacrifice, or even shortening his life.

Indeed, according to utilitarian liberal morality guru, Peter Singer, everyone has a moral duty to give until he personally is no better off than the least well off person in the entire world.

(He has never followed his own counsel.)

So imagine that everyone has a moral duty to give until everyone in the world in danger of dying within the next year is made safe for that long, so long as neither he (the giver) nor anyone in his immediate sphere of concern loses a moment of life by it.

Sound right?

So, has it happened yet?

Has every American, has any American, done anywhere near that much to save the dying?

No?

So, let them die, huh?

Think about that willingness to allow, what, actual millions of unnecessary deaths, worldwide.

In view of that, is it any surprise Americans - like everyone else, really - are so uninterested in making sacrifices to mitigate the impact of climate change on Third World countries, or worldwide coastal dwellers, or even American coastal dwellers?

Or to "save the planet" for future generations of humans, their own descendants included?

Maybe those folks still living in New Orleans should just move to higher ground, eh?

PS.

Every moral theory other than act utilitarianism denies any very strict or very extensive obligations of charity at all.

None remotely as extensive as what Singer so absurdly proposed.

After all, as Clough had it,

Thou shalt not kill
But needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive.

You know, you may say you're a girl, but we both know you're not.

Actually, I sympathize with these bathroom bans.

Unenforceable (would door guards be posted to - ahem - frisk people at the entrances?) but good symbolism.

I am not in the least interested in licensing persecution of these folks, but such bans are not persecution.

GOP House nominee compares his anti-LGBTQ bigotry to saving Jews from the Holocaust

Likewise, I oppose and deplore as absurd mockery gay marriage.

But these are not half so serious to me as my opposition to abortion.

And yet none of these individually, nor all of them collectively, are deal breakers for me.

On social as well as class issues, voters are faced with two opposing teams increasingly committed to extremes.

One party favors abortion on demand for the whole term of the pregnancy and is apt to favor infanticide on demand as soon as they dare, while the other favors a nearly total prohibition of abortion and would never in human imagination favor infanticide.

I am closer to the Republicans; forced to choose I will choose their position.

One party favors gay marriage, adoption by same-sex couples, women in combat, and even greater absurdities in deference to sexual outlawry, post-modernist feminism, and gender revolutionism while the other would turn back the clock on the law regarding all things sexual to 1950.

I am about equidistant from both, though I find the Dem position far less cruel though much more absurd.

Forced to choose I will choose the Dems position.

With the GOP and increasingly against the Dems I favor capital punishment and long sentences.

To my knowledge there is not any actual, formal issue position of the contemporary GOP regarding race that I do not agree with.

I would prefer that whites remain a politically dominant demographic majority in the US, since I have no wish that I, my family members, or my near descendants suffer the greater or lesser indignities of minority status.

Sometimes I sympathize with the libertarian view that private economic agents ought not to be subject to government-enforced nondiscrimination.

And I generally sympathize with the legal toleration of racially, religiously, or otherwise exclusive private clubs, such as men-only or whites-only country clubs.

I am pro-capitalism (and anti-socialism and anti-Communism) without being personally a capitalist, and favor the careful sort of free-trade/fair-trade, globalizing deals favored by O and Hillary and center-left Democrats as well as Republicans.

And I would much prefer the American security forces use torture, if necessary (and useful), to prevent a serious radiological, let alone a genuine nuclear, attack on the US, or maybe on anyone, though I would also prefer that the police eschew it and not return to the third degree as a tool for choking out false confessions in preference to actually trying to find out and punish the truly guilty.

Forced to choose, I prefer a system in which education is overwhelmingly in private hands, and some of it religiously affiliated in one way or another, rather than that education be overwhelmingly - much less entirely - in the hands of state agencies committed to an official view of anything or an official secularism.

Why do I vote for Democrats, every single time?

Because they have built and today defend over a century of progressive achievements in aid of the common people nearly all of which have benefitted, do benefit, or will benefit myself and my wife and my immediate - however stupidly ungrateful - family.

While Republicans have opposed those achievements every step of the way and to this day would tear them all down if they could, putting myself, my wife, and my immediate family in a perilous fix.

Why am I a registered Democrat?

So I can vote in my state's closed primaries.

Mill on Representative Government

Mill upholds the role of impartial principle and beliefs about justice, right, and general or common good, as well as religious beliefs, and seems to underrate those of empirical egoism and interest, in political action and evaluation.

