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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   33126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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I think the take is usually "even if someone gives fully informed consent to have a violinist attached to their circulatory system, they have the right to remove him at any time, even if it causes his death and they agreed not to initially." There are people willing to bite the bullet on this.

Notably, this was not part of the original violinist argument. It was pretty clear from the original violinist argument that they were positing a cabal of music fans kidnapping someone in the middle of the night and attaching them without consent. This version is getting close to my preferred analogy - rock climbing.

When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope.

More generally, the idea of prospective consent exists elsewhere in the consent literature. The classic example is Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast. It would normally be objectionable for his men to tie him to the mast (or to keep him tied) against his objection. He had reason to believe that his future self would protest profusely, demanding to be untied, but we respect his original consent to overcome his later objections. A related example is the skydiver example. A new skydiver might know that they have a fear reaction to actually jumping out of a plane. It is normally not allowed for someone to just strap their bodies together and throw them out of the plane. But the new skydiver can prospectively consent, saying, "I know that I'm going to protest when we're standing on the edge, but I still want you to pull me off the plane with you."

Nearly all of contract law is an attempt to enforce prospective consent to things that you might not want to do at a future time. Even the most basic, "You give me stuff now, and I'll pay you money later," when at a later time, after having received the stuff, one might protest and want to withdraw their consent to paying the money. But there are clear responsibility laws/rules/norms in gobs of different situations. Commercial passenger pilots, for example, are known to have taken on a responsibility to stay in their airplane and try to save it and the lives of their passengers, even when they might want to just grab a parachute and leave the passengers to somehow save themselves. I think many people would also consider that to be literal murder.

"even if someone gives fully informed consent...they have the right to [revoke it]"

Heading off on a bit of a tangent, I've seen arguments like that a few times. They never quite sit right with me, or at least they feel incomplete.

When I see that argument, I imagine a hierarchy of agreements: at the bottom are mundane ones that anyone can agree to. In the middle are serious agreements that are restricted to adults of sound mind (legal contracts, etc.) because children can't fathom the consequences of signing. At the top are super serious ones that no living human could be expected to follow through on (e.g. that take on the violinist) because adults can't fathom the consequences of signing.

With that in mind, the fully-consenting-violinist arguments says that (by analogy) motherhood is a superhuman commitment that no adult should be held to, regardless of any indications they might make otherwise.

What I always wanted to know is, having bitten that bullet, how do they justify not biting the bullet on infanticide, or extermination of the non-self-sufficient.

Same way you bite the bullet when you don't give food to the homeless.

There are no homeless people starving to death in the USA(source- look at their waistlines). There are probably some who freeze to death from lack of shelter, or die of ordinarily quite preventable diseases due to poor hygiene, or..., but not as many as simply die from drug overdoses.

Seems like it's closer to the bullet people bite when they pass out cokes spiked with antifreeze to the homeless.

The homeless with a profusion of free money, food, shelter, education, healthcare, goods, and services available to them, paid for by my taxes? The ones that I have, on multiple occasions, witnessed throwing away food given to them because despite what their cardboard sign claimed it's not what they actually wanted? Those homeless?

Not quite. When I don't give food to the homeless, I just don't give them food. Maybe someone else does, maybe they go to a church-run soup kitchen, but I don't put a bullet in their head.

So no, the comparison fails, and once more I wonder how the Elite Human Capital had the hubris to unironically use the name.

Those, or even undesirables in general.

The pro-life side will probably happily point you to the apparently slippery slope of MAID in Canada (and elsewhere): have you considered euthanasia as a treatment for PTSD?

America had legal abortion from 1973 to 2022 and no such slippery slope was encountered.

I'd actually say we've seen America do nothing but slide down the slippery slopes since the 70s. It may not have taken the exact same form at the exact same pace as Canada, but it's still tumbling down.

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