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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30748 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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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 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

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?

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.

A speedy decapitation is the least barbaric method I can conceive of.

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 addressing Christians in prison who were awaiting martyrdom, encouraged and strengthened them by citing the example of famous suicides including Lucretia, Dido and Cleopatra. Chrysostom and Ambrose both applauded Palagia, a girl of 15 who threw herself off the roof of a house rather than be captured by Roman soldiers. In Antioch, a woman called Domnina and her two daughters drowned themselves to avoid rape, an act which, as in the case of the Jews, was venerated. […] Jerome also approved of suicide for religious reasons and did not condemn austerities which undermine the constitution and which might be regarded as slow suicide. He recounts, with the greatest admiration, the life and death of a young nun named Belsilla who imposed such penalties on herself that she died.

Tertullian is considered the father of western theology and he writes

It would take me too long to enumerate one by one the men who at their own self-impulse have put an end to themselves. As to women, there is a famous case at hand: the violated Lucretia, in the presence of her kinsfolk, plunged the knife into herself, that she might have glory for her chastity. Mucius burned his right hand on an altar, that this deed of his might dwell in fame. The philosophers have been outstripped — for instance Heraclitus, who, smeared with cow dung, burned himself; and Empedocles, who leapt down into the fires of Ætna; and Peregrinus, who not long ago threw himself on the funeral pile. For women even have despised the flames. Dido did so, lest, after the death of a husband very dear to her, she should be compelled to marry again; and so did the wife of Hasdrubal, who, Carthage being on fire, that she might not behold her husband suppliant as Scipio's feet, rushed with her children into the conflagration, in which her native city was destroyed. Regulus, a Roman general, who had been taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, declined to be exchanged for a large number of Carthaginian captives, choosing rather to be given back to the enemy. He was crammed into a sort of chest; and, everywhere pierced by nails driven from the outside, he endured so many crucifixions. Woman has voluntarily sought the wild beasts, and even asps, those serpents worse than bear or bull, which Cleopatra applied to herself, that she might not fall into the hands of her enemy. But the fear of death is not so great as the fear of torture. And so the Athenian courtezan succumbed to the executioner, when, subjected to torture by the tyrant for having taken part in a conspiracy, still making no betrayal of her confederates, she at last bit off her tongue and spat it in the tyrant's face, that he might be convinced of the uselessness of his torments, however long they should be continued. Everybody knows what to this day is the great Lacedæmonian solemnity— the διαμαστύγωσις, or scourging; in which sacred rite the Spartan youths are beaten with scourges before the altar, their parents and kinsmen standing by and exhorting them to stand it bravely out. For it will be always counted more honourable and glorious that the soul rather than the body has given itself to stripes

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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