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taw comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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"Choosing infanticide over abandonment is pretty pointless, so why do it?"
How about infanticide as euthanasia ?
Killing another living thing doesn't qualify as "euthanasia" if you do it for your benefit, not that being's.
By infant abandonment by giving it to an orphanage (it's not legal everywhere, but in a lot of countries it's perfectly legal and acceptable) you lose both your responsibility and your control over the baby, so you no longer have any right to do so.
And speaking of euthanasia, we really should seriously reban it. We pretty much know how to deal with even the most severe pain - very large doses of opiates to get rid of it, and large doses of stimulants like amphetamines to counter the side effects. War on Drugs is the reason why we don't routinely do this to people in severe pain.
We don't have a magical cure for depression, but if someone is depressed, they cannot make rational decisions for themselves anyway, so they cannot decide to kill themselves legitimately.
Once you cover these casese, there are zero legitimate arguments left for euthanasia.
"Choosing infanticide over abandonment is pretty pointless, so why do it?" "Killing another living thing doesn't qualify as "euthanasia" if you do it for your benefit, not that being's."
I once was a friend with a boy with a progressive muscular dystrophy. It is a degenerative disease, where gradually, Your muscles stop working, and at the age of cca 20, most patients die, because they stop breathing. If You have heard great stories about people on the wheelchair getting adapted to their situation, well, here adaptation can be only shorterm, because next year, You might not be able of doing what you can do now. The pain was not excruciating but there was some, the body which is deprived of excercise gives You this feedback. If he had a bad dream at night, he could not turn to the other side (a very usual remedy, most people do it without even realizing). The boy had 2 suicide attempts, although, frankly, he did not really mean them. He would make phonecalls to his friends in the evening to relieve his pain - very unwelcome calls. I sometimes pretended not to be at home, and I know other people who did the same (We were in our twenties). Then, his desperation was deepened by feeling he is not loved. Once he was calling his psychologist, and caught her in the middle of a suicide attempt, poisoned by drugs - she repeated to him HIS previous statements from the previous phonecalls. I am not saying it was HIS fault, the lady clearly failed to safeguard the known risks of her profession (plus had other problems, departed partner etc.) I am just illustrating how hard it was sometimes to deal with him. (He called other people who saved her life, to close up this branch of the story). His parents took great care of him up to the level of their financial abilities, plus using the limited help of our government. There were frequent conflicts between him and his parents, though, and made him feel unloved, again. On the other hand, his parents were deeply religious and, knowingly, had another baby with the same genetic defect later, they did not choose abortion. The older boy has died at the age of 28, his life being surprisingly long.
This story clearly contains aspects, which were not optimized, the parents could have earned more money and bring more comforts to his lives, he could have gotten a personal assistant at night, more physiotherapy excercises, a better computer, some lectures how to deal with people and get a girlfriend (his desires were strong), he could have tried harder to develop his talents and get a job, which would make him feel useful to society. (We persuaded him to get a job eventually, phone operator, lasted 1 year or so). His friens, including me, could have worked harder on their emotional maturity. But, can You see all the energy and resources to make a misery somewhat better ?
Now let us see a different story, where the parents of a sick child became EXTREME optimizers. Watch the film Lorenzo's Oil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo%27s_Oil_%28film%29) or read about Lorenzo Odone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Odone). Wonderful and admirable story. But can You see the end result, after You do all that is in Your power for Your baby ?
"Choosing infanticide over abandonment is pretty pointless, so why do it?" Abandoning a baby with a severe genetic defect at birth condemnes the baby to even lower quality of life in most government institutions, unless a millionaire chooses to adopt him.
I have a counterargument to my own reasoning right away - what if some parents killed their baby diagnosed with adrenoleukodystrophy (but with no developed symptomps yet) a year before Augusto and Michaela Odone invented the Lorenzo's Oil for their son ? Such parents would have lost a potentially healthy baby, the baby would lose a realistic chance to live their normal life...
I am not really trying to win this argument, just explaining, why I sometimes TOY with the idea of infanticide being not so immoral, and considering it a form of euthanasia.
There's plenty of diseases we can now deal with quite well because we didn't infanticide or murder everyone who had them. This isn't a coincidence that a treatment is found, if we killed everyone with a disease there would be no search for treatment.
Is this one of those "torture one person for 50 years" versus "deaths of millions" thought experiments?
