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Feasibility aside, what are the arguments against a culture of widespread euthanasia in the old? I find it an attractive option provided there’s the right cultural infrastructure. I’m thinking something like, “once you cease to be of value to others or once you experience too much pain, you willingly die, which is honorable.” By value to others, I mean that you can no longer relay to the young any worthwhile stories or wisdom, can no longer provide any emotional warmth to others, your redeeming personality traits have decayed, and you have too many costly medical problems. The way in which this occurs is also important. I find euthanasia by injection in a hospital disgusting and barbaric and aesthetically displeasing, whereas something like a speedy decapitation in a beautiful natural environment is preferable, and in fact how Samuraii died and similar to how animals are killed in kosher law.
I’m unpersuaded by the typical religious argument that life is so sacred we cannot take it. We do take it, all the time, in war and executions. I’m unpersuaded that this reduces the dignity of man. This increases the dignity of man, by giving him power over when he dies, and by serving as a reminder that life is about wellbeing and benefit rather than selfish clinging to the flesh and absurd quantitative metrics (“how long you live in days” is a silly metric). There is, with that said, an economic incentive to do this: the money that is spent keeping the old alive is transferred to the young, the living root of life, which has a compound benefit, increasing quality of life and education.
Scott’s fantastic who by very slow decay, and a recent experience involving a distant relative, is what truly motivated my thinking that our culture of death needs reform. Dying is a horrible experience for everyone who witnesses it. Dying itself is not the pain, watching the death slowly is the pain. The amount of psychological stress and pain and burden that my relatives experienced as a relative slowly died was significant and impossible to ignore. Were the death to have occurred one night in sleep, a huge amount of pain would have been avoided. But we can’t will ourselves to die peacefully in sleep. The best we can do is pick when we die, so that we die before we increase the sum total pain in ourselves and others.
I am considering this from the standpoint of “how I would like to die”, not “boo old people”, to be clear. Death is inevitable and mundane. Our hospital culture hyperfixates on continuing life for its own sake and on clinging to life, and this reifies the mistaken impression that personal death is a catastrophe. Were we to truly care about life, we would forget the old (who start to decay well before expiration) and instead focus on the young, the living root of life, and we would focus on increasing their health so that human life flourishes. That’s where life resides. Why take care of an old flower when you could nurture young seedlings? It’s the same life, it is just found in the young and not the old. So, when I imagine the most enjoyable way to die myself, it’s that it occurs right before the worst of age-decay sets in. I have an enjoyable weekend with loved ones, we celebrate living, and then they give me the Marie Antoinette treatment and everything is quite peaceful. It actually doesn’t appear to be stressful or anxious or sad at all, though (we should all hope) there are some loved ones present who will miss my presence.
I don't like this proposal because it effectively guarantees that most people's last experience of life will be making the decision that they are worthless. That's not a 'good death' to me.
I'm not starry-eyed about getting old, but I would prefer a solution where we stop providing non-palliative care at a certain age (85-90). We give people pain-killers and so on, but we don't try to cure them of things or prevent their body from failing. I've been tossing that proposal around for a while so I'd be interested to know the Motte's doctors think of it. What Schelling points are there between 'making people comfortable' and full-on interventionism?
I mean, if they can afford to pay for it then let them use their money to extend their life as much as they care to.
The real problem will end up being those whose body is still functional but whose mind is so far gone that they can't look after themselves and can't actually make an informed decision to accept euthanasia anyway.
So we provide 'palliative' care to folks who will never regain their faculties but could be kept alive another 3+ years with basic care. Do we spend those resources or no?
I’m ruling out euthanasia in all cases, for basically the reason that I give above plus the ethical and political concerns others have mentioned.
If it’s cheap, all is well. If somebody can’t even feed themselves without expensive 24 hour care then presumably they will die soon and we try and keep them comfortable while that happens. Of course, family can step in and do the work themselves.
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I don’t think it needs to be seen as an acknowledgement of worthlessness. Instead it would be a noble and heroic “my time has come, I lived my life, now I will end it with dignity”. The choice is not living versus not living so much as living terribly versus finalizing one’s life. If your personality and memory have run out and the rest of your months / years are pain, I’m not sure how much that is living.
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You are coming to this from utilitarian standpoint and here I'd have to agree with you, support of euthanasia is perfectly fine in that horrible worldview. The only obstacle here is something like parasitic relationship that some utilitarians have toward deontological moral systems such as Christianity - where they keep some of the deontological axioms, and then slap them onto their version of utilitarianism in order to prevent themselves going full retard, also resolving some unpleasant cognitive dissonances. Something like Adding Up to Normality where "eating babies" is for some reason axiomatically bad without further explanation. I could have argued with you on your grounds, the usual angle would be mentioning let's say mentally handicapped people who share most characteristics with seniors you mentioned and then some - and then go with that. But I won't, as I think the whole premise of utilitarianism is wrong.
