Just as Judi Chamberlin said “you have the right to commit suicide but you don’t have the right to commit suicide in my living room”, I think society can say “you don’t have to protect your brain basket with a helmet in every situation where you optimally should, but if you’re going to drive on our highways you damn well shall wear a seatbelt; we haul injured people off to get patched up, and we don’t want to waste time and energy on the outcome of you not doing so, it costs us time and money”.
But I support your right to take the safety guards off your Home Depot chain saw you use at home.
Well, if you’re dirt biking off a ramp in your own back yard, I’m not sure how anyone can tell you to wear a helmet. If you get injured, it’s not like we say “oh, you crossed our line, so no treatment for you!”.
But here is what I am asking. If you are the parent or guardian of a 10 year old who says “I am going to ride the dirtbike on the ramps in our backyard, and helmets are dumb so I’m not wearing one”, and you warned the kid of the consequences and showed him some bloody PSAs, you think it should be acceptable for you to say “well, I disagree, but I respect your decision”?
Because I think that this would be criminal child neglect, and if your kid got hurt in that situation they could (and probably should) be taken away from an unsafe situation.
No. It assumes lack of infallibility - that any planned intervention on your part is not necessarily supportable, useful, helpful, or beneficial and hence not morally correct. At least not without an overwhelming mass of evidence, which is quite a quantum leap from “more likely than not” or “better to intervene if there’s any doubt”, which have become the operational standards.
In criminal law we have the stated standard “beyond a reasonable doubt”, even though in practice we shove people around a lot more than that standard implies we do. So at a minimum, to intervene on someone who hasn’t violated any law “because we think it’s best for you”, the standard should be “beyond the faintest vanishing scintilla of a doubt”. Basically: just don’t. That’s your default. Exceptions should be rare enough that they don’t occupy your philosophical attention.
My mother in law’s mom (my wife’s grandmother) is in her 90s and cognitively declining sharply. If left to her own devices, she would try to do laundry in her garage in the middle of the night, fall, and stay there, on the ground, until someone found her or she died. She has a life alert necklace, which of course, she refuses to wear. We know this because this is what she has done when left to her own devices in the past.
She isn’t that irrational all the time. It comes and goes. Sometimes there’s an underlying cause - she had a really severe decline that my MIL thought was the end before it turned out she had a yeast infection that was found and treated, and she drastically improved. Of course, in that state, she refused all treatment. Because she was delirious due to the infection. But by your standards, we should have “respected her wishes” and let her refuse treatment.
So you can either keep her “alive and safe” while angering her and interfering with her autonomy or let her make bad decisions. (This assumes for the sake of argument that she doesn’t give you an advance directive to intervene when her thinking is off). But at 90 you can’t be kept alive and safe, really. With limited schedule remaining, many of us would prefer to take our chances and tend to value our autonomy over our safety. Those who don’t so prefer can so indicate.
I’m actually not, but subjecting us all to the same rules is a good starting point. Ultimately I’m an anarchist and don’t support the existence of jails, prisons, police officers, the enforcement of law, any of that; but I’m a pragmatic anarchist and we can’t just wave our hands and dismiss the law without a structure of decision-making that can prove to make the proverbial trains run on time and give us peaceful safe communities. I’m all for “defund the police” but not with an axe. Just like detoxing from Prolixin or Thorazine is best done gradually because of the withdrawal symptoms, detoxing from coercion can’t be accomplished all in one whack.
I’m saying stage one is to ditch the pretense that “benevolent coercion” is in existence for the good of the people it is done to and strip it back to “we only coerce to protect the public from people doing specified bad things” and quit coercing people just because you don’t like the way they think.
If you think you can make a 10 year old do as you say without tromping around behind them 24 x 7, you haven’t spent much time with 10 year olds. We all had parents, parents all had rules, and we all violated them left and right where we thought we knew better. That’s part of growing up.
We did? I’m not so sure I did—not with the frequency or abandon that “left and right” implies.
I’m curious how much time you’ve spent with 10-year-olds.
In my own personal experience, the authority figures in my life (parents, grandparents, teachers, supervisors, etc.) have been, for the most part, both genuinely benevolent and basically competent. I realize that not everyone has had that same privilege. But it means that I do not automatically discount the possibility that those in authority may genuinely be acting in the best interests of those over whom they have that authority.
Perhaps, but it is not more important than social responsibility and respecting the rights of others, and there are far too many people in this society that don’t seem to see that.
Informed autonomy means understanding the consequences of one’s actions. If people are in their right mind and capable of comprehending their actions then I’m all for it. If someone is hallucinating or having a psychotic break then their autonomy is not particularly valuable.
And I’m sure the loss of all the good experiences she has had since the last garage incident are made up for by “At least she died FREE!”.
Plenty of people who are older than 90 prove you wrong. This is a pretty wild take, I have to say.
We have totally different ideas about what society should ideally look like, so I doubt we will ever agree on this.
You didn’t answer the question. Would you let a child in your care ride their dirt bike off ramps in the back yard without a helmet on if that was their decision? When the police is questioning you while the kid is lying with his head bashed open at the foot of the ramp, your defense would be “Well, there’s no way for me to make sure he wears his helmet whole biking at all times, so I didn’t even try”?
if someone is an imminent threat to others you say you are ok with intervening, but an imminent threat to themselves you are not. Why? Is one life worth more than others? Any argument that is discrepancy is ok must be based on self-determination (which presupposes competency). But you have already ruled that out as an exception to this rule.
You aren’t in a position to assess that. At best you can hold the opinion that someone else is having cognitive issues. You also have a mind, and it may have biases, unquestioned assumptions, or delusions, any of whihc renders your opinion invalid. Autonomy isn’t where I am free to think, act, and feel as long as it doesn’t strike you as crazy. Autonomy is where I have the right to be crazy as long as I’m not hurting you.
I think their argument is that no one ever has a right to judge you not competent. Which I think is ridiculous and would lead to a lot of unnecessary death.
You have asserted this, but you haven’t supported this.
Back in prehistory times, when we live in small clans and subsisted on whatever we could club over the head with a rock, there were no laws. Just social norms that helped us navigate the world without annoying or frightening other people too much. In time we came to realize there were two types of people.
Them who can get their acts together well enough to add enough value to the community to justify keeping around.
And them who can’t get their act together. Not only do they annoy and frighten, but they do stuff so stupid and bizarre that it creates a drain on limited resources.
I have a hard time figuring out what your real position is and that could be on me, I guess. But look, if we see someone showing all the signs of the second type of person, we have a moral justification to intervene. Even if it means they lose their autonomy. Our cavemen ancestors figured out a long time ago that if you let delusional, erratically behaving people just do whatever they want in the name of “freedom”, eventually it costs everyone their freedom.
If you’re acting crazy in a manner that makes me (and others) think you don’t currently have the self control necessary to avoid hurting people, are we allowed to intervene, or do we have to wait for those suspicions to be proven true?