And yet he and pretty much everyone else involved at least as an onlooker in politics expects voters to generally vote their interests, though the rule is far from exceptionless.

People often vote in support of their principles, of religious agendas, or of their greed, hatred, and will to vengeance.

What were the Nazis about, after all?

Or the Muslim Brotherhood?

Or the Iranian revolution of the Ayatollahs?

Anyway, in chapter 1 Mill advances 3 conditions on the suitability of a people to a form of government, or vice versa - though it is not entirely clear that these are really three different conditions.

The people must be willing to accept it, or not so unwilling as to make establishment possible.

They must been willing and able to do what is needed to keep it standing, and omit what would undermine it.

They must be capable of fulfilling conditions of action or restraint necessary for its existence and achievement of its ends, conduciveness to which forms its recommendation.

In chapter 1 he opposes the idea that given historical, social, or economic circumstances uniquely determine the form of government.

But his notion of conditions and what they are make it clear enough he sees such things as possibly limiting the range of suitability.

Chapter 2.

He begins by saying to decide what form of government is best for a society we need a way to decide what form best serves the interests of that society.

He goes on to undermine the idea that these interests can commodiously be characterized as Order and Progress (yes, with capital letters).

But all the same he spends the entire chapter considering what conduces to either, which he thinks boils down to traits of government that encourage personal qualities conducive to either (industry, prudence, etc.) or such features of government itself as efficiency and justice.

On the whole, focusing on just these factors, he in this entire chapter completely misses whatever might actually have led to the scientific and industrial revolutions while repeating several times such numbskull claims as that whatever conduces to order also conduces to progress, provided only that there is more of it.

The Difference Principle

Rawls.

The difference principle is the second part of the second principle of John Rawls’s theory of justice. 

The first principle requires that citizens enjoy equal basic liberties. 

The first part of the second principle requires fair equality of opportunity. 

These rules have priority over the difference principle; the difference principle cannot justify policies or institutions that abrogate them. 

The difference principle governs the distribution of income and wealth, positions of responsibility and power, and the social bases of self-respect. 

It holds that inequalities in the distribution of these goods are permissible only if they benefit the least well-off positions of society.

These are Rawls' offerings as principles of justice.

The most widely discussed theory of distributive justice in the past four decades has been that proposed by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971), and Political Liberalism, (Rawls 1993). 

Rawls proposes the following two principles of justice:

1. Each person has an equal claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme for all; and in this scheme the equal political liberties, and only those liberties, are to be guaranteed their fair value.

2. Social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: (a) They are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; and (b), they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society. (Rawls 1993, pp. 5–6. The principles are numbered as they were in Rawls’ original A Theory of Justice.)

Where the rules may conflict in practice, Rawls says that Principle (1) has lexical priority over Principle (2), and Principle (2a) has lexical priority over (2b). 

It is his claim that justice requires observation of these principles.

Ignore, for the moment, the senselessness of moral claims of all sorts, including claims about what justice requires.

Is it really plausible that justice requires that any number of better off people be deprived of any amount of income or wealth to prevent deprivation of some or even all of the worse off, no matter how few they may be, of even the tiniest amounts of the same?

Apparently it was to Rawls, but it isn't and hasn't been to most others aware of the question.

No utilitarian would buy that.

And is it in the least credible that a representative flock of even no more than normally egoistic rational individuals would, in the fiction of the original position, choose a regime committed to this behind Rawl's veil of ignorance?

No, IMHO.

Interpersonal comparisons of utility

Forever denigrated as impossible, such comparisons of intensity of desire, preference, or pleasure must surely be possible if the most abject materialism is true, or reliable correlations between whatever on the side of matter passes for these things and these things as felt or as impinging on the human mind are available, at least in principle.

And materialism is all the less plausible as such correlations are all the more doubtful.

Or, anyway, doubtful in principle.

Thumbs up, thumbs down

Possibly the only thing on which I am closer to the Republicans than the Democrats is abortion.

And that is because support for the alleged right of women to kill their unborn children, which ought to be denied the shelter of the privacy right given it in Roe, is the absolute core of modern feminism, and because feminists are so strong within the Democratic Party they have made it a litmus test issue for Democratic candidates.

In my view - except for the first couple of weeks of pregnancy, before actual organs begin to develop, during which it is intrinsically unobjectionable, though perhaps it still would be best for it to be illegal - abortion is the killing of an unborn child and ought to be illegal, just as is infanticide.

In fact, woman should have legally enforceable duties of care for their unborn children, just as parents have such duties regarding their children who have already been born.

