Bittersweet Candy Bowl Forums

Taeshi, on 22 February 2012 - 10:14 AM, said:

Its a modest proposal, I'd say.

Though I do believe I also said that it wasn't unreasonable to draw the line at birth simply because it was convenient and avoids the possibility of killing any people that way. Though if Yolen taught me anything, the closer to the egg, the sweeter the meat.

Quote

I misunderstood what you meant, I see what you're saying now. I was thinking you meant the animal showing empathy, as opposed to the opposite. I don't really feel comfortable with that rationale, as heavily used s it is in reality (there is a reason we call it charismatic megafauna); it makes us value things that are cute or otherwise attractive to us over things that are ugly. The other bad thing is that it also leads to out of sight, out of mind and odd resource utilization - there is a reason they club baby seals, after all, and it isn't like they are endangered, even if they are adorable little things.

Outrageous: Ethicists Argue For Acceptance of "After-Birth Abortions" - Live Action News & Opinion

Oh boy.

- Final paragraph makes me chuckle a bit since as a whole, people don't really find abortion one day before birth as acceptable. I'm guessing the writer isn't very happy with abortions in general.

It's called "euthanasia" at that point and it's perfectly reasonable.

Euthanasia is a mixed bag for me. If the person is suffering, has no hope of recovery and will undoubtedly die from his or her malady, I see it as no different from pulling the plug on a comatose patient. That being said, when it comes to infants you had a whole 9 months (well, 6 months) to get an abortion. Unless the particular illness didn't show up on screening, you should be stuck with it. Otherwise, I'd say the patient should have a choice in the matter.

And for that article: ugh, the slippery slope argument. An exercise in baseless fear used when a temper tantrum doesn't go your way.

Car, I can't agree with you more. The issue with whole Euthanasia thing from my research of it is Religion. ( I know I am sorry!) People see it as murder despite the fact it is what they want. Killing yourself is wrong in many religions as well.

I feel it is wrong to make the patience suffer if they are not going to make a recovery. I also think it shouldn't be up to the doctor to actually kill them either. If the patient actually wants to end their life due to suffering they should be given the means to do it and do it them selves in the end. It shouldn't be the burden's of others to take your life. If you can't take your life in the end that means there is a still a will to live in some form. (I could be wrong I know it has stopped me from killing myself a few times)

I don't think religion should have any affect on where euthanasia is made legal in this America at least.

One thing people fail to realize is that at the time when the bible was written, modern medicine was no where in sight. Many patients with terminal illnesses would not survive half as long as they do today. Those who wrote the bible had no way of knowing about CPR, hospitals, chemotherapy and life support. They could possibly have seen the modern implementation of that rule as cruel and unnecessary.

Actually that is exact case with most religions. I think Buddhism and Hinduism is one of few that have kinda accepted it. Saying the doctor shouldn't out right kill them. If I remember correctly Hinduism is one where doctor can't kill or it would hurt karma of both the doctor and the patience but people will starve themselves to end their suffering. Buddhism, Doctors are not allowed to kill because of suffering and people are only really allowed to kill themselves is when they have reached enlightenment.

I can find the references for it, it was interesting actually.

This post has been edited by Zevida: 01 March 2012 - 11:33 PM

Well, you say you have nine months but there's a lot of things only visual confirmation is going to confirm. At that point, cost/benefit kicks in: all things being equal, can we afford to take care of the kid? For awhile. And then what? It dies on its own, in pain so excruciating you can't even imagine. It will die screaming.

But yeah, let's go back to that sanctity of life thing.



Lookit that. Costs a fucking fortune to keep it alive. For what? I mean, besides loaning her out to circuses.

Arghh, what the fuck! Please tell that is photoshopped, because honestly words can not describe.

Anyway, like Jerk said true the kid may have a right to life but if it's going to be half dead or in pain for however pitifully long it has to struggle, the parents should be able to say whether they want to abort, or not, and spare it from a life of pain and suffering with what ever condition the doctors say the fetus has.

Nope, she's real. She was actually even worse, that's after thousands and thousands of dollars in surgeries. It's really hard to imagine being the parents of something from Amnesia.