Easiest thought experiments ever?
Would you rather be tortured for 3^^^3 years, or have a dust speck in your eye?
If I use UDT2 can I choose 'both'?
This seems like a good "control" thought experiment to determine whether people are just being contrarian.
I think you'd have to be a pretty unsubtle contrarian to answer that with "torture".
And yet, at least one person below did just that. Edit: ...but later asserted that had been a joke.
I think in this case you can drop the suffix and just say "being contrary".
More like, to determine whether people are paying any attention. (I once took an online personality test which included questions such as “I've never eaten before” to prevent people from using bots or similar to screw up their data.)
It's hard to get people to answer such things straightforwardly. I once included "Some people have fingernails" in a poll, as about the most uncontroversially true thing I could think of, and participants found a way to argue that it wasn't true - since "some" understates the proportion.
That's not that easy, unless having a dust speck in my eye also entails my living for 3^^^3 years.
I nominate ABrooks as this month's contrarian.
This is another great example of a comment that should have been silently downvoted, not responded to.
I generally avoid downvoting comments that are direct responses to me. I'm not exactly sure why, beyond a sense that it just feels wrong, although I can justify it in a number of different ways that I'm pretty sure aren't my real reasons.
I thought that too, but I assumed I'd die right after being tortured anyway. And I'd rather live to age n without ever being tortured than live to age n + m being tortured for m years.
Wait, what?
To clarify:
A = Dust speck in your eye, and your life is otherwise as it would have been without this deal.
B = 3^^^3 years of torture, followed by death.
Is that an easy choice for you?
If not, can you summarize your arguments in favor of choosing B?
Well, if I choose B, I'll be alive for a very large number of years. I'll be alive so long, that I expect that I'll get used to anything deployed to torture me. And I'll be alive so long, I'd need to study a fair amount of cosmology just to understand what my lifetime will involve, by way of the deaths and rebirths of whole universes or whatever. Some of that would be interesting to see.
The easy thought experiment would be dust speck vs. 3 years of torture followed by death. I think there, I'd go with the speck.
An obvious argument in favor of B is that you get to live for 3^^^3 years. A reframing:
A = Dust speck in your eye, after which you read a normal life except that you cease to exist a mere 60 years later.
B = Tortured for the rest of your life, but you never die.
Note that you're arguing that your preferred policy can never have true drawbacks, rather than arguing that it's worth it on balance. Be careful.
Policy of not mass murdering people is as close to drawback-free as it gets.
I'm sure you can figure out some trivial drawbacks if you want.
Doesn't appreciably constrain your behavior, though, unless you happen to be the star of a popular Showtime series or something. Declaring a policy is only meaningful if it actually affects your choices, which in this case only makes sense if you expect to be considering mass murder as a solution to your problems.
And in a situation as extreme as that, I wouldn't be surprised if some otherwise unthinkable subjective downsides came up.
Suppose I say now, in my non-depressed state, that if I were ever to become so depressed that I wanted to die, I'd prefer that this want be fulfilled.
We cannot allow this any more than we can allow people to sold themselves to slavery as a loan guarantee.
Which doesn't preclude allowing both. I can see benefits of allowing the latter. Or, more to the point, I can see situations where forbidding the latter is morally abhorrent. Specifically, when there is not a safety net in place that prevents people starving or otherwise suffering for the lack of finances that they should be able to acquire.
Sure, I can see how if you didn't like the latter then you'd dislike the former.
I'd be incredibly surprised if this actually worked clinically.
Start here, and follow the links.
That doesn't answer my question. I'm not interested in the ethical, legal, and societal barriers to adequate pain management, which is what your link covers as far as I can tell.
I want to know how one intends to circumvent opiate tolerance, and whether or not large doses of stimulants really do counteract the side effects of large doses of opiates in a large enough class of people to be effective, without the side effects of these stimulants becoming undesirable.
Assembling a drug cocktail in order to achieve some central result while minimizing side effects, with ongoing adjustment as the severity of the underlying condition and the patient's sensitivity to the drugs in question both change, is one of those complicated problems which modern medicine is nonetheless capable of solving, given adequate resources.
Wow. You just decreed it impossible for euthanasia to be done professionally.
I think if someone's paying you do perform a service for them, that counts as doing it for their benefit. You're benefiting from the money, not the act itself.