Example: I believe that IP is a direct contradiction of nature, sacrificing the advancement of humanity and the world for selfish gain, and therefore is sinful.
Edit: pls do not downvote the comments this is a constructive discussion
Edit2: IP= intellectal property
Edit3: sort by controversal
I think one of the more controversial ones I have is that I don’t tend to be in favor of things like MAID or voluntary euthanasia. I understand why people are for it, but I don’t like the idea of killing someone over something that is ultimately in their head, like pain or a person’s desires, and the way I tend to evaluate the value of life has something of a floor (that is to say, I do not really believe that there is such a thing as a “fate worse than death” so to speak, because I believe that death is the least functional state a person can have and anything above that implies at least some functioning even if that state is still highly undesirable).
Tell me you’ve never suffered without telling me you’ve never suffered…
I bet you’d change your mind if you were personally in enough pain.
I’ve answered responses along those lines a couple times at this point. My position is that pain is a bit like mind control; you probably could get me to change my mind that way, but the reason for doing so wouldn’t be anything to do with the reasons why I think this stuff unethical and everything to do with the way sufficient pain overrides one’s normal thinking and forces you to pay attention to it.
“Someone/something could torture you into changing your mind” doesn’t say anything about how right or wrong the original position is, you could probably torture someone into believing the earth is flat if you kept at it long enough and the victim wasn’t unusually strong willed, but that doesn’t make it so.
It’s true, that doesn’t prove anything exactly. Your position is intellectually self-consistent. It’s more that I suspect you’d re-asses aliveness as a good basis for ethics with that source of information.
Okay, I’ll revise that to “I bet if you hung out with other people in unbearable suffering for long enough, you’d change your mind”. With “long enough” being anything from days to decades depending on your own compassion:conviction ratio.
I reckon you could be tortured out of that belief, although I don’t wish it on anyone.
Probably yes, however, I consider a person under such conditions to not truly be sound of mind, as torture is rather extreme duress, so that isnt really much of an argument in my view. I dont dispute that you could inflict an amount of suffering on me that would make me wish to die, I just think, while not in that state, that if I were in it would not be ethical for me to make that choice, and so that under that circumstance I shouldnt be able to.
Now extend that idea to the torturer being cancer cells. You will suffer extreme agony until you die. There will be no reprieve outside a partial numbing of the pain from high morphine doses that keep you mostly out of consciousness.
Or have I misunderstood your other comments and you covered this scenario when discussing the terminally ill?
I did consider things like that to be under the case of terminal illness yes. I do understand that circumstances, especially around such disease, can bring about extreme suffering, and that the way brains process pain can override a person’s normal feelings on the matter and make them seek death to end it. Its just that, I think that an end of existence (which, not being someone that believes in afterlives, is what I believe death is) is the worst possible state, worse than any amount of suffering (even an infinite amount of such, not that a human can actually process an infinite negative stimuli). As such, I view it is as more ethical to extend life for as long as possible than allow it to end early.
I acknowledge that a person in great pain will likely disagree, even myself if my life brings me to that, but I dont take this as actual evidence that the pain is worse, because pain shuts down a person’s regular thinking and can in high enough amounts override that persons values and ability to think clearly about them. In other words, I think that a person, any person, even myself, that is in sufficient pain will consider that pain worse than death, because pain is almost like a sort of mind control in that it forces you to think that way, but I think that person, even myself in that hypothetical, would be wrong about that. In the same way that if some cruel inventor devised a machine that manipulated a person’s mind and forced them to have suicidal thoughts, I would think it wrong to let the victim act on them.
I understand your position now. You can probably have it in your Advanced Directive to deny you life-ending care should that be an option where you live. Hopefully you won’t get to make that determination for someone else.
If a person is in such immense pain that they would rather be dead and there is no reasonable expectation from an objective standpoint that their situation will change (e.g. they have metastatic cancer in multiple organs), then they will never return to the state of mind that they want to live. Denying death at that point is sadistic.
What about unimaginable suffering before one’s certain death? Would this not qualify as a worse fate than death?