What we see is real-time dissolution of these unspoken axioms as more and more people are raised outside of traditional morals, and who find these axioms less relevant. So we now perfectly accept that it is okay for young mother to kill her own baby in her womb just to improve her career prospects. Nothing to see here, in fact let's throw a party. We now accept that euthanasia is perfectly good option for 29 years old with depression to end her life. Yay, heroic doctors just eliminated bunch of negative utils from the universe, where is the champagne? I tend to think that this is the feature and not a bug of utilitarianism in its pure form. Euthanasia is just another of those lines, those "normality" axioms under attack. And you are just "not persuaded" and refuse irrational religious moral arguments that "life is sacred". Okay. Just beware, because in couple of decades somebody else may not be "persuaded" that things like "free choice" is sacred - it basically stems from some religious "bullshit" about how we were all created as morally equal or some such nonsense - and then they will just euthanize people for greater good.
So yes, I would argue that life is sacred and that euthanasia is wrong based on virtue ethics principles. You will remain unpersuaded I guess, but then you neither persuaded me that euthanasia is such a terrific thing and we should all jump on that bandwagon. Mostly because I do not submit to your utilitarian moral reasoning with your sacred utils.
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I think we need to consider the effect of a 'free' existence provided by the state through social security, and the motivating effect of maximal value extraction. My existence is free through social security and healthcare, even if it is objectively a low quality life because my existence is continuous marginal pain. Inertia keeps me from killing myself, and small incidental pleasures such as Number Go Up in my social security account can be enough to motivate a person through a period of temporary pain.
We should also consider that heterogenous populations can view competition as existential and will refuse to die if they think their enemy will seize the demographic advantage. Kill white grandmas so the NDP can win more seats is probably a desired outcome whispered longingly when a Canadian progressive is deep in his cups, but the inverse is likely yelled at by truckers who need the barest excuse to rant about the Indian invasion.
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I used to pick up dead people. Of all the corpses I've dealt with, the one death that sticks in my mind as the most desirable for myself or my loved ones was a very old lady who passed away in her own bed with a well-read new testament on the bedside table next to her. Her 80 year old daughter and 60 year old granddaughter were there with her. I don't know if there's such a thing as a good death, but that one was the closest I've found.
I think we should be willing to accept earlier, natural deaths rather than dragging things out. Many if not most old people would prefer to die in their own beds with family around rather than in a nursing home or a hospital. Realistically you can't provide the same level of medical care in a home setting, but so be it.
However I very much dislike the idea of making deliberate choices to end a life. It's good for the human soul to accept the inevitable, but it is bad for the human soul to cull lives that are inconvenient. There is a difference between letting go and throwing away, and once you cross that line it is all too easy to start killing other people too. Why not the healthy-but-depressed person? Why not the person disabled by accident rather than age? Slippery slopes are indeed slippery.
Of course you start by saying it's voluntary. And it is, kinda, but the people who go know that they're an inconvenience and that it would be easier for everyone around them if they just sat in the nitrogen capsule. And more and more people respond to that pressure and increasingly society becomes built around the assumption that of course you'll off yourself when the time is right and then if you don't it becomes a really awkward imposition on everybody. And the choice ceases to really be a choice, it's an expectation.
Our elders deserve to die with dignity with their lives neither artificially prolonged nor not artificially truncated. When I go I want it to be in my home with my children and grandchildren around me. And when someone sees that I'm having a stroke or I'm struggling to breathe, they don't panic and they don't call the ambulance, they just hold my hand and stay with me till the end. That's as much as I can ask for.
Please ignore this if you're worried about doxxing yourself, but I thought you were an Australian political lobbyist? That and corpse disposal seem like very disjointed careers and I'd be interested to hear more. You were volunteering?
I did funeral work while I was getting my degree. Mostly it was overnight stuff - I'd just be at home chilling until I got a phone call that there had been a car crash or a suicide or something and then I'd suit up and go to the scene and take the body to the coroner once the cops' forensics people were done getting what they needed. I also got a second job doing cremations for a while.
I highly recommend the death industry - you accumulate no end of great stories.
I see, thank you! I was under the impression that undertaking and funeral work were almost entirely hereditary jobs, at least in the UK. 'Mucky' but lucrative jobs like undertaking and sewage work often seem to be that way - they accumulate close-knit communities who don't stigmatize their work and because the work itself is lucrative, fathers don't try to get their sons out of it in the way they do for mining or farming.
Yeah, there's a lot of family connection in the funeral industry. Even among the ones that aren't directly family-owned, a lot of the workers tend to be related. There was a while where myself, my two sisters, my wife, my brother, my brother-in-law, and my mum were all working for the same funeral business.