But what women want is the right to commit murder, and without any interference from anyone, not even the fathers of their children, not even the parents of pregnant minors.

And they want that more than anything else on their feminist todo list, many of the items on which are there only to defend or entrench that right.

It occurs to me that Immanuel Kant somewhere wrote that prohibitions of cruelty to animals were necessary, though animals have no rights and no moral standing in themselves, in order to prevent humans being even more vicious and brutal toward each other than they are.

Surely someone must see how this applies to the question whether abortion ought to be prohibited, even if it is believed or anyway alleged that unborn children are not children or have no rights.

Though it has been argued by some utilitarian ethicists - perhaps previously employed at Buchenwald and widely admired by liberals -  that killing a mature ape or adult chimpanzee is morally much worse than even killing a human infant, and much, much worse than abortion.

Trump Administration to Tie Health Facilities’ Funding to Abortion Restrictions

But this is horrible, malicious, ugly, misogynist Nativism.

Trump Administration Wants to Shut Door on Abused Women

Not so fast, my utilitarian friend

Societies A and B have the same population size at any given time.

In society A, people live for an average of 75 years.

In society B, people live for 35 years and are then killed by the government to make room for more young people.

Because younger people are happier than older people, the average utility of people living in society B is greater than that of people living in society A, though the utility of people in society A is generally positive throughout their lives.

And for the first 35 years of their lives, persons in society A are as happy as persons in society B.

So the total, lifelong happiness of people in society A is greater than the total, lifelong happiness of people in society B.

And no one in society A is deprived of a future they have every expectation would be happy by their government.

Egoists in the Original Position would surely choose A over B.

It is not true, as some utilitarian critics of Rawls claimed from the first, that each of us in such a position could be confident that the greater the average utility of the whole population the greater our own expectations.

Two points.

The first point is that Hannity is a shameless and disgusting mini-Goebbels.

The second is that what the FBI was willing to do is terrifying and disgraceful, and a perfect proof that far too many people in power are abundantly willing to do evil that good may come, convinced that the end justifies the means.

Such people set all our rights at nothing, and do it as a matter of principle.

"Making the hard choices," they call it.

Note that there is no hint any of them went to jail, as they all should have for decades.

And the money paid to the victims of wrongful imprisonment all came from the taxpayers, not from the criminal bastards of the FBI who colluded in perjury and sent four innocent men to prison - two of whom died there - to protect the actual murderer because he was an informant.

Smearing Robert Mueller

In an April 8 interview with John Catsimatidis on his New York radio show, Mr. Dershowitz asserted that Mr. Mueller was “the guy who kept four innocent people in prison for many years in order to protect the cover of Whitey Bulger as an F.B.I. informer.” 

Mr. Mueller, he said, was “right at the center of it.” 

Mr. Bulger was a notorious crime boss in Boston, the head of the Winter Hill Gang, and also a secret source for the F.B.I.

There is no evidence that the assertion is true. 

I was the federal judge who presided over a successful lawsuit brought against the government by two of those men and the families of the other two, who had died in prison. 

Based on the voluminous evidence submitted in the trial, and having written a 105-page decision awarding them $101.8 million, I can say without equivocation that Mr. Mueller, who worked in the United States attorney’s office in Boston from 1982 to 1988, including a brief stint as the acting head of the office, had no involvement in that case. 

He was never even mentioned.

The case wasn’t about Whitey Bulger but another mobster the F.B.I. was also protecting, the hit man Joseph Barboza, who lied when he testified that the four men had killed Edward Deegan, a low-level mobster, in 1965. 

Mr. Barboza was covering for the real killers, and the F.B.I. went along because of his importance as an informant.

But the evidence — or rather, lack of it — hasn’t stopped the piling on against Mr. Mueller, particularly by Mr. Hannity. 

In a March 20 broadcast, he said, “Robert Mueller was the U.S. attorney in charge while these men were rotting in prison while certain agents in the F.B.I. under Mueller covered up the truth.”

He returned to this theme on April 9, noting the Catsimatidis interview with Professor Dershowitz, and said: “Four men went to jail. Mueller was involved in the case. Two of them died in jail. They were all later exonerated.”

. . . .

The record simply doesn’t support these assertions. 

As I explained in my decision, because of the gravity of the accusations made by the imprisoned men, I analyzed the evidence “with special care in order that the public, and especially the parties, could be fully confident of my conclusions.”

That said, I was unsparing in my criticism of the F.B.I. and Justice Department officials who were responsible for this wrongful imprisonment. 

