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NihilCredo comments on A Fate Worse Than Death - Less Wrong
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I really, really don't understand this one (and I know you're stating a personal choice rather than a universal argument). Avoiding the psychological burden for your loved ones, and the financial burden to your country, could be a very reasonable altruistic argument. But it sounds like that's not the point of this example of yours, am I correct? Proceeding on that assumption:
would you refuse a nice cake if you were on your deathbed with a life expectancy of a few hours, in favour of an immediate lethal injection? I doubt it. A couple of hours of blissful coma? That's a pretty similar offer. How about a couple of days then? Months? Years?
In other words, at which order of magnitude do you start feeling preemptively guilty for accepting a state of mindless pleasure in which you aren't accomplishing anything meaningful, in alternative to the state of being dead in which you don't accomplish anything either anyway?
I can't speak for the OP, but my own justification for a similar preference rests on something like the consideration you set aside in your first paragraph. Stated more generally: my continued survival consumes resources, and there are things I would prefer those resources be devoted to than maintaining me in a blissful coma.
Sure, when the resources involved are small enough (a cake, a couple of hours of blissful coma, etc.) I may choose otherwise because what the hell, but when the magnitude gets large enough to matter I start to care.
The key question isn't what I could accomplish either way, but what would be accomplished either way.