Fascinating. And would you say that working with dead bodies for a few years had any effect on you? All the philosophical stuff about getting closer to death, corpse meditation, etc?
Or does it mostly get siloed into the mental filing cabinet for 'that job I did during my degree' and doesn't really relate to your feelings about life in general?
I grew up on a farm so I always had a pretty grounded attitude to life and death. It didn't affect me a huge amount. That said, no matter how jaded you are something will get to you eventually.
There's two events that still make me cry whenever I remember them. Both of them involved dead babies. The first one was a large Catholic family. They had seven boys and then finally had a little girl with their eighth child. She had health problems and survived for a while after birth but ultimately didn't make it. At the funeral her older brothers each went up and talked a bit about how much they loved their little sister and would miss her, etc. All very sad, all of them young men trying manfully to hold themselves together.
It got down to the fourth brother in line who was around 13 I think. And he gets up there and he tries to offer some words for his baby sister and he just can't. He can't speak at all, he's trying so hard not to cry but every time he tries to say something he just breaks down. And I've been in all sorts of awful tragic situations and it didn't bother me, but somehow just watching that kid trying to speak and failing cut right into me and I've never really been able to recover from it.
The other time that really got to me was the day I burned ten babies.
The first 9, I was ok. It's confronting the first time you see one of those little shoebox sized coffins, but you get used to it like you get used to anything. And so I put them in the oven one after the other, box after box, and just didn't really think about the enormous tragedy that each one represented.
Then number ten comes down. It's the last funeral of the day, the last cremation to be done before I go home to my own baby (yes I was married with a kid at this stage). But before I took him to the oven the funeral director came to me with a little toy car. He tells me the parents asked if I could put it in the coffin with him. Of course I can.
So I remove the lid. And I see him. And he's such a cute little boy. He's a stillbirth - I'm not exactly sure how far along, but he's pretty much fully developed except his ears aren't separated from his head yet. And of course he's tiny, would have fit in my hand. And for some reason the unfairness of it all just hits me in that moment. This little kid lying in front of me who's died before he even had a chance to live. He deserved so much better than that.
But there's nothing I can do. I tuck the little car in next to him, I close the lid, I apologize to him through my tears, and I put him in the fire. I hope there's some justice for him in the next life because there's sure as hell none here.
I go home to my family. I get over it. I sleep fine. And then the next day I go back in to work and the first thing I have to do is rake his ashes out of the furnace. And I'm doing that and putting them into a little porcelain urn to give to his parents, and I find something in the ashes. It's a little button from his little onesie. And it just sets me off again.
So there's those events that still affect me on an emotional level. In terms of my outlook on the world though I would say that it's given a more visceral understanding of things that I already knew but didn't really feel. I knew suicide was awful and tragically common. But now I know in my gut how terrible and how frequent it is. I've seen the kids whose dad hung himself in front of them. How is a family supposed to go on after something like that?
Same with car accidents. They happen all the time and they barely make news. But I know exactly what it looks like and what those statistics mean. The woman with the destroyed legs who bled out on the side of the road. The dad who picked up his two girls for the weekend and got T-boned. The grandfather with his chest caved in on Christmas day. Self driving cars can't come fast enough.
Thank you for the stories, and I apologise for dredging up painful memories. I've mostly been fortunate enough that the funerals I've been to have almost all been for the elderly. The one exception is for a schoolmate who developed a condition that killed him in university. In general the funeral wasn't so bad; almost a school reunion with everyone gathered for the first time since graduation. The thing that really got to me was the obituary, because of course there was nothing to put in it. He'd been a good boy, worked hard, did well at exams, and then he died. Bravely and stoically, by all accounts. We sang the old school hymns and then we went back out into the world.
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I want to die by having my brain implanted with hundreds of deep brain stimulating electrodes that can be used to do a bunch of crazy, dangerous experiments.
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If it would happen I expect it to become effectively mandatory by the time I am old. I deeply dislike such possibility.
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Personally, I would like to pass on my own terms before I lose the ability to consent, and do not want to see my elderly relatives tortured to life by the medical system.
Unfortunately, Canada has showed how easy it is for euthanasia to become a vehicle to shuttle out any medically inconvenient citizens. This has flipped me back from supporting euthanasia to opposing it.
Much of the time, unfortunately, it's the family who can't let go and insist that very elderly, very sickly people be coded and revived despite zero quality of life in the US. Whether it's guilt or love or inability to say goodbye or accept death or because "giving up" on grandpa might look bad.
I would like to outline my wishes with ZERO intervention from others if I, say, later become mostly incapacitated due to something like dementia. I should be able to state now that if I pass a certain threshold, I'll be given a nice spot in a garden at dusk with a blanket over my knees and an adulterated cognac that'll put me permanently to sleep in a dignified fashion.
In the absence of this, I do think that impartial physicians should be making the call NOT to break granny's ribs with vigorous CPR and keep her alive for an extra month of fun n' bedsores.
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I think you have a point. There should be some normalization of our cultural relation to death. That we struggle against it so unconditionally probably makes us more afraid of it and worse at dealing with it than we otherwise might be.
But with that said, I wouldn't want to actively encourage the elderly to die. In my view we owe them a debt of gratitude for their lifetimes of hard work and self-sacrifice, and if they don't want to die, we shouldn't push them.
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Speedy decapitation!? Being less barbaric?
A hospital can deal with things going wrong, controlled settings, blood born pathogens, etc.
Why would what you find pleasing have anything to do with it? Do you have any idea how arrogant that sounds?
Yeah the whole "execution style" is where he lost me, too. Made me think the whole thing might be a modest proposal.
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You can just be a normal and plan on blowing your brain out when you get infirm or senile enough somewhere deep in the woods on a nice spring morning.
Or develop a hobby with chemistry and go out with a bang. Plenty of horrible people out there who are not expecting a suicide bomber.
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Personally, I'm going out in a blaze of glory like Bohdi's 100 year storm, or else a purple haze of tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
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It is his very humane endeavour
To make each senior spent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of innocent merriment!
If one is so outside the overton window as to suggest killing off people one thinks are a net negative on the fiscus and society, why go full hog and not even consider the sensations experienced by those sacrificed for the greater good? It is to me a lesser evil to suggest a method of execution which might cause more pain for a short period of time, than to suggest killing off innocent people in the first place.
I want to die when my brain is starting to go and limit my emotional enjoyment from kin, and my body can't enjoy things like food or sex anymore. Give me the ultracocaine, overdose on cialis and let me fuck a sexbot until my heart explodes. Also, best if I can calculate my anticipated savings from insurance payouts and have the insurer refund a balance of the payout to my beneficiaries. I'm saving you money by not living out of spite, give my kids some money to offset their trauma of grandpas livestreamed fisto 9000 sexfight.
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A speedy decapitation is the least barbaric method I can conceive of. Reasonable attached heads may differ. It is quick, relatively painless, and inexpensive. There have already been some higher tech forms of decapitation that developed over the centuries, like the guillotine. I would rather trust a well-designed instrument of physical decapitation than a doctor’s lethal injection that is liable to all sorts of errors. Something also seems wrong to me about filling a human with foreign chemicals before his death. What I find pleasing is relevant because the post considers, essentially, the optimal way to treat death. So what is aesthetically preferable matters. Others will have their own aesthetic preference, but it can’t be ignored completely — how many people are against “dying before SHTF” because of the gross culture surrounding it? The word “euthanasia”, the doctor, the injection, the hospital room… this is so displeasing that it actually biases us against a pretty reasonable argument.
Skydiving without a parachute has always been my preferred autoeuthanistic endeavor, though as a Christian I am honor-bound never to do such.
Did some looking at the early church and I’ve come away with a different interpretation
Tertullian is considered the father of western theology and he writes
So at least two major Christian thinkers had an approximately utilitarian view of suicide, namely that is it virtuous when the Good it accomplishes his greater than the bad it effects. And I don’t think it is too hard to defend “utilitarian suicide” from a Christian schema generally. It’s an acknowledgment that we belong to God and that God wishes us to love each other; it’s an act of love to others that we die before we cause immense pain; it acknowledges death; it acknowledges that a virtuous life matters more than clinging to years; and so on.
I’m an individualist American, an objectivist libertarian, and well versed in Western mental health models. This informs my Christianity that I should strive for health as one of my highest utility functions, and suicide outside of martyrdom is one of the unhealthiest acts I can perform.
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Nothing against your aesthetic but it's not my aesthetic. I mean, it is metal and badass, for sure, but I'd prefer psychedelics in a relaxing bed amongst family as my body naturally gives out if it must die this millennium.
You're right that the current legally permissible aesthetic is insufficient for everyone. But your aesthetic is also insufficient for everyone. If we want this to work for more people we should broaden the permissible aesthetics.
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I can perhaps accept an argument that we should be more accepting of the death of the elderly, but I don't think it is moral to encourage it. A culture of maybe taking a more serious look at what kind of life you might have remaining, and accepting a person's decision to no longer prolong it through medical procedures -- I can maybe accept that. But not intentionally ending (or pushing for the end of) someone's (or your own) life.
"No longer prolong" compared to "intentionally ending" is a fuzzy distinction. Which one is removing a feeding tube?
And even if that counts as "no longer prolong", that still means people have to die in agony instead of peacefully.