I named names where the record supported it. 

I resoundingly condemned the government in an unusual court session in which I read my conclusions.

Mr. Mueller is mentioned nowhere in my opinion; nor in the submissions of the plaintiffs’ lead trial counsel, Juliane Balliro; nor in “Black Mass,” the book about Mr. Bulger and the F.B.I. written by former reporters for The Boston Globe.

. . . .

Mr. Barboza’s F.B.I. handlers, Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico, and their superiors, knew that Mr. Barboza had perjured himself and that he was protecting Mr. Flemmi, but they withheld that information from state prosecutors because of his importance as an informant and to protect the informant program.

They continued to withhold the truth during commutation hearings for the men; each time the F.B.I. could have disclosed Mr. Barboza’s lie, it did not. 

In fact, the agency lobbied against clemency.

. . . .

When Mr. Hannity and others say Mr. Mueller was responsible for the continued imprisonment of those four men, they are simply wrong — unless they have information that I, Ms. Balliro, the House investigators and the “Black Mass” authors did not and do not have. 

If they do, they should produce it. If they don’t, they should stop this campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller.

Moral individualism

"I will not harm or kill them for my advantage, or for that of anyone I especially care about.

"But they must not harm or kill me for the like reasons."

What egoists would agree to in the social contract.

It's not any style or variant of utilitarianism.

Under utilitarianism, individuals - people, that is to say - count for nothing.

To hell with that, says the egoist.

Thing is, they really did crazy, evil stuff

Your government and mine, I mean.

For the greater good, you know.

But, hey, no worse than Hitler, or his goon Mengele.

Stranger Things.

Such things are a standing refutation of utilitarianism.

Please, not Bernie

George Will said just now on MSNBC that Bernie would be McGovern 2.0, and I think he's right.

Single payor is a bad idea and won't sell, anyway, nor will the rest of Bernie's signature, social democratic, "socialist" agenda so beloved of smart and both socially and economically well-off college kids who don't want to pay off their government guaranteed college loans.

He's an anti-Democratic Party candidate for the anti-Democratic Party left.

He's the Trumpist of the left, but far more sincere than The Duce in his moral disgust with the system, the establishment, the DC "swamp," our very form of government, and capitalism, itself.

His positions - anyway, his verbal positions - on trade and on foreign policy are not so different from the America First-ism of the Buchananite Trumpists.

And his views on global warming and global redistribution of wealth are way too close to those of that anti-capitalist hyper-liberal and vegetarian, utilitarian globo-phony, Peter Singer.

The truth is the outsider left who support him will tell you straight out they would rather Bernie and people like them take over the party and lose than see the Democrats win as a party of progressive Democrats, committed to our republic and to democratic capitalism.

They are as ideologically committed as the radical wingnuts of the right who dominate the House and have dominated the GOP for decades.

And them controlling the Democrats would be as bad for the country as the wingnuts controlling the GOP has been.

Bernie Sanders Says He’ll Run For Re-election As An Independent

They never give until they are as poor as the world's poorest

Actually, people who have large amounts of money mostly keep it, and pay large sums to other people who help them find ways to spend it more or less on themselves.

1stdibs is selling this Carlo Giuliano brooch for just under $300,000.00.

And this yellow and white diamond necklace for $675,000.00.

Amal Clooney channels flapper-girl glamour in a vintage fringed dress at Lake Como party

Eat your heart out, Peter Singer.

Or, for that matter, Bernie Sanders.

Bernie shifts to global economic revolution

Bernie Sanders: Democrats Need to Wake Up

This is not Bernie using his hard won high profile to shift from seeking the Democratic nomination to supporting Hillary and the Democratic Party against Trump and the Republican Party.

This is Bernie the Seattle rioter, the global anti-capitalist revolutionary jumping up and down and angrily shouting in rage.

Rage at a human race born in naked poverty, a humanity that spent most of history as poor as the most desperate Chinese peasant of the 19th Century, a human world in which wealth remains exceptional and the erratic race between progress and poverty sees now one and now the other dash ahead.

Rage at the global poverty against which progress still races, and at the inequality that is in any case intrinsic to capitalism.

Rage at the global capitalism, itself, that Obama and Hillary support, endorse, and seek to ameliorate.

We so are not all socialists, now.

And then he pivots to briefly damning those who supported Brexit and those who support Trump while espousing the left wing fake version of economic nationalism, before with his usual hypocrisy pretending to take their side and share their rage, as he has done throughout his campaign.

