I really hate this form of argument but it seems common on less-wrong.
“If you don’t want to do something right now you obviously don’t want it ever or for it to ever be an option. ”
If you apply the same form to anything else it becomes more obvious that it’s not logical. Don’t want to move away from your parents today? well then you must never want to. Don’t want to eat that cake today? well then you must never want to.
Ditto for the fake “proof by induction” I once saw posted in one of these topics where someone claimed that if you want to live today and also will want to live tomorrow and the next etc then you must want to live forever.
It also implicitly assumes that everyone shares the same ethical system. Someone might be utterly against murder but would be quite happy if someone they really really hate gets hit by a train. That doesn’t mean they want to kill that person today. Many people view suicide as wrong in it’s own right, something to be avoided for the simple reason that they believe taking their own life to have some form of ethical injunction against it.
Alas, but no. The reason I don’t expect my current decisions to be preserved into, say, the next year, is because I expect something crucial about my situation to change during the intervening period. For instance, take this example:
Don’t want to move away from your parents today? well then you must never want to.
Sorry; that’s just plain wrong. If I don’t want to move away from my parents today, that’s due to a number of reasons: I might be underage, still economically reliant upon them, still need to attend school, etc. On the other hand, I anticipate with high probability that at some point the above statements will no longer be true; there will come a point when I am no longer underage, no longer dependent, and ready to go to a fancy out-of-state college, say. The point is, I expect my decision to change because I expect the surrounding circumstances to change. If for some reason I was persuaded that I would forever remain an economically dependent minor, then perhaps I would want to stay with my parents forever.
Note that this is not the situation our supposed deathists find themselves in. They are not expecting some future change in their circumstances that would render death suddenly a thing that they want. They don’t want to die today because they are (for example) living comfortably in a retirement home, interacting with their children and grandchildren. There is no reason to expect those conditions to change anytime soon barring death, and in particular, there is no reason to expect those conditions to change in such a manner as to make death preferable to life.
And for good reason: try to imagine a situation in which you are happily living your life one day, and suddenly want to die the next. All right, I bet that was pretty easy. Maybe you were kidnapped during the night and subjected to extremely painful torture that you were told would last for 50 years. Maybe you developed some mental disorder causing you to become rampantly suicidal. Or maybe it’s just that you received a notice of foreclosure; that’s been known to drive people to suicide, after all. Now let me add one more caveat. It has to be something you were expecting in advance—not necessarily that you knew it was going to happen on that day, but you knew it was going to happen someday.
Suddenly not so easy, is it? Death is one of those things for which your preferences should never change outside of some extreme circumstances that are minimally probable at best. If you don’t want to die today, there will never come a day when you do want to die (“Oh, man, it’s Tuesday! Wouldn’t this be just a fantastic day to commit suicide!”) barring the possibility of black swans. And that makes “wanting to die” a very different beast than “wanting to move out from my parents’ house” indeed.
Note that this is not the situation our supposed deathists find themselves in. They are not expecting some future change in their circumstances that would render death suddenly a thing that they want.
Yes, they are. They are expecting their health to keep deteriorating.
At what point does deteriorating health change your answer to the question of whether you want to die today from “no” to “yes”? This isn’t a continuum here; you either want to die or you don’t. Do you expect a particular day on which you will wake up and suddenly decide it would preferable to die, having held the opposite preference on the previous day?
Yes, I expect that. If that was not so, it would never be possible to have different yes/no answers to any continuous thing. You can walk X distance, you can walk an inch more, when is it too far to walk?
This happens the same way you change any other preference or opinion. The reasons for your preference or opinion change on a roughly continuous basis, but in the end you do change the preference or opinion on a particular day.
Note that this is not the situation our supposed deathists find themselves in. They are not expecting some future change in their circumstances that would render death suddenly a thing that they want. They don’t want to die today because they are (for example) living comfortably in a retirement home, interacting with their children and grandchildren. There is no reason to expect those conditions to change anytime soon barring death, and in particular, there is no reason to expect those conditions to change in such a manner as to make death preferable to life.
You’re kidding right? There are a great many scenarios which would make death preferable to life and we see them happening to people all around us regularly.
