i think the issue with consent is that when power imbalences are involved, it becomes very hard to tell if it is actually present.
like someone whose needs are not met can be pressured into giving consent for things they do not actually consent to, in exchange for what they need most.
we really need to make sure that everyone is provided for and social power imbalences aren’t too big, to make consent actually work.
There’s not a realistic chance of that happening. There is a realistic chance of consent laws being changed to allow very easy access to assisted suicide and other things. One is a minor change to existing law, the other is a complete transformation of society. One belongs in real-world discussions of governmental policy, the other in political theory. When discussing the very real problems with consent and power imbalance in our real world, “just dissolve all power,” is not a serious solution.
“Dissolve all power” is a good answer to the question, “what would an ideal society look like?” It’s a very poor answer to, “how do we avoid coercion in our medical aid in dying programs?”
This doesn’t really have anything to do with what you said, other than some assumptions you seem to be making that I’d like to push back on. Mostly, just the idea that things will continue to work the way they have in the future. Which they will not. We are in full-blown collapse right now, and there are NO policy changes that will make a lasting impact or can stop it from happening.
I just don’t find building castles in the sky to be particularly productive. Will our environmental crises require major reforms to society? Yes. But if you think a climate crisis is the ideal time to finally produce the socialist utopia you dream of, you’re insane. Crises like these historically lead to totalitarianism and reduced social mobility.
If your analysis doesn’t start with, “let’s start at the current state of the world and see how we can reform it,” you’re not being productive. We’ve been in this civilization game for 10,000 years. No one gets to start fresh with a blank slate. This is a relay race.
You’re right, but you’re also missing my point. The time to be productive is long past. There is no reforming our way out of this. We will experience the worst possible scenario before any of this gets any better. It is far more productive to learn and practice resilience at this point.
If an ideal socialist utopia is produced, it won’t be something that any of us ever see, and we need to start getting a lot more comfortable with that idea, while also recognizing that none of it ever gets better without us right now learning the right things.
Sure, and there’s not a realistic chance of reducing emissions to the point humanity avoids extinction either.
We have to destroy capitalism anyway if we want our grandchildren to have a chance at survival. Why not abolish other involuntary hierarchies while we’re at it?
“All or nothing thinking” is also known as a paradigm shift. Or a revolution, when it comes to those thoughts becoming political reality. Those do in fact happen and often make things better.
I don’t expect perfection. A society that prioritizes abolishing involuntary hierarchies is going to have a lot of issues. But it’s going to be better for human survival than a society that prioritizes accumulation of capital.
I think it is necessary to have some limitations to avoid people being pressured or coerced into ‘consenting’ to things they really shouldn’t. Because otherwise you’re going to get scenarios where it’s rather dubious to imagine someone really sincerely consented to getting killed.
Consider something like Squid Game. Every participant joined the games voluntarily, at least on paper. They’re even given the opportunity to leave, only for many of them to come back because their lives in poverty are that bad, and they have families who need the money, need it so badly that they’ll take such an extreme risk. So is that consent? Should that be a legal form of dueling? Or is the entire message of the show that it very much shouldn’t be?
We also don’t do this, because it will lead to people agreeing to be killed for money. Also you’d need everybody involved to undergo a mental evaluation. We wouldn’t want manipulable people bring killed for sport. Because let’s not kid ourselves, that would absolutely happen. And so we just don’t allow it at all.
Yeah, think about it this way, if you were suicidal, but you knew that there was some rich dude that loved killing people, and watching them scream in terror as their life drained from their body, but would pay you, or pay your family, like a quarter of a million dollars to torture you to death…
That’s like a win-win, right?
You’re taking care of your family, you’re killing yourself, some dude gets his rocks off, everyone walks away happy.
No! That’s an abhorrent thing, and it should not be allowed to happen, but it definitely would happen if this were made a law.