Maybe it should be on a parent to parent basis, since they ARE living things, but cases vary so heavily. There's been a case of a Harlequin baby surviving to adulthood (think he's still alive, haven't checked) so even a condition like that isn't ALWAYS fatal.

If that was shopped I could have eventually forgotten but that picture, but that she's real and used to look worse? Good god, that's just horrifying and more than a little sad. What would her mental state even be like with a head and presumably brain that deformed?

We had a well-publicized case like that here. Robert Latimer's daughter Tracy had cerebral palsy and severe mental and physical disabilities. She had little voluntary control of her muscles, could not walk or talk, and suffered from constant pain. Latimer killed his daughter by means of carbon monoxide so that she would no longer be in pain, and was subsequently convicted of second-degree murder. He served 10 years in prison before being granted full parole.

Bourbon, on 02 March 2012 - 03:32 AM, said:

Millions, actually. I've heard their family actually looks for children with this same disease from around the world and collects them too. The Wetmore Family. That would be the closest TLC has ever come to making a reality show I want to watch.

Let's be honest: if something like that falls out of you, you are a monster for not smothering it with a pillow to put an end to its universe of suffering.

@Jerk

I did say "Unless the particular illness didn't show up on screening." I was referring more to illnesses that are in the standard screening anyway; a child born with severe defects that will only suffer probably wouldn't want to live with their agony.

It's also disproportionately expensive to keep them alive. For the price they pay keeping her from swallowing her own tongue they could dramatically improve the quality of life for dozens.

I don't like the conclusion people are reaching here, and I'll explain why.

At the end of the day, there are two facets to the euthanasia issue. The first seems grounded in kindness, and aims at sparing a living thing pain and suffering. The second is based on greed and ruthless objectivity, objectivity which I think is misplaced.

Science and mathematics give us beautiful objectivity, cleanly cutting through complicated issues and painting a black and white picture of how the universe works. They remove sides in issues, separate true things from the false, and most importantly, they neutrally determine the real, actual facts. There's never room for debate with a scientific conclusion, since everyone can run the same experiment or do the same derivation and get the same answer. This gives us a power, which we can use to do everything from build machines that fly to the moon, to see inside the smallest things in the universe. We can make medicines that help people live long and happy lives, grow more food so fewer people go hungry, and tie ourselves closer together through devices like the internet.

Looking at these things, and all the good our objective work has done in the last hundred years alone, it's easy to conclude that that's all there is. It's easy to say that it's a guide to our morality, and we can use the same precision and neutrality to decide things like whether abortion is ok, whether animals should have rights, and even less controversial everyday things like how to treat other people.

There's a fatal mistake in this line of reasoning.

Science is neutral and objective. This neutrality is what gives it power, but it never says anything about how it should be used. Nuclear physics gave us chemotherapy that help children with leukaemia survive, and the exact same equations and understanding gives us terrible weapons which can kill millions in an instant. Classical mechanics gives us equations we can use to explore the solar system, but the same equations give us ballistic missiles which fly through space and crash, killing hundreds or thousands of people. Biology and chemistry make medicines which keep us healthy, and they also make poisons which make people sick.

Something gets lost when we strip a situation down to the bare, scientifically relevant. Equations are cold things, they don't come painted with emotions, desires, intentions, or anything that their creator felt when they were written down or discovered. They only tell us what, how, and sometimes, why. They're tools and facts, nothing more. I find aesthetic beauty in them, but that's my perception. You might think differently.

What I think is this: when we take a tool that's been specifically designed to remove every trace of humanity and emotion from what it's used on, and then apply it to a situation *heavily rooted* and *about* emotion and kindness, we're not using the tool for the right purpose. It's a misapplication of something that wasn't ever intended to be used on the subjective, many times un-defined or under-defined, and logically fuzzy world of human emotions and ethics.

You can't capture a beautiful sunset in an equation, model the love of a mother for her child, or place a metric on a human being. You can't place a least upper bound on friendship, measure kindness, or control empathy. You can't distil joy, derive sadness, or even find it's causes most of the time.