We need to fundamentally reject our “free trade” policies and move to fair trade. 

"Fair trade" is what cosmopolitans urge to steal votes from economic nationalists who urge tariffs or even bans on importing specified products.

It does not and cannot keep jobs in America and is not intended to, but only ensures that the foreigners who get our jobs are not too awfully exploited.

It is what Denis Kucinich and David Sirota used to talk about while pretending they wanted to stop factories moving to Mexico or China when what they really wanted to do was make those lost American jobs even more beneficial to the Mexican and Chinese workers who took them.

Americans should not have to compete against workers in low-wage countries who earn pennies an hour. 

Absolutely not.

We need to insure those workers in low wage countries at least earn dimes and quarters.

That is what "fair trade" is all about.

We must defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership. 

And then he ends pretending, as he has all along, that he wants to prioritize Americans while demanding policies that would harm Americans for the purpose of benefiting others around the world, as well as future owners of beach-front and shore level property.

We must help poor countries develop sustainable economic models.

. . . .

We need to create tens of millions of jobs worldwide by combating global climate change and by transforming the world’s energy system away from fossil fuels.

We need international efforts to cut military spending around the globe and address the causes of war: poverty, hatred, hopelessness and ignorance.

Those are the causes of war, huh?

My God, what awful left-wing twaddle.

The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States. 

Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.

In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. 

We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires.

So writes the global radical who has all along worn the sheep's clothing of faux economic nationalism, his crude redistributionism amiably attired as Scandinavian social democracy.

There is a lot more Chavez/Madero/Pope Francis in this fellow than he has clearly let on.

Had he been chosen as the Democrats' nominee Trump and the Republicans would have eaten him alive.

PS.

Yes, all this means that the establishment left and the establishment right actually agree that Americans are overpaid.

Raising the minimum wage in a context of free trade will not actually help American workers that much as it will mostly just drive factories out of America even faster, possibly at the cost of a rise in inflation putting a nasty ding in people's - and especially retirees - nesteggs.

But that will help make the globalizing plutes even richer (conservatives: Yay!) while pleasing cosmopolitan liberals and libertarians who think giving poor foreigners our jobs benefits the globally worst off, does the greatest good for the greatest number, and helps equalize the global playing field.

Ditto open borders and high-volume low-wage immigration.

In contrast to all of which Donald Trump, alone, stands for positions on trade and immigration that put America First.

Fielding's Allworthy

It seems to me he talks a talk but does not walk the walk.

A man in a palace sounding like Peter Singer on famine relief.

Well, I suppose that makes sense, after all, since Singer is the poster boy for humbuggery celebrated as a virtue.

Allworthy vs Blifil on benevolence.

Tom Jones, Bk 2, ch 5.

The greatest good of the greatest number

That is the rule of force and nothing else.

As is the principle of majority rule.

Happiness - or utility, if you prefer - doesn't sum across individuals.

Carpe diem

Officials confirm Tennessee couple won historic Powerball

John Robinson said he reached out to his brother for help assembling a team of lawyers and financial planners before deciding to take the winnings in a single lump sum of nearly $328 million, rather than let the Lottery invest the prize and pay him 30 annual installments totaling an estimated $533 million.

Why pass up on a certain income totaling more than $200 million?

"We're going to take the lump sum, because we're not guaranteed tomorrow," Robinson said. "We just wanted a little big piece of the pie. Now we're real grateful we got the big piece of the pie."

Note, too, that they indicate no plans to donate it all to the world's worst off people, which could reasonably be expected to do the greatest good for the greatest number, as the liberal celebrity faker Peter Singer claims and recommends.

No word of consulting with experts about any charitable or altruistic volleys, at all.

The Greater Good, or Jihader Utilitarianism

Islamic State okays taking organs of living non-Muslims

The sources quoted do not refer to all non-Muslims but only apostates.

Bad enough, though.

The Islamic State's religious scholars have ruled that taking the organs of non-Muslims is permissible under Islamic law to save the life of a Muslim, because killing apostates to eat their flesh has previously been allowed.

The revelation comes in a January 2015 document that was capured by U.S. special forces in Syria in May and obtained by Reuters.

The news agency posted a U.S. government translation of the document attributed to the Islamic State's research and fatwa committee.

"Allah almighty knows what's best and knows what's right and what is wrong and there is evidence from texts and Islamic principles and laws supporting the notion that transplanting organs from an apostate's body into a Muslim body in order to save the latter's life or replace a damaged organ with it is permissible," the document reads.