>Relatedly, I argue against the “culture of life” argument on the >grounds that we place too much value on human life and it would >be better if we placed less on it, a view that conservatives >implicitly hold on topics like covid restrictions.
All right then.
He’s just saying that it’s unsustainable to have sacred values when there are tradeoffs to everything. That’s a point you’d accept for many contexts, so reacting with sneer here seems a bit unfair.
That said, I think his point would’ve sounded a lot better if he added a sentence like “placing less value on human life means we get to place more value on other things that also matter.”
The way he said it, it indeed sounds a bit dystopian – but what’s the alternative? It’s difficult to estimate what numbers for assisted suicide are “high” or “low” in the sense that matters morally. Some % of the people would’ve committed suicide also without assistance, and you’d probably agree that those people are unambiguously better off with the assistance. Then, some people would take assistance but wouldn’t want to kill themselves in the messy way. That seems very reasonable – it’s super scary and probably more traumatizing for anyone you leave behind to do it with household methods. Not to mention that there’s a risk that it doesn’t quite succeed and you’re left way worse than before! So, you can’t just go from “Some people kill themselves with assistance who otherwise wouldn’t” to “Therefore, it’s preposterous that this doctor describes assisted suicide as moral progress.”
Sometimes people want to do something difficult that they think is good for them, but they don’t dare to do it because it’s really aversive. Consider how many people didn’t ask out someone they had a crush on because they were too scared – asking out your crush is probably a hundred times easier than jumping off a bridge or hanging yourself or what not.
Unless there’s something particularly bad about how the medically assisted suicide program is implemented, I indeed consider this sort of thing moral progress.
He’s just saying that it’s unsustainable to have sacred values when there are tradeoffs to everything. That’s a point you’d accept for many contexts, so reacting with sneer here seems a bit unfair.
That said, I think his point would’ve sounded a lot better if he added a sentence like “placing less value on human life means we get to place more value on other things that also matter.”
The way he said it, it indeed sounds a bit dystopian – but what’s the alternative? It’s difficult to estimate what numbers for assisted suicide are “high” or “low” in the sense that matters morally. Some % of the people would’ve committed suicide also without assistance, and you’d probably agree that those people are unambiguously better off with the assistance. Then, some people would take assistance but wouldn’t want to kill themselves in the messy way. That seems very reasonable – it’s super scary and probably more traumatizing for anyone you leave behind to do it with household methods. Not to mention that there’s a risk that it doesn’t quite succeed and you’re left way worse than before! So, you can’t just go from “Some people kill themselves with assistance who otherwise wouldn’t” to “Therefore, it’s preposterous that this doctor describes assisted suicide as moral progress.”
Sometimes people want to do something difficult that they think is good for them, but they don’t dare to do it because it’s really aversive. Consider how many people didn’t ask out someone they had a crush on because they were too scared – asking out your crush is probably a hundred times easier than jumping off a bridge or hanging yourself or what not.
Unless there’s something particularly bad about how the medically assisted suicide program is implemented, I indeed consider this sort of thing moral progress.