The death penalty has various serious problems and lifetime imprisonment is really really expensive.
I guess we should be happy every time someone so thoroughly bad we want them out of society forever (like a serial murderer) does us the favour of killing themselves. Nothing of value is lost, and the justice system saves money. Right?
It seems to me it logically follows that we should incentivize such suicides. Like: 5000 dollars to a person of your choice if you're dead within the first year of your lifetime sentence, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
It feels very wrong and is clearly outside the overton window. But is there any reason to expect this wouldn't be a net benefit?
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People keep accusing me of being "uncharitable" when I claim that utilitarianism is fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing because in order to remain logically consistent it must inevitably devolve into either mindless wire-heading or a fucking death cult. And yet here we are with one of my "strawmen" made flesh asking do we really need to value life? Really? and why cant we just euthanize the people [user] doesn't like.
On the off chance you're just naive and ignorant rather than a troll, the answer to your question in the OP is; No, we shouldn't, because we've already established that this is a slippery slope, and at the bottom of this slope lies a mountain of skulls.
You as a utilitarian may see that as a fair trade for some nebulous benefit but I do not
As well take a look at the posts in the main thread here and conclude that anti-woke purity spiraling inevitably turns into Stormfront.
Dogmatic adherence to utilitarianism doesn't lead to any better outcomes than dogmatic adherence to the Old Testament. Anything has to be alloyed with common sense and some flexibility for appeals to emotion, otherwise you end up with one Repugnant Conclusion or another. TRVDITION is all fun and games and human flourishing until you have to disown your daughter for marrying the Wrong Sort (oops, guess I've been reading too many of SecureSignals' posts).
There's also an aspect of status signaling, whereby emotion is low status. The more coldblooded, the more points you get for being purely rational and high IQ - thus, nuke the GPUs/kill the degenerates/forced sterilization and eugenics.
Precisely.
My position is essentially that none of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
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