Most people who survive a suicide attempt are very happy they did. Suicidal ideation should not be promoted, it’s a mental health emergency. Also, what you will see even more often is people being bullied into a situation like that. This is really a situation with minuscule to no benefits and enormous potential for harm, so I really don’t get why people argue for it. Bodily autonomy yes, very sick people should be allowed to end their lives on their terms. I absolutely agree with that. Anything else is just bullshit.
Where are you getting that people who survive are happy? Happy immediately or over time eventually they’re glad? What about all the people who have multiple attempts? Maybe some are jolted out of their mindset when suicide intervention happens, sure, but how many are just trying to get out of psychiatric care/ suicide watch by agreeing they’re happy now. Also maybe people who don’t succeed are half assing the attempt and of course are happy in the end it didn’t work out. Idk. As someone who attempted this line always rings untrue to me.
Everything else aside, duels were basically always linked to ‘honor’ and the accompanying societal pressure. As soon as you get duels back on the table as an option for ‘conflict settlement’, your ‘consent’ is very much under pressure by the societal expectations.
People in the past did not go duelling because they really liked duelling or wanted to die, but because it was the only way to reclaim your ‘honor’ in society. That is really not a culture anybody should want coming back.
It’s difficult, because consent can be revoked at any time. So you could sign a contract em and then revoke consent (or others could use this to void the contract).
This is why, in many countries with euthanasia laws, euthanasia is assisted suicide in the literal sense as well; the person dying needs to physical pull the trigger.
I think this is too individualistic of a framing for something that has a real cost to the community and society as a whole. Even putting aside the moral problems with you killing yourself and leaving your family, there’s also a legal issue with you abandoning your dependents.
If a father goes and gets himself killed in a duel he’s not just harming himself, he’s harming both the children and mother of the children who depend on him.
And on a grander scale society has taken care of you for many moments in your life and it is only fair that you contribute back to the society that raised you.
Whether you like it or not you have certain duties to society and society has a legitimate interest in preventing you from getting out of those obligations by killing yourself.
My argument isn’t we shouldn’t do it because it’s hard and messy, it’s that we shouldn’t do it because it irrevocably harms the community and society so the community and society has a right to try and stop it.
It does serve people, if that father fails the suicide attempt or gets busted by the cops before he can duel, then we can put him in treatment and try and help him out which can keep him alive and supporting his family. If we just throw our hands up and say “you do you” and he gets himself killed for sure then there’s no helping him or his family.
Your seems like an argument against having laws against anything then. Yeah people are going to do crimes, that doesn’t mean we as a society shouldn’t try and dissuade them from doing it.
If you go by this logic why shouldn’t we have ash trays in bars? Sure we as a society think smoking in bars is a nuisance, but some people are going to do it any way so why make it messier and more complicated for them? Should we not even have laws in place banning smoking indoors?
Laws and rules also have a normative function as well. An indoor smoking ban isn’t really enforced by the state, and not even by the bartender as much, it’s enforced by everyone at the bar who understands it’s a nuisance and will yell at you if you do it. We as a society shame those who break the rules, and we should be shaming people who do extremely selfish acts like suicide or dueling. If it were allowed and normal more people would engage in these acts as there’s less of a cost to them.
For abortion I wouldn’t argue a fetus is a part of society. If you deny it care then I have no problem with that. If you deny a child care though that’s neglect and we as a society should step in to ensure that child gets a good upbringing. Same with child support, if we’re going for the full libertarian personal freedom principle then a deadbeat dad has no obligation to his children and should be free to abandon them. His actions aren’t directly physically harming the child so he should be able to do what he wants.
Abandoning your child is shunting your responsibilities and putting real costs on society .
anyone who argues that position is on the slippery slope to supporting slavery.
Do you recognize any case where societal duty trumps bodily autonomy or is that always a slippery slope to slavery?
I think that moral view is too value hierarchical and Deontological, reliant on rules, such as bodily autonomy always trumps societal duty.
