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But what's the principle behind the distinction? "Consent"? Surely the sort of depressed and chronically ill people who assent to their execution were never in any sort of position to make this decision rationally in the first place. Not to mention those pressured in it for financial reasons, which make it just a roundabout way of executing some subset of the poor without recourse.
I know what mine is when I distinguish between forms of killing: it is right to kill some criminals because it is justice, and society is upholding some metaphysical order in doing so. Whilst letting people you could have helped die because it's easier or cheaper is abominable cowardice that betrays that self same metaphysical order.
What's the argument for the converse view really? Any attempts at constructing some distinction through some liberating principle of self determination immediately crumble in the face of the contradiction between free will and materialism. The core problem of the Rousseauist project of liberating the mind from tye body.
What level of constraint turns assisted death into murder? Apparently it's not a third party's intent to kill. Nor is it being killed when you'd prefer to live.
I don't think the two issues are particularly connected. There is a whole grab bag of potential reasons to be against the death penalty; false convictions, it's seemingly non-existent effectiveness as an additional deterrent, the 'sanctity of human life'. It seems that only the final one of those justifications also entails being against euthanasia
Look, I'm hardly going to try to litigate centuries of debate over free will here, but it seems pretty clear to me that justifying euthanasia on the grounds of respecting the autonomy of the person is a legitimate perspective which is in no way contradictory with a number of legitimate criticisms of the death penalty. I don't even subscribe to the former but to rather glibly discount it as you do is pretty arrogant.
Neither am I, which is why I handwave it.
I'm sure it's possible to extract a position where one has a strong belief in free will and thinks that killing oneself through the State is moral, but it's pretty unconventional.
People who believe in individual will usually go one of two ways.
Either they believe existence is a prerequisite of morality and therefore that suicide is impermissible.
Or they believe whims/reason are beyond question because individual autonomy is paramount, and then the morally reprehensible part isn't that one is permitted to die, but that they have to rely on an institution to do it.
This is the paradox at the heart of Rousseau's idea of liberation: this nonsensical idea that the individual can be freed by dissolving his individual will into the General Will. Which taken to its logical conclusions ends in totalitarian modernisms which would say this scheme is not impermissible, but would justify it through the idea that it benefits the State rather than the individual, which does not exist under such conceptions.
Autonomy is a legitimate perspective indeed (within some moral paradigms anyhow), that's not the issue The issue is an autonomous person doesn't need the State to kill them.
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I can help many poor Africans by selling all my worldly possessions and donating to some charitable cause. This implies that my failure to do so is abominable cowardice on my part, and in fact that everyone except such Africans is engaged in abominable cowardice.
You have no duty to care for proverbial poor Africans. This isn't true of the countrymen a national healthcare system is sworn to protect.
The people being offered death are citizens and in some cases direct wards of the State, sovereignty implies a moral duty to care for your subjects under even purely utilitarian conceptions of it.
Someone is clearly responsible for this particular senseless waste of human life.
This can be true of your proverbial Africans as well, but without a specified scenario it's impossible to tell. That said the problem is unlikely to be one of cowardice in that continent rather than more blatant forms of tyranny, incompetence and corruption, in my experience. Canada has no such excuses.
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I think "letting them die" is the wrong term. What is happening here is the state is "actively killing them."
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No? I struggle to see how you even came to that conclusion. Would the opposite also be the case? Anyone not spending everything they have on Africans can kill anyone that's costing them money?
YouThe OP said that "... letting people you could have helped die because it's easier or cheaper is abominable cowardice."I have failed to help such Africans, and I've failed to help them because it was easier and cheaper to not do so. Some of them will die because of this.
So it follows that I am engaged in abominable cowardice.
If that's the standard for cowardice, rest assured I'm standing by your side and competing to become an even bigger one. I never claimed to be omnibenevolent, merely a net positive of the same. I feel no shame about the matter either!
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