I don’t really have a strong opinion on this topic, but one example comes to mind that shows that many people don’t act according to your maxime. Have you ever seen those battlefield suicides that are filmed by the drones in Ukraine? I’m not going to link them here, but they are plentyful. So, so many soldiers, many of them wounded, decide to take their own life to avoid going through an experience that they probably view as worse than death. I just think it’s interesting and worth considering.
I think I alluded to this in one of my other responses, but I would hold that things like that are situations that the person involves thinks are worse than death, especially given that all they would be able to think about under those conditions is what they are or anticipate feeling rather than what death is. They may also simply have beliefs about death that are nicer than what I view it to be.
A lot of the objection i get along those lines seems to be “But have you considered just how bad (horrible fate) is”, when I totally acknowledge that there are some truly agonizing things that can happen to someone, my objection is simply that I believe death is just that bad.
I think I understand your position.
In a previous post, you seem to give value to functioning as opposed to being dead. Why is that? Why does functioning even matter if your position seems to be that death is the absolute worst thing that can happen to someone?
A person can lose all brain functions and remain alive, implying that there is no chance of making new experiences of any kind. Does that count for you as functional?
I would consider brain death to be death, if thats what you mean, I had thought that was a common enough position that I didnt need to state it. I guess I should clarify that I meant mental function there rather that just one’s bodily functions. If you irreparably lose all brain functions, your mind is gone, so “you” are dead even if some of your body’s cells can be kept alive.
I would have agreed with you when I was younger, but now that I’m older I think I changed my mind, I’m not so sure it’s fair to make people suffer with late-stage terminal diseases where their whole life is reduced to suffering.
Is constant, unending suffering where you are in a state of constant unimaginable and untreatable pain a state worth living, though? Should people have to live that way, just because death is “worse”?
Everything is in someone’s head. Without consciousness, we are nothing, so saying something is “in someone’s head” is the wrong way of putting it.
Have you ever heard about functional neurologic disorder? Just because symptoms are psychosomatic does not mean they are not actual symptoms.
What about people with terminal, genuinely incurable diseases? I understand not letting people kill themselves just because they want to (since mental illness can compromise your objectivity there) but sometimes it’s less about someone deciding if they’re going to die, and more about how.
Everyone dies eventually, so the distinction in my mind isn’t so much the how, though obviously does change, but the when.
If you take the stance that deciding to die is okay if you know you won’t live past a certain time period, then you either need to arbitrarily definite a cut off time period for how long until death is certain a person can do this, or simply decide that anyone can do that whenever, because death is already certain given a sufficient time interval.
If you don’t, then information that someone’s death is imminent doesn’t really change that.
Yes, that’s technically true, but maybe not in the way you think.
Everyone dies from something. While yes, as you get older it’s harder to overcome things that seemed trivial when you were younger, in theory you could continue living indefinitely until something kills you. It’s just statistically very unlikely.
I am of the complete opposite opinion. Not letting people decide if they want to live or not is the ultimate restriction of personal freedom. I think there should be some kind of process for euthanasia for practical reasons cause most people will eventually feel they want to keep on living, but for those who don’t there should be a right to die.
I actually agree that it is a restriction on personal freedom. Its just that, in my view, maximal personal freedom isnt actually a moral absolute, but a moral heuristic, something that is usually true and so makes a decent guideline, but not under every circumstance. This is simply one of the situations where I think that heuristic fails and no longer aligns with what I view as moral.
Maximizing personal freedom shouldn’t be the only goal, yes. But not letting people choose whether they live or die is minimal personal freedom to me. Or it should be, like the bare minimum.
Personally, I’d be “ok” with it, if it wasn’t such a slippery slope and if liberals and politicians could be trusted not to take it too far. Under capitalism, it’s inevitable that it’s going to be used as a solution for people who are seen as a “drain” on the system, and as an excuse to not provide accommodation and a higher standard of care.
It’s always justified by pointing to an extreme case like a terminally ill elderly person living in constant physical pain but then in practice it’s, “What do you mean doctors shouldn’t tell depressed teenagers to kill themselves? Are you saying that mental suffering isn’t real?” I’d rather it be banned entirely if that’s the endgame these sociopaths are after.
I’m in the same boat, maybe because I’m in the U.S. I’m in favor of it on paper, but would feel really, really hesitant to ever support it in this country, because it would be like a month before they’d take off their masks and be using it to euthanize the homeless en masse.