While this is true in a lot of cases, such as drug use and abortion, there are some cases where it isn’t. One of them pertaining directly to slavery is the civil war. How does Lincoln end slavery without violating the bodily autonomy of millions of men to fight a war with the south? If we follow the rule that bodily autonomy trumps societal duty then a draft can never be justified, and then the north loses the war and my ancestors are enslaved for way longer then they needed to be.
Of course a draft is not always justified, we shouldn’t be violating the bodily autonomy of millions of men to fight communists in vietnam. This is where deontology fails as the ethics of something like a draft are based more on the specifities of the case rather then any general rule or hierarchy of values.
This is where a more dialectical approach to ethics is valuable. We can recognize the values of bodily autonomy and societal duty in tension. They are in conversation and sometimes one is more relevant to the situation while other times the other value is.
So in the case of suicide we can look at the harm it’s doing to society against the value of bodily autonomy. If that person has no societal value or obligations, say a retired person, then sure there bodily autonomy can be more important and they should be able to kill themselves. But if there value to society and there dependents and obligations are greater then I say there can be cases where societal duty trumps bodily autonomy.
Consent requires someone to be of sound mind though. Someone can’t consent to sex when they’re drunk. I would argue that there are some activities where simply consenting to them is demonstration of mental malady or incapacity. A rational and mentally well person would not consent to have themselves voluntarily killed by a serial killer. If you post an ad offering to let someone literally tear you to pieces, you’re clearly not of sound mind. Now, I’m not in favor of punishing people for surviving an attempted suicide, but I am perfectly fine punishing people who would take advantage of mentally unwell suicidal people by getting them to consent to all sorts of horrible and lethal things.
It’s different in the case of medically assisted suicide that the person is not irrational. Someone of perfectly sound and rational mind can recognize that a slow, painful, and humiliating death is worse than a quick and painless one. If religion weren’t a factor, most people with diagnosis like Alzheimers or painful untreatable cancers would end up going that route.
i think society in general just gets the ick from the idea of people consenting to things being done to their body that they personally dont understand or would never want and tries to stop it to satisfy their own feelings. we see this applied to all kinds of things like abortion, body modification, drug use, suicide, gender transition, sex acts, sexual partners, etc.
These are not all the same thing. Drug use costs society, not just the drug user. Bridge/train jumpers are some of the most selfish people out there; forcing your suicide onto an unrelated driver is the epitome of an asshole move.
Your body your choice is right, but that stops right at the line where it crosses over into other peoples lives.
My point being, duels to the death very easy to argue against simply because of the societal cost of managing them, while completely ignoring any so called ‘ick factor’ it may or may not have on the majority of people.
Would you be one the people to sign up for body cleaning duty? Would you be happy paying taxes for the dueling arena where it is impossible to prove that there was consent the whole time, every time?
Like is it weird? Sure. Would I do it? No. Do I like it? Also no. But none of these are good enough reasons not to allow two consenting adults to undergo surgical procedures to conjoin their bodies into a single, deadly chimera
If every dual ended with at least one dead - as opposed to incapacitated - then it’d probably be fine. The problems as I see it is that it can be both extremely easy and ridiculously difficult to kill someone. If you just wing the opposition do you then have to finish them? What if they’re left a vegetable - who pays to keep the machine on; or do you pop back to the hospital and complete the job at a later date?
So what about suicide assistance for people without any sort of illness?
How do you feel about bodily autonomy if the person is choosing to die at 18 just because they don’t want to work 9 to 5 and believe they’ll never be rich, and that alone makes them want to end it?
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i think the issue with consent is that when power imbalences are involved, it becomes very hard to tell if it is actually present.
like someone whose needs are not met can be pressured into giving consent for things they do not actually consent to, in exchange for what they need most.
we really need to make sure that everyone is provided for and social power imbalences aren’t too big, to make consent actually work.
Power is generally best off dissolved anyway.
