I don’t believe anyone has said that.
Can we all just agree that whatever Smapti considers morality to be, it is completely orthogonal to what we have, and leave it at that, and stop engaging him on this topic?
Agreed. That’s sick. Perhaps **Smapti ** is the mentally ill one here.
As for Maynard’s trip to the Grand Canyon, it was the last such trip she would be able to take, and it took a toll on her, with increasing seizures, pain, