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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.
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.
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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