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The problem that I don’t see addressed by pro-euthanasia advocates is how exactly do you prevent the perverse incentives that remove the free choice of the individual? How do you make sure that insurance companies don’t instantly refuse to pay for surgeries or pain treatments or even medical equipment when an elderly person reaches the age where she’s eligible for euthanasia? How do you keep the family from talking advantage of early stages of dementia to convince their granny to choose euthanasia so they can inherit her money? The potential for those kinds of things would be pretty strong — a lot of money is spend on care in the last five or so years of life, which can mean that for insurance, ending the life 7 years early is a substantial cost savings. For the family, they’d get a bigger inheritance as you aren’t using those funds for the purpose of keeping granny alive. Governments can also save on accommodations in some cases.
What I see here is a very vulnerable population with a lot of people poised to get (or keep) lots of money by convincing that person to choose euthanasia even if it’s not what that person really wants, or if that person has less mental capacity.
One solution is different medical insurances available according to your preferred end of life care. Governments can be totally agnostic about the issue and keep away from medical care entirely, or they can run their own optional buy-in government-run healthcare. But if there develops a culture that says “actually we are fine with dying before things go terrible”, then the members of that culture should never be taxed for the costly end of life care of the rest of the population, and they should be allowed to engage in euthanasia as they please (above a certain age) provided there is consent of the member. As for,
Perhaps a requirement that they agreed to this eventuality at an earlier healthy date a certain number of years prior. Sort of like a Do Not Resuscitate.
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The set of examples coming out of Canada has been sobering, especially as someone who was loosely in favor of allowing voluntary euthanasia previously.
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I was thinking about this recently, in the context of the "population pyramid" getting worse and worse. What would be the effects in our modern society if all else were the same, but no one lived beyond the age of 75? Or if statins had never been invented?
I'm not advocating for, or evaluating the morality of doing this; it just makes me wonder. To what extent is the debt crisis, for example, caused by longer lifespans?
See also Logan's Run for a dramatically less serious examination of one solution to this issue, lol.
Also: Soylent Green & Midsommar
Lots of movie options that really sell mandatory euthanasia in a positive light!
Note that Logan's Run and Soylent Green (Make Room! Make Room!) also are available in their original book form.
Apropos of nothing: I have a copy of Make Room! Make Room!; but I have never yet seen the original Logan's Run (the book) in the wild at a bookstore, though I've been casually looking for it for years. I wonder if it had a limited print run or something.
It's on amazon, both as kindle format and paperback. Oddly, they also list an audio book available for the sequels Logan's World and Logan's Search, but the only books available are from used-book sellers.
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How do people keep ignoring the actual argument? Killing good people is bad, killing bad people is good. This has been more or less the justification for war and executions from religious and non-religious people alike for thousands of years. And within the past 40 years the majority of people not only stopped believing it, but completely and utterly forgot that this is what other people believe. Just because some people believe in a constant function: "killing people is always bad", does not mean everyone who disagrees with them believes its pure negation: "killing people is always good." There's a ton of room for nuance.
Given that the vast majority of potential euthanasia recipients are "good people" according to most sane definitions, ie they are not mass murderers or foreign soldiers that represent an existential threat to the life and liberty of your nation, any belief system that believes "killing good people is bad" and doesn't make exceptions for the will of the person will think that killing them is bad. Sophistication is not hypocrisy.
Historically, after its conversion to Christianity, the Eastern Roman Empire became less likely to execute high status people guilty of crimes against the state and more likely to use exile, disfigurement, or imprisonment in a monastery. The reasoning was that this was a merciful punishment, since it gave the guilty time to repent of their sins.
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When we send a soldier to die in war, for no other reason than that it retains a territorial claim with economic benefit, we are making a transaction of human life for “communal wellbeing”. And this is common in history, including nearly all Catholic countries. A country which considered human life ultimately sacred would give up the territorial claim so that no lives are lost, provided it is a mere territorial claim with no further risk of aggression. But no one would do this. This tells us something important about our values: human life is not the ultimate sacred value, but can be transacted for wellbeing. (Consider also sending humans to work in mines.)
The argument “it is okay to kill bad people” must be rooted in something, not axiomatic. Why is it okay to kill bad people rather than jail them for life? Human life ceases to be sacred when it is a bad person? This isn’t the religious argument whatsoever.
I don't think this scenario has ever happened in the history of the world. Conquering powers that aggressively steal land from others typically only pause to consolidate their gains, reshore their power and morale, cooldown international outrage, etc, before continuing to conquer. And even if the particular nation decides not to go further, if it becomes known you explicitly have a policy of not fighting back against conquest plenty of other nations will swoop in to exploit this. Nations with no militaries and no allies very quickly cease to exist.
Nobody ever explicitly sends soldiers "to die", except in very rare and very evil exceptions. People send soldiers in the hopes that they live and their enemies die. Again, killing bad people is good, killing good people is bad. If your enemies are aggressive and unprovokedly attacking you, then they are bad and you are good, so every soldier of theirs you kill is acceptable, and every soldier of yours they kill is yet another evil they have committed. The fact that your own people die is a horrible tragedy, but the blame for it lies on the enemy for killing them, not on you for sending them in self-defense.
This is pretty typical natural rights stuff, which can be religious or not depending on whether or not you believe the natural rights are inherent to humans or derived from God. Everyone is born with an inherent right to life, liberty, property, etc. Violating these is not okay. But if you willingly violate them in others then you forfeit some of yours (in various amounts depending on how harsh a perspective one has, but generally proportional to the amount that you violated from others.) Your natural rights are contingent on respecting the natural rights of others, and if you can't do that then you don't get the respect of others for yours.
Think of the Faklands. The British, rightfully, exchanged the lives of British soldiers for an important geopolitical claim. The British, in their minds rightfully, also fought Indian kingdoms and revolts for an important economic claim… were these Indians going to invade Britain?
Falklands is the obvious example, but this is also disproven if you consider the way the Mongols operated. Fighting the mongols always leads to more death, but if you win, you are in an economically more valuable position (less taxes paid). If human lives are the terminal value than it would never be rational to fight off the mongols.
Falklands is once again the obvious example. There’s an enormous difference between a territorial concession far away and invading the homeland. France would not invade the UK if the UK relinquished the Falklands.
This is an unserious semantic argument. We can predict with 99% accuracy that the some soldiers will die. We choose that they die to secure economic benefit. You haven’t argued against this point: soldiers have died to secure economic resources throughout history, in conflicts over geopolitically important or economically valuable territory, in cases where there is no direct threat of aggression in the mainland.
If human lives were the terminal value and there is no added risk to your defense, then the rational position would be to continually secede territory always, regardless of economic cost. We can even draft a hypothetical scenario involving interplanetary war, to make our intuitions clearer. Planet A and Planet B are completely defended and cannot be invaded. B is about to take A’s valuable resources which will leave A poorer. I think almost everyone would say that it’s permissible for A to sacrifice their lives to secure the valuable resources, even though there is no risk of mainland invasion — because we understand that resources increase wellbeing.
Okay so it’s rooted in whim
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Literally no one, including today, sees territorial claims as being maintained solely or primarily for economic benefit.
Have you heard of guano islands? The sugar trade? Colonial possessions? The whole history of European war in the colonial era is mixed with fighting other nations for territorial claims wherein the territory has economic benefit and nothing else. Russia today is preparing for war in the arctic involving its territorial resources, and China over fishing areas.
Are you? Or do you actually think Russia is invading Ukraine to get a few more scheckles?
In the end, the question of geopolitical dominance for someone who isn't race essentialist or heavily religious or something like that rests on the economic benefits of being the local hegemon, and the disadvantages of being a fractured gas station. I don't think anyone in the Kremlin who matters really believes physical genocide of Russians is in the cards, so that leaves submission and destitution.
While this may or may not apply to Russia, there's several dictators who could easily negotiate an agreement with the west, of yielding power for what would be untold riches (compared to what they have now), but prefer to be kings of the ashes. Money isn't everything.
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The argument rests on the widespread occurrence of war over purely economic territorial claims. It does not rest on every territorial claim involving purely economic motives.
I'll go out on a limb and say even the wars that we see as "purely economic" in retrospect, were justified on other grounds to people fighting them at the time.
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Genesis 9, and all:
Isn't that an endorsement of the death penalty?
Right, I'm agreeing.
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I support euthanasia being an option for the elderly, or anyone really, but I'm not quite aboard with actively encouraging it as the default option for the elderly.
I'd much rather we explore ways of delaying or reversing aging, the degree of investment there is nowhere near enough. On a pragmatic note, I'm all for a fixed budget or ceiling of care for people not paying out of pocket or through their family.
The UK is relatively sane in that regard, while we don't outright euthanize people on request, DNACPRs are widely used, and doctors have the ability to say enough's enough and refuse to treat further. At that point it's a matter of making sure they're comfortable till the embrace of death, while not doing anything to hasten or slow it.
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I feel like a lot of the benefits of this philosophy could be achieved by just pursuing less rigorous medical interventionism as opposed to out and out euthanasia. The issue with modern medicine is that, now that the pandora's box of super aggressive end of life care has been opened, it has proven difficult for medical systems to draw the line on what's a sensible amount of sunk cost to go into.
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The main and most potent argument against the death penalty is still relevant for euthanasia and any other desecration of human life: vesting in the State the power to kill is always and in all forms a slippery slope to horror. (And yes, though sometimes necessary, warfare is one of the worst things that befall us.)