There’s not a realistic chance of that happening. There is a realistic chance of consent laws being changed to allow very easy access to assisted suicide and other things. One is a minor change to existing law, the other is a complete transformation of society. One belongs in real-world discussions of governmental policy, the other in political theory. When discussing the very real problems with consent and power imbalance in our real world, “just dissolve all power,” is not a serious solution.
“Dissolve all power” is a good answer to the question, “what would an ideal society look like?” It’s a very poor answer to, “how do we avoid coercion in our medical aid in dying programs?”
This doesn’t really have anything to do with what you said, other than some assumptions you seem to be making that I’d like to push back on. Mostly, just the idea that things will continue to work the way they have in the future. Which they will not. We are in full-blown collapse right now, and there are NO policy changes that will make a lasting impact or can stop it from happening.
I just don’t find building castles in the sky to be particularly productive. Will our environmental crises require major reforms to society? Yes. But if you think a climate crisis is the ideal time to finally produce the socialist utopia you dream of, you’re insane. Crises like these historically lead to totalitarianism and reduced social mobility.
If your analysis doesn’t start with, “let’s start at the current state of the world and see how we can reform it,” you’re not being productive. We’ve been in this civilization game for 10,000 years. No one gets to start fresh with a blank slate. This is a relay race.
You’re right, but you’re also missing my point. The time to be productive is long past. There is no reforming our way out of this. We will experience the worst possible scenario before any of this gets any better. It is far more productive to learn and practice resilience at this point.
If an ideal socialist utopia is produced, it won’t be something that any of us ever see, and we need to start getting a lot more comfortable with that idea, while also recognizing that none of it ever gets better without us right now learning the right things.
Sure, and there’s not a realistic chance of reducing emissions to the point humanity avoids extinction either.
We have to destroy capitalism anyway if we want our grandchildren to have a chance at survival. Why not abolish other involuntary hierarchies while we’re at it?
This all or nothing thinking is generally counterproductive to actual progress.
“All or nothing thinking” is also known as a paradigm shift. Or a revolution, when it comes to those thoughts becoming political reality. Those do in fact happen and often make things better.
I don’t expect perfection. A society that prioritizes abolishing involuntary hierarchies is going to have a lot of issues. But it’s going to be better for human survival than a society that prioritizes accumulation of capital.
Draw up a quick contract with an independent legal authority if you want to duel. Vetting can be part of that process.
I think it is necessary to have some limitations to avoid people being pressured or coerced into ‘consenting’ to things they really shouldn’t. Because otherwise you’re going to get scenarios where it’s rather dubious to imagine someone really sincerely consented to getting killed.
Consider something like Squid Game. Every participant joined the games voluntarily, at least on paper. They’re even given the opportunity to leave, only for many of them to come back because their lives in poverty are that bad, and they have families who need the money, need it so badly that they’ll take such an extreme risk. So is that consent? Should that be a legal form of dueling? Or is the entire message of the show that it very much shouldn’t be?
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That’s precisely it though, we do live in a society, and as long as that’s the case, society needs some guardrails against abuse.
We also don’t do this, because it will lead to people agreeing to be killed for money. Also you’d need everybody involved to undergo a mental evaluation. We wouldn’t want manipulable people bring killed for sport. Because let’s not kid ourselves, that would absolutely happen. And so we just don’t allow it at all.
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Religion does it too, don’t you want to go to heaven? Like right away?
Yeah, think about it this way, if you were suicidal, but you knew that there was some rich dude that loved killing people, and watching them scream in terror as their life drained from their body, but would pay you, or pay your family, like a quarter of a million dollars to torture you to death…
That’s like a win-win, right?
You’re taking care of your family, you’re killing yourself, some dude gets his rocks off, everyone walks away happy.
No! That’s an abhorrent thing, and it should not be allowed to happen, but it definitely would happen if this were made a law.
