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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32894 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.

You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.

I actually agree with your hypothetical, but choosing to kill yourself or choosing not to stop a fellow prisoner from killing himself is very different from society validating your choice and killing you itself.

If this girl had slit her own wrists in the bathtub or whatever, I think many of us would view it as a tragedy but none of us would view it as an outrage. The fact that the state did it is a necessary component of the fact pattern.

Also -- being tortured in a Russian prison is much worse than being mentally ill. Being under the physical control of another intelligent adversary intent on maximizing your suffering is an exotic state, morally, and I think your analogy trades on that exoticism in order to reach the conclusion that you want. If someone broke a bone and had to go through a week of painful recovery -- equally painful to the Russian torture -- but was expected to be fine after that, then I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances, even if we would sympathize with the suicidal tortured prisoner.

I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances

I'm not sure if I do. Though of course, if this is the only option on offer, we-as-society should figure out a way to do better.

The median human life for most of history probably included at least, in total, the equivalent of a week of awful torture, tbh. And they, in turn, would describe the life of a wild animal, not dissimilar to a far ancestor, as torture.

I should hope that the median human life does not involve begging for death! Intensity and locality of suffering has its own quality.

Does future you have any children in this scenario?

If you don't have to live for your future self, to whom you owe the most out of anyone, why would you have to live for future children?

I don't agree with the premise of any temporal snapshot raising to the level of identity anyways when it's intrinsically transient in my opinion.

But glossing over the metaphysics, if we're speaking in terms of obligation and duty, whether we're part of the great chain of being in real terms or not seems important.

People endure all sorts of suffering for their kids, real or imagined.

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