Thanks for the reply. How would you respond to the idea of hiring someone to kill you if you had a bad day? Perhaps you take a poison each morning, and they provide the antidote each evening if nothing too bad happened. This gives you a higher chance of having only good days.
You might say “but what about the costs of this scheme, or the chance that if it fails I will be injured or otherwise worse-off?” But if you say this, then you are also saying that it would be a good idea, if only the cost and the chance of failure were small!
On the other hand, maybe you bite the bullet. That’s fine, there’s no natural law against hiring people to kill you.
And this isn’t just an isolated apparently-bad consequence. If a decision-maker assumes that they’ll survive no matter what (conditioning on a future event), it can end up with very different choices from before—the differences will look much more like “figure out how to ensure I die if I have a bad day” than “well, it makes investing in the stock market more prudent.”
And the no-natural-law thing cuts both ways. There’s no law against making decisions like normal because arranging to kill yourself sounds bad.
I’m not sure. Another thing to think about would be what my SO and relatives think, so at least I probably wouldn’t do it unless the day is truly exceptionally lousy. But do I see a problem here, in principle? Maybe not, but I’m not sure.
Where do we disagree, exactly? What would you do in the euthanasia situation I described? Do you think that because hiring assassins doesn’t make sense to you, the living to be 100 or 1000 scenario isn’t interesting, either?
Thanks for the reply. How would you respond to the idea of hiring someone to kill you if you had a bad day? Perhaps you take a poison each morning, and they provide the antidote each evening if nothing too bad happened. This gives you a higher chance of having only good days.
You might say “but what about the costs of this scheme, or the chance that if it fails I will be injured or otherwise worse-off?” But if you say this, then you are also saying that it would be a good idea, if only the cost and the chance of failure were small!
On the other hand, maybe you bite the bullet. That’s fine, there’s no natural law against hiring people to kill you.
And this isn’t just an isolated apparently-bad consequence. If a decision-maker assumes that they’ll survive no matter what (conditioning on a future event), it can end up with very different choices from before—the differences will look much more like “figure out how to ensure I die if I have a bad day” than “well, it makes investing in the stock market more prudent.”
And the no-natural-law thing cuts both ways. There’s no law against making decisions like normal because arranging to kill yourself sounds bad.
I’m not sure. Another thing to think about would be what my SO and relatives think, so at least I probably wouldn’t do it unless the day is truly exceptionally lousy. But do I see a problem here, in principle? Maybe not, but I’m not sure.
Where do we disagree, exactly? What would you do in the euthanasia situation I described? Do you think that because hiring assassins doesn’t make sense to you, the living to be 100 or 1000 scenario isn’t interesting, either?