Institutions cannot be trusted with the power to kill. The best and most sophisticated safeguards we have built over the years haven't prevented every instance to turn into extermination of undesirables (for whatever definition of undesirable is in vogue at the time).
Don't gas the boomers, you're next.
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You seem to be alleging that this is hypocritical on the part of the religious argument, but I think in fairness one must acknowledge that religions which oppose euthanasia generally oppose war and executions too.
Well, the religious would argue that war, law enforcement and capital punishment are endorsed by the Bible, but euthanasia had no scriptural precedent, except perhaps case of Abimelech.
Well, and Saul, and Jonah, and a bunch of other passages, if yours counts, but never positively, and seldom does it occur.
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I certainly would not argue that war is endorsed by the Bible, nor would any other Christian I know. Nor capital punishment for that matter.
Would capital punishment be endorsed by its being laid down as law for the ancient israelites? That would seem to ensure that there are at least some situations where it's proper. (See also the various statements against showing mercy in those contexts.)
I'm a little less confident about war, but Israel entering Canaan seems pretty plausible as by divine command.
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Not sure how you get around this one. God specifies that the blood will be shed “by man” and then gives a justification, indicating that this is to be taken as a normative statement instead of a descriptive one.
This is immediately after Noah gets off the ark, so you can’t pull the “Mosaic covenant” stuff that gets you out of Leviticus.
I disagree that this is a normative statement.
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Extremely easily. That's Old Testament. Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament and so the old covenant no longer applies.
Please don't write so arrogantly when you are unaware of one of the most basic concepts in Christianity. It's unbecoming.
This is an overly simplistic view of the relationship of the old and new covenants. (Accordingly, maybe be a little slower to say those final two sentences of yours, especially since @Quantumfreakonomics demonstrated knowledge of what you talk about by his reference to the Mosaic covenant.)
The following is probably not optimally ordered, but it should present things in a little more detail and clarity (I'd need to do significantly more reading to clarify my thoughts enough to do it better). But first we'll look at the law as laid down at the time of Moses. This can, generally speaking, be classified into three sorts of laws:
Christ's fulfilling of the law refers to his perfectly keeping it, in its entirety. (Rather than, as James 2:10, describes, breaking it in one point, and becoming guilty of the whole.) He alone has properly measured up to its standard, and so earned, on our behalf, the promised rewards associated with that.
Note that this does not abolish any of the three classes of laws. Moral laws still remain, as we still ought to do good things, and not to do bad things. It's not obvious to me that ceremonial laws would be affected by this—plausibly, there's no reason to stop celebrating the passover, just because someone's fully followed the law. And civil laws still must obviously exist, it still makes sense to punish criminals.
Rather, what Christ's fulfillment of the law accomplishes is meriting for us salvation and the rewards of the law—in the case of the promises to Adam, eternal life. In its application to us, that means that we are no longer dependent upon our fully upholding and fulfilling the law to reap these benefits, we are generously given those by means of our being united to Christ.
What about the three classes of laws, then? Why are they not all here?
First, moral laws stick around. They continue to apply in three sense to Christians. First, they serve to remind us of our dependence upon and estate before God by our failure to keep them. (Consider especially the bar Jesus sets in his articulation of them in the sermon on the mount—one breaks the commandment against adultery not merely by adultery outright, but also by lustful desires, for example.) Second, it can deter evil. Third, it acts as a guide to life. None of these change. (If you want textual proof, 1 Corinthians 9:9 cites a law as authoritative.)
Second, ceremonial laws are changed, because the system of laws that are proper to a people who are largely ethnically a single nation, and which exist in anticipation of and invoke a future savior are no longer so fitting when now the people of God are ethnically diverse, and rather look to the past (and future) coming of God in the flesh, and a corresponding fuller revelation. Read Hebrews in its description of how the old covenant relates to the new, and Paul, in his insistent commands against requiring gentiles to follow the Jewish laws. We still have ceremonial laws, though, of a sort—the command to celebrate the Lord's Supper is one.
Third, civil laws are changed. This is because the polity of Old Testament Israel has collapsed. These were never incumbent upon those not living as a part of the people of Israel, anyway. Instead, we have the various legal codes enacted by governments around the world (many of which are better for that people, in the context and society in which they live, than if they were to replace that law with the Israelite one), which are, as stated in Romans 13, of divine ordination and to be obeyed.
(This isn't a full discussion of everything that could be said—I haven't addressed things through the lenses of covenants properly.)
Applying this to the question at hand. What are we to make of the "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his image"? Well, the previous discussion was properly speaking, talking about laws for Israel. This is not one of those, being given rather at the time of Noah. It is also a bit ambiguous (at least in translation, I haven't looked at scholarship on this) whether this is a prophecy or general principle, or a command. Let us assume that it is the latter—that is conceded by your treating it as an old testament law.