Science is a tool, a beautiful language and set of knowledge which helps us. It can also be a deadly weapon and our biggest downfall, but which is which is entirely up to us. We're removed ourselves from the picture by it's very definition, it is dangerous and inappropriate to try to use it to probe exactly what it was engineered to throw away.

It's easy to use it as a justification for a conclusion which is convenient for the person making the argument. Economically beneficial to kill those who couldn't ever do a job? No doubt, the numbers can't and don't lie. Is this something we should do? Science returns the answer NULL when it's asked this question. We've gotten nowhere ethically, all we know is what the consequences are.

Social Darwinism was a sad and terrible bastardization of Darwin's theory of evolution. By modelling how we treat other people after how animal populations interact, grow and die in the wild, we killed a critical part of what makes us human. Animal populations are things you can write as numbers, equations, and condense down to the language of science. People populations are as well, but these equations don't tell you anything about what's *right* and *wrong*. They only tell you *what* and *how*. Seeing that this is *how* some system in the universe works doesn't give you moral permission to use it and appeal to it's natural-ness. It's just the way it is, nothing more, and nothing less. Social Darwinism lead to ethically justified racism, classism, and imperialism. These things are almost universally rejected today.

What I'm saying is this: embrace the precision, the theory, the facts. Use the power that science and math give us to do great things, but always keep a clear sharp line drawn on the ground between what it can and can't do. Science lets us know what this is, that's one of it's great achievements. Don't step over this line, or you might do things that kill our humanity and reduce us to cold, heartless machines.

edit:

Quote

I could feel love for her. Why can't you?

This post has been edited by Starwatcher: 02 March 2012 - 09:44 PM

Let's see: would I rather spend my tax dollars keeping Lump alive for little more than my own amusement or would I rather that someone had killed it early so as not to decrease the quality of life for everyone else?

Gee, Star, that's a tough choice. Let me get back to you on that.

As much as I wanna say how all life is sacred and everyone has a chance to be happy, that kind of mentality is why things like this happen so often. Early man invented medicine to stay alive, because our numbers were so few. In doing so, we were stuck in the middle of our evolutionary breakthrough: because now more and more were surviving and passing down their genes, even the ones nature would've deemed 'unfit'. That's why childbirth is so dangerous for our women, the pelvis hadn't fully adjusted for an upright lifestyle. If medicine and the ethics of letting the weaker die was pushed back even a few thousand years, there might've been a dramatic difference in how the human race panned out.

TL;DR - Mercy and ethics are kind of the reason people suffer so much.

Well, the kind of technology we've had for a long while has always set us apart, and while it does impair our natural evolutionary process it gives us tools to ammend the problems that might bring. Case in point, cesarean sections for dangerous births.

Of course, some problems are much harder (and sometimes impossible) to correct, and for that euthanasia does appear as a possible "solution" of sorts. The point Jerk makes is a very valid one, a disproportionate amount of resources has to be used for such a person, and even then they don't enjoy a normal life, and have to deal with a lot of problems, depending on their conditions.

Star, you say it has 2 facets, "kindness" (sparing suffering) and "objectivity" (reallocating misplaced resources), but I think sparing the suffering is also something that can be measured objectively. Is the benefit of living really enough to offset the suffering the person would have to go through? For minor problems it might be so, but very severe conditions raise the question of whether it would be better to just spare yourself the burden and spare them the suffering. We live in an overpopulated world anyway, and you could always adopt a kid or, as grim as this might sound, make another one. I know it's a human being though, and you can't fully replace anyone.

Love doesn't really have much to do here, as you could use it to support any side, or any argument, really. For instance, you can say your love for the child is what leads you to spare them the suffering, or your love for people is what leads you to want to grant them a better overall quality of life.

Quote

What I mean is... I don't know what the right conclusion is when it comes to euthanasia, but I do know the answer needs to be based on love, not some kind of twisted sense of objectivity.

This post has been edited by Starwatcher: 03 March 2012 - 05:34 AM

This post has been edited by Bourbon: 03 March 2012 - 05:38 AM

Relevant

That makes me think of a scenario.

Let's say you were married and your wife was pregnant, and the doctor let you know that the pregnancy will be normal and the child will be born without complications, except for the fact the child is going to be severely mentally challenged. As in you have to take care of the child during adulthood and the child could never be intelligent enough to live independently.