Most people who survive a suicide attempt are very happy they did. Suicidal ideation should not be promoted, it’s a mental health emergency. Also, what you will see even more often is people being bullied into a situation like that. This is really a situation with minuscule to no benefits and enormous potential for harm, so I really don’t get why people argue for it. Bodily autonomy yes, very sick people should be allowed to end their lives on their terms. I absolutely agree with that. Anything else is just bullshit.
Where are you getting that people who survive are happy? Happy immediately or over time eventually they’re glad? What about all the people who have multiple attempts? Maybe some are jolted out of their mindset when suicide intervention happens, sure, but how many are just trying to get out of psychiatric care/ suicide watch by agreeing they’re happy now. Also maybe people who don’t succeed are half assing the attempt and of course are happy in the end it didn’t work out. Idk. As someone who attempted this line always rings untrue to me.
Everything else aside, duels were basically always linked to ‘honor’ and the accompanying societal pressure. As soon as you get duels back on the table as an option for ‘conflict settlement’, your ‘consent’ is very much under pressure by the societal expectations.
People in the past did not go duelling because they really liked duelling or wanted to die, but because it was the only way to reclaim your ‘honor’ in society. That is really not a culture anybody should want coming back.
I think a solid middle ground could be notarized, witnessed contracts for ensuring the consensuality of dueling/bodily harm.
Since if someone asks to be killed they can’t exactly confirm that consent after the fact y’know?
It’s difficult, because consent can be revoked at any time. So you could sign a contract em and then revoke consent (or others could use this to void the contract).
This is why, in many countries with euthanasia laws, euthanasia is assisted suicide in the literal sense as well; the person dying needs to physical pull the trigger.
I think this is too individualistic of a framing for something that has a real cost to the community and society as a whole. Even putting aside the moral problems with you killing yourself and leaving your family, there’s also a legal issue with you abandoning your dependents.
If a father goes and gets himself killed in a duel he’s not just harming himself, he’s harming both the children and mother of the children who depend on him.
And on a grander scale society has taken care of you for many moments in your life and it is only fair that you contribute back to the society that raised you.
Whether you like it or not you have certain duties to society and society has a legitimate interest in preventing you from getting out of those obligations by killing yourself.
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My argument isn’t we shouldn’t do it because it’s hard and messy, it’s that we shouldn’t do it because it irrevocably harms the community and society so the community and society has a right to try and stop it.
It does serve people, if that father fails the suicide attempt or gets busted by the cops before he can duel, then we can put him in treatment and try and help him out which can keep him alive and supporting his family. If we just throw our hands up and say “you do you” and he gets himself killed for sure then there’s no helping him or his family.
Your seems like an argument against having laws against anything then. Yeah people are going to do crimes, that doesn’t mean we as a society shouldn’t try and dissuade them from doing it.
If you go by this logic why shouldn’t we have ash trays in bars? Sure we as a society think smoking in bars is a nuisance, but some people are going to do it any way so why make it messier and more complicated for them? Should we not even have laws in place banning smoking indoors?
Laws and rules also have a normative function as well. An indoor smoking ban isn’t really enforced by the state, and not even by the bartender as much, it’s enforced by everyone at the bar who understands it’s a nuisance and will yell at you if you do it. We as a society shame those who break the rules, and we should be shaming people who do extremely selfish acts like suicide or dueling. If it were allowed and normal more people would engage in these acts as there’s less of a cost to them.
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Just curious, what’s your position on vaccinations?
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For abortion I wouldn’t argue a fetus is a part of society. If you deny it care then I have no problem with that. If you deny a child care though that’s neglect and we as a society should step in to ensure that child gets a good upbringing. Same with child support, if we’re going for the full libertarian personal freedom principle then a deadbeat dad has no obligation to his children and should be free to abandon them. His actions aren’t directly physically harming the child so he should be able to do what he wants.
Abandoning your child is shunting your responsibilities and putting real costs on society .
Do you recognize any case where societal duty trumps bodily autonomy or is that always a slippery slope to slavery?
I think that moral view is too value hierarchical and Deontological, reliant on rules, such as bodily autonomy always trumps societal duty.
While this is true in a lot of cases, such as drug use and abortion, there are some cases where it isn’t. One of them pertaining directly to slavery is the civil war. How does Lincoln end slavery without violating the bodily autonomy of millions of men to fight a war with the south? If we follow the rule that bodily autonomy trumps societal duty then a draft can never be justified, and then the north loses the war and my ancestors are enslaved for way longer then they needed to be.
Of course a draft is not always justified, we shouldn’t be violating the bodily autonomy of millions of men to fight communists in vietnam. This is where deontology fails as the ethics of something like a draft are based more on the specifities of the case rather then any general rule or hierarchy of values.
This is where a more dialectical approach to ethics is valuable. We can recognize the values of bodily autonomy and societal duty in tension. They are in conversation and sometimes one is more relevant to the situation while other times the other value is.
So in the case of suicide we can look at the harm it’s doing to society against the value of bodily autonomy. If that person has no societal value or obligations, say a retired person, then sure there bodily autonomy can be more important and they should be able to kill themselves. But if there value to society and there dependents and obligations are greater then I say there can be cases where societal duty trumps bodily autonomy.
Challenge someone to a duel
Pistols at dawn
The instant they fire, yell out “I don’t consent to this!”
Die anyway
They go to jail for murder
Oddly Texas and Oregon both allow adults to have an altercation if they consent, but you are not allowed to kill them.
I get your saying more generally, but technically that would be true in every state, that’s basically what boxing is
Consent requires someone to be of sound mind though. Someone can’t consent to sex when they’re drunk. I would argue that there are some activities where simply consenting to them is demonstration of mental malady or incapacity. A rational and mentally well person would not consent to have themselves voluntarily killed by a serial killer. If you post an ad offering to let someone literally tear you to pieces, you’re clearly not of sound mind. Now, I’m not in favor of punishing people for surviving an attempted suicide, but I am perfectly fine punishing people who would take advantage of mentally unwell suicidal people by getting them to consent to all sorts of horrible and lethal things.
It’s different in the case of medically assisted suicide that the person is not irrational. Someone of perfectly sound and rational mind can recognize that a slow, painful, and humiliating death is worse than a quick and painless one. If religion weren’t a factor, most people with diagnosis like Alzheimers or painful untreatable cancers would end up going that route.
These are not all the same thing. Drug use costs society, not just the drug user. Bridge/train jumpers are some of the most selfish people out there; forcing your suicide onto an unrelated driver is the epitome of an asshole move.
Your body your choice is right, but that stops right at the line where it crosses over into other peoples lives.
My point being, duels to the death very easy to argue against simply because of the societal cost of managing them, while completely ignoring any so called ‘ick factor’ it may or may not have on the majority of people.
Would you be one the people to sign up for body cleaning duty? Would you be happy paying taxes for the dueling arena where it is impossible to prove that there was consent the whole time, every time?
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Uh huh. And who pays for the medical bills after someone gets shot in the spine and decides they no longer want to ‘consent’ to this farce of an idea?
You can’t rescind consent after the fact.
Like is it weird? Sure. Would I do it? No. Do I like it? Also no. But none of these are good enough reasons not to allow two consenting adults to undergo surgical procedures to conjoin their bodies into a single, deadly chimera
If every dual ended with at least one dead - as opposed to incapacitated - then it’d probably be fine. The problems as I see it is that it can be both extremely easy and ridiculously difficult to kill someone. If you just wing the opposition do you then have to finish them? What if they’re left a vegetable - who pays to keep the machine on; or do you pop back to the hospital and complete the job at a later date?
So what about suicide assistance for people without any sort of illness?
How do you feel about bodily autonomy if the person is choosing to die at 18 just because they don’t want to work 9 to 5 and believe they’ll never be rich, and that alone makes them want to end it?
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