Well, first, as this is something that is being given immediately after the flood, to Noah, this seems to have in its scope the entire people upon all the earth. This is different from, say, the commandment of circumcision, which applied only to the sons of Abraham, and to all others who wished to join the church of God as it existed then upon the earth. Rather, this is describing something universal. Accordingly, this could not be a ceremonial law—it is not laying down a churchly rite, that is only contingently the case and for the people of the church. It is explicitly grounded in something universal and enduring to mankind (the image of God), and at a time when it would be delivered to the whole of mankind then existing (Noah and family).
"By man shall his blood be shed" is notably in the passive. This does not seem to give any specific entity (or every individual?) the right to avenge murderers. But it does seem to establish that that person ought to be put to death. A reasonable reading of this passage—though certainly not the only one—is that it is incumbent upon the kingdoms of this world to punish murderers with death (but given the cities of refuge, this is clearly not intended to be limitless or without qualification). This reading seems to be supported by later passages. Genesis 4 had described blood crying out. Deuteronomy 21 requires unresolved murders to have an animal slaughtered in atonement. Romans 13 describes the ruler as an avenger, and refers to bearing the sword (not merely prison or the lash). These all at least plausibly indicate that some crimes, especially murders, demand punishment, and that death is a suitable penalty for that. Because of the universality of the Genesis 9 passage, and because there is no identifiable principle why that should cease due to Christ's coming, at least in my judgment—it is not in respect of the chosen people of God, but is universal, and flows from unchanging principles—we should think that it remains in place.
You may not agree with all of this—I'm not certain of everything I said myself, especially regarding Genesis 9:6—but this does require more serious engagement than a simple dismissal of everything prior to the coming of Christ as irrelevant.
I didn't say it was irrelevant! I just said we could pick and choose as we pleased based on what's convenient at the time. :)
But fair, I'll get schooled. Yeah I mean a lot of it depends on patristic interpretations and such.
Why would it depend on patristic interpretations?
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But what /u/Quantumfreakonomics is saying is that it is something that God says prior to the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. It's easy to write off a rule from Leviticus or Exodus, because, as you say, Jesus came to fulfill the law from a Christian perspective. But it is much harder to take a normative statement God said to Noah, the ancestor of all of modern mankind and prior to any Mosaic covenant, and say that it doesn't and shouldn't matter to modern Christians. Do you also think that Christians shouldn't be fruitful and multiply, or enjoy the beasts of the field and plants as food?
Not in all situations, no. And in fact many Christian saints have been vegan, and many Christian sects over the years have eschewed childbearing and focused on individual salvation.
Modern atheists have an unfortunate tendency to equate all of Christianity with the beliefs of the most vocal, modern evangelical Protestants. I should know, I used to do the same thing.
I mean, I wasn't thinking of modern Protestantism per se at all, Evangelical or otherwise. I've read through documents like the Westminster Larger Catechism (albeit years ago now), and my general impression was that the Christian attitude towards the Old Testament was not that none of it mattered to modern Christians. There was a fairly extensive role for the Old Testament in those old confessions and catechisms beyond it being the old covenant that doesn't apply anymore. There was lots of emphasis on the importance of Adam and the Patriarchs of Genesis, and discussion of parts of the Old Testament (like the 10 Commandments) being moral instruction that was still relevant to modern Christians.
A quick search reveals that you're Eastern Orthodox, and I don't discount that they probably have their own traditions surrounding the Bible and Apostolic Authority that differ from any Protestant or Western Christian branch, but even so I would find it unusual if an Eastern Orthodox scholar said that what God said to Noah doesn't apply because of Jesus' covenant. At the very least it seems to me that rainbows still happen, and God still hasn't flooded the Earth again, so it can't be the case that the Noahide covenant has been completely superseded.
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Then the Christians you know are very unusual, even just considering the set of Christians alive today, let alone considering the set of Christians across history.
That's not true. The official stance of the Catholic Church (the largest Christian denomination) is that the death penalty and war are both bad, and must only be engaged in when there's no other choice. This is very mainstream Christian belief, not some fringe position.
The Catholic Church's opposition to the death penalty is well known, but their doctrine explicitly allows for the possibility of just warfare.
If your claim is just that they teach that war is bad then I fully agree. I read eetan's "endorsed by the Bible" to mean permissible under some circumstances, not preferable or desirable.
I guess our disagreement hinges upon that last point, because I read "endorsed by the Bible" to mean desirable. I would phrase "permissible under some circumstances" as "condoned by the Bible".
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Who decides when someone has "cease[d] to be of value of others?" What if the person in question doesn't want to die? Killing oneself is not that hard and probably easier as one gets older.
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