Would you choose to abort the unborn baby? I'm asking this with the notion that your wife would agree with your position and your choice, so no "Umm i'll have to see what she thinks", she thinks the same so you have to make a choice.

Also if you're a woman then you're the pregnant one

esalaka, on 03 March 2012 - 06:19 PM, said:

Hopefully not to what I said =(

That's insane.

I meant relevant in general

I stopped reading after this little gem:

Quote

I almost can't believe this is for real.

esalaka, on 03 March 2012 - 06:19 PM, said:

Jesus H. Christ on a cracker, this guy is a fucking moron.

esalaka, on 03 March 2012 - 06:19 PM, said:

@Taeshi

This forces me to go against my position on abortion (that it is a woman's choice, as she assumes all of the risks of the procedure) so it's a difficult decision. I guess it really depends on how retarded the child is. If the child will never live on their own but can otherwise function (ie it will be a permanent 8 year old mentally or something) then I'd probably go ahead with it. If there's a high chance that the child will be in a baby-like state for the rest of its life, I'd probably abort it, because at that point its quality of life would be much lower than I'd want for him/her.

I'm assuming the doctor will know this much simply because your scenario assumes he can predict quality of life at all. The less information I'd get, the harder the choice would be.

It's not a troll blog

can't be

Taeshi, on 03 March 2012 - 08:53 PM, said:

Without even hesitating, yes. I'm not such a glutton for punishment that I should worship every protein bubble that falls out of my wife.

You're also a protein bubble.

But he doesn't need to leech disproportionate resources out of others to give him a sub-par (at best) quality of life, is a grown man, and can function by himself. Plus, I guess he's productive to society. Also, at this point he has formed social relationships and attachment to other people. A zygote is largely irrelevant socially.

Taeshi, on 03 March 2012 - 08:53 PM, said:

Personally, I don't even know if I'll want to have kids in the first place. It seems something so distant at this point, that it's very hard to know how I'll think when it's time. Assuming I will, though, with the same opinions I hold right now, I would have to consider how much time into the pregnancy we are and whether I can really afford to take care of a child with that kind of condition. I'd probably do it in several cases, given I'm not filthy rich and the condition is severe enough.

This post has been edited by Itu: 03 March 2012 - 10:59 PM

Quote

Who cares? We've got enough food and medicine to take care of sick and disabled people.

If we were in a post-scarcity society maybe, but we don't actually have enough money, food and medicine for everyone. We live in a world full of inequality and poverty, and crippling it further doesn't seem like something that should be done. If a person has enough money to take care of someone like that and is willing to do so, well, it's their money.

I don't know about the USA, but in Canada you won't go without healthcare. We're doing ok economically, so clearly there is enough.

Norway is similar, and they're even more proactive about this than we are.

See this?



It costs 1.45 million US dollars. Do we really need, every single one of them?

This post has been edited by Starwatcher: 03 March 2012 - 11:15 PM

Yeah, I wish the world was perfect too. Some countries are doing ok, which is great. Many aren't, and many are wasting a lot of resources in things like war.

Then let's fix that by being more peaceful and having socialized heathcare.

edit: the world doesn't have to be perfect for this to work. Doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying, either.

This post has been edited by Starwatcher: 03 March 2012 - 11:23 PM

Again, I wish the world was perfect and people weren't idiots. They actually tried to implement socialized healthcare in my country some years ago. Corrupted government agencies and people ended up taking all the money and it was a mess, but I think now it's kinda working. The world's going forward slowly I guess.

Of course we should try to make the world better, but that doesn't mean it's gonna suddenly work.

This post has been edited by Itu: 03 March 2012 - 11:24 PM

No, and it doesn't have to.

Saying that there's not enough to take care of such a small number of disadvantaged people is just false though. There really is.

Quote

Yeah, there are actually several of them now. However, being one of those does not actually cause mental impairment, which is what defines someone as human.

I wouldn't -want- to keep one of those alive, but eh, nothing completely immoral about it, so long as they don't reproduce and pay for it themselves. (Ha, as if)

Quote

Not really. In the end, the universe doesn't really care about things like "emotions", and because such things are inherently subjective...

