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1·5 months agoHere’s how your answer sounds to me:
“I would rather pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to waste people’s time wiping my ass long after I’ve lost my mind than help future generations and my loved ones by passing away at a moment of my choosing.”
And I gave you my answer- I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t want to end my life unless it has to end.
WHY? That’s what I’m asking you. You haven’t even attempted to answer this question.
You don’t like the answer
You haven’t given an answer, and my guess is you don’t have one. Perhaps the reason you would want to live, even with dementia, is a mystery to you. That’s fine, but just say so.
Dementia is a spectrum of neuropathology, so you’ve effectively ignored my question. But ok, let’s go with your specific example. Why would you keep your father alive in such an undignified state? You’re describing him as playing with “child-level jigsaw puzzles,” meaning he’s barely sentient and someone has to wipe his ass, which is a horrifying indignity. Literally my idea of hell. Are you punishing him? Are you punishing yourself? Do you just not care about his dignity?
Humans are supposed to transcend the mortal realm, so why this obsession with remaining alive even at the expense of everyone around you? I guess I’ll never get an answer.
I defer to you on whether your particular life was worth living. The question is why you would want to live if your mind, your character and memories were gone — if you were a burden on those around you and could no longer engage in self-reflection or abstract reasoning. What would be the point?
Honest question, why are people so obsessed with living? I’d want to be euthanized at the first sign of dementia. Just give me like a week to get my affairs in order. It’s bizarre that people would rather exist as mindless husks than die peacefully at a time of their choosing.
Maybe it’s fear. Most humans live and think like animals whose impulse to survive overrides rationality. Or is there another explanation?
I genuinely want to understand.
Pointing out that killing women and children is bad is “divisive.”
Amazing.
You could attribute any payment, no matter how corrupt, to “national defense and a civil space program.”
You’ve really never encountered a biology textbook, huh?
Give them their Darwin awards.
This kind of thing tends to happen when frugivorous apes attempt to eat meat for no reason.
Edit: the replies confirm that humans really are one chromosome away from Chimpanzees. Amazing.
Let me again recommended this textbook on Ethics: https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/living-ethics-9780197608876
The death penalty is chapter 20.
Also,
- “Death” isn’t (or should not be) a punishment. We don’t “punish” rabid dogs when we euthanize them. Sometimes the alternative is simply worse.
- Earlier you said that “evil cannot be quantified” and therefore doesn’t exist. However, quantifiability is not an ontological prerequisite. If it were, then almost nothing would exist, including you and me.
- You don’t need to resort to straw men. Respond to my arguments instead of arguing with yourself.
- Moral claims wouldn’t be “arbitrary” unless nihilism is true, which you’ve denied.
The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.
I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.
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