You’re making the exact illogical claims that I was talking about.
Many elderly people, faced with a slow decline pre-commit to some Schelling fence or set of conditions for when they want to stop living. It may be when they can’t remember their childrens names or similar. They know with absolute certainty that it is coming but may not want to die today.
Believe it or not “How about June? ” genuinely is the kind of thing that people sometimes say about dying.
Even without alzheimer’s given enough time I can certainly see myself picking some arbitrary time to die. I’d quite like that to be far more than 100 years after my birth but lots of people have no problem imagining wanting to die eventually even without extreme or horrible events.
Many elderly people, faced with a slow decline pre-commit to some Schelling fence or set of conditions for when they want to stop living.
I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t talking about those. I was talking about the same kind of people PhilGoetz was talking about:
I live in a small town full of retirees, and those few I’ve asked about it are waiting for death peacefully. When I ask them about their ambitions, or things they still want to accomplish, they have none.
By switching the topic of discussion away from retirees and to ill people, you’ve effectively pulled a bait-and-switch. Let’s try to stay on topic, neh?
By switching the topic of discussion away from retirees and to ill people, you’ve effectively pulled a bait-and-switch.
Nope, I don’t think so. You said:
They are not expecting some future change in their circumstances that would render death suddenly a thing that they want.
and this is plainly false—it’s false not just for ill people. Retirees are quite aware that their health and mental abilities will continue to worsen with age.
My assertion is that there’s a difference between wanting to die and being apathetic about having death sneak up on you, and that most old people are actually in the latter category. I’m not comfortable calling these people “deathist”, preferring instead to reserve the term for those who would oppose the idea that death should be optional.
I hold that the person who merely wouldn’t mind not waking up tomorrow is usually just as content to keep living for one more day, and would likely be at least as content to wake up in a younger body.
The guy living in his mom’s basement who says he would like to leave is less ambivalent. He would much rather wake up in a place of his own, provided he didn’t have to make the continuous effort normally needed to enable this.
If dying took as much effort as getting and holding a job, I doubt it would be so popular.
I would probably say that some very old people are ready to die. I wouldn’t call it “wanting to die”, it’s not an active desire, but I also wouldn’t call it “apathetic” because it’s more than just not caring.
The question is, how much of this sentiment among the elderly is based on it being improbable that there will be affordable replacement organs or other “anti-aging” technologies in their lifetimes?
Some of us 20-somethings are trying to decide whether to (A) go into YOLO mode or (B) sacrifice utility for the next 60 years in order to maximize expected utility for the next 1,000.
I really hate this form of argument but it seems common on less-wrong.
“If you don’t want to do something right now you obviously don’t want it ever or for it to ever be an option. ”
If you apply the same form to anything else it becomes more obvious that it’s not logical. Don’t want to move away from your parents today? well then you must never want to. Don’t want to eat that cake today? well then you must never want to.
Ditto for the fake “proof by induction” I once saw posted in one of these topics where someone claimed that if you want to live today and also will want to live tomorrow and the next etc then you must want to live forever.
It also implicitly assumes that everyone shares the same ethical system. Someone might be utterly against murder but would be quite happy if someone they really really hate gets hit by a train. That doesn’t mean they want to kill that person today. Many people view suicide as wrong in it’s own right, something to be avoided for the simple reason that they believe taking their own life to have some form of ethical injunction against it.
Alas, but no. The reason I don’t expect my current decisions to be preserved into, say, the next year, is because I expect something crucial about my situation to change during the intervening period. For instance, take this example:
Sorry; that’s just plain wrong. If I don’t want to move away from my parents today, that’s due to a number of reasons: I might be underage, still economically reliant upon them, still need to attend school, etc. On the other hand, I anticipate with high probability that at some point the above statements will no longer be true; there will come a point when I am no longer underage, no longer dependent, and ready to go to a fancy out-of-state college, say. The point is, I expect my decision to change because I expect the surrounding circumstances to change. If for some reason I was persuaded that I would forever remain an economically dependent minor, then perhaps I would want to stay with my parents forever.
Note that this is not the situation our supposed deathists find themselves in. They are not expecting some future change in their circumstances that would render death suddenly a thing that they want. They don’t want to die today because they are (for example) living comfortably in a retirement home, interacting with their children and grandchildren. There is no reason to expect those conditions to change anytime soon barring death, and in particular, there is no reason to expect those conditions to change in such a manner as to make death preferable to life.
And for good reason: try to imagine a situation in which you are happily living your life one day, and suddenly want to die the next. All right, I bet that was pretty easy. Maybe you were kidnapped during the night and subjected to extremely painful torture that you were told would last for 50 years. Maybe you developed some mental disorder causing you to become rampantly suicidal. Or maybe it’s just that you received a notice of foreclosure; that’s been known to drive people to suicide, after all. Now let me add one more caveat. It has to be something you were expecting in advance—not necessarily that you knew it was going to happen on that day, but you knew it was going to happen someday.
Suddenly not so easy, is it? Death is one of those things for which your preferences should never change outside of some extreme circumstances that are minimally probable at best. If you don’t want to die today, there will never come a day when you do want to die (“Oh, man, it’s Tuesday! Wouldn’t this be just a fantastic day to commit suicide!”) barring the possibility of black swans. And that makes “wanting to die” a very different beast than “wanting to move out from my parents’ house” indeed.
Yes, they are. They are expecting their health to keep deteriorating.
At what point does deteriorating health change your answer to the question of whether you want to die today from “no” to “yes”? This isn’t a continuum here; you either want to die or you don’t. Do you expect a particular day on which you will wake up and suddenly decide it would preferable to die, having held the opposite preference on the previous day?
Yes, I expect that. If that was not so, it would never be possible to have different yes/no answers to any continuous thing. You can walk X distance, you can walk an inch more, when is it too far to walk?
See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/
This happens the same way you change any other preference or opinion. The reasons for your preference or opinion change on a roughly continuous basis, but in the end you do change the preference or opinion on a particular day.
You’re kidding right? There are a great many scenarios which would make death preferable to life and we see them happening to people all around us regularly.
You’re making the exact illogical claims that I was talking about.
Many elderly people, faced with a slow decline pre-commit to some Schelling fence or set of conditions for when they want to stop living. It may be when they can’t remember their childrens names or similar. They know with absolute certainty that it is coming but may not want to die today.
Believe it or not “How about June? ” genuinely is the kind of thing that people sometimes say about dying.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-last-day-of-her-life.html?_r=0
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Even without alzheimer’s given enough time I can certainly see myself picking some arbitrary time to die. I’d quite like that to be far more than 100 years after my birth but lots of people have no problem imagining wanting to die eventually even without extreme or horrible events.
I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t talking about those. I was talking about the same kind of people PhilGoetz was talking about:
By switching the topic of discussion away from retirees and to ill people, you’ve effectively pulled a bait-and-switch. Let’s try to stay on topic, neh?
Nope, I don’t think so. You said:
and this is plainly false—it’s false not just for ill people. Retirees are quite aware that their health and mental abilities will continue to worsen with age.
My assertion is that there’s a difference between wanting to die and being apathetic about having death sneak up on you, and that most old people are actually in the latter category. I’m not comfortable calling these people “deathist”, preferring instead to reserve the term for those who would oppose the idea that death should be optional.
I hold that the person who merely wouldn’t mind not waking up tomorrow is usually just as content to keep living for one more day, and would likely be at least as content to wake up in a younger body.
The guy living in his mom’s basement who says he would like to leave is less ambivalent. He would much rather wake up in a place of his own, provided he didn’t have to make the continuous effort normally needed to enable this.
If dying took as much effort as getting and holding a job, I doubt it would be so popular.
I would probably say that some very old people are ready to die. I wouldn’t call it “wanting to die”, it’s not an active desire, but I also wouldn’t call it “apathetic” because it’s more than just not caring.
The question is, how much of this sentiment among the elderly is based on it being improbable that there will be affordable replacement organs or other “anti-aging” technologies in their lifetimes?
Some of us 20-somethings are trying to decide whether to (A) go into YOLO mode or (B) sacrifice utility for the next 60 years in order to maximize expected utility for the next 1,000.