The truth is that it is absolutely horrible that we spend a million dollars to keep someone alive who will never contribute to society when we could send 10 poor kids all the way through college for that same amount of money, and improve our society far more. It is simply unethical to spend the money keeping that deformed thing alive. Keeping that thing alive steals from everyone else.

Quote

Actually you totally can; some videogames have already done it.

Quote

Probably will be possible eventually.

Quote

Actually its pretty easy to do so. Insurance companies and tests do it all the time.

Quote

We're trying though!

Quote

Actually you can rather easily find it in many cases.

Quote

Ah but you see, one of the major problems with the world is people like you. You know why?

We don't have infinite resources. We have to choose. And the money you spend on a deformed mentally retarded thing is money you didn't spend fixing potholes in a road, or sending children through school, or funding medical research.

Quote

Because I'm a good person.

Quote

This is one of the big things abortions are for. Get rid of that shit.

Quote

No we don't. The Earth can sustain about 2 billion people indefinitely.

You will note that we have more than 3 times that many people on the planet at the moment.

You do the math.

Do you have any idea how many people are starving in Africa? North Korea? How many don't get medication?

And you are SERIOUSLY saying this?

Hell no.

I know you don't live in reality, but here it is:

Right now we are using up resources far, far faster than they are being replenished. Your quality of life is dependent on resources which will never come back - petrochemicals being a prime example.

I'd rather spend more resources keeping fewer people in high standard of living than keeping as many people alive as possible. It is far more ethical to reduce the population.

Quote

They cost quite a bit less than that now. And yes, we really do need them. They're pretty handy weapons, and much cheaper than the alternative.

Quote

Nice ad hominem. I terminate this discussion.

It occurs to me that I'll never be able to reason with someone who thinks it's ok for parents to murder their babies.

Starwatcher, on 06 March 2012 - 03:43 AM, said:

Its only an ad hominem if it isn't relevant. If someone advocates eliminating the age of consent and someone else points out that the first person fucks babies, that is entirely relevant to the argument at hand. In this case, the problem is that you are allowing your emotion for something cheap and easy to overwhelm your feeling for things that are harder to see but more important.

It is easy to say we should take care of retarded children because they are more visible than the benefits to vast numbers of poor people who have shittier schools so that one retard can have $100k spent on them per year for very expensive babysitting.'

Emotion without reason leads to tragedy.

Titanium Dragon, on 06 March 2012 - 03:08 AM, said:

I guess I'm a terrible person because I would totally abort the child if I knew it was going to grow up in constant need for the rest of its life

The parents who become permanent caretakers I admire very much for their love and dedication to their child, but I would hate to be in that position.

Also way to sound like a bible-thumping pro-lifer, Starwatcher.

It must be pretty awful when a couple finds out that their fetus (which they wanted to keep) has some condition they can't afford to deal with. Sometimes abortion is the rational choice, but that doesn't mean it's nice at all. It would be nice if we had enough resources and technology to give everyone a chance to be and develop.

Quote

Itu, on 06 March 2012 - 06:21 AM, said:

I disagree. There's nothing admirable about that at all. Its biology overwhelming reason, not something to be celebrated, but something to be disliked. There is precious little enough natural selection on humans, and there's no reason to keep broken things around that will never be people. Far more merciful for them never to exist at all, better for the species and better for the parents.

Titanium Dragon, on 06 March 2012 - 09:30 AM, said:

You are kind of starting to sound like some sort of eugenicist really. This kind of entirely utility driven thinking starts with trying to quantify all the things you seem to think can be quantified and ends at a train station with only one destination.

There needs to be a debate about resources and how the population is too big etc. But when it comes to individual human rights I think the point about there needing to be a judgement that's based on compassion and not some entirely rational cost/benefit analysis is reasonable.

Quote

I never once appealed to any kind of religion. I'm an athiest, and neither always pro choice nor pro life.

I look at complicated things like abortion on a case by case basis. Being extreme in either direction sounds absurd to me.

Well, there was one case in this thread, and TD pretty compellingly explained how your choice to keep it alive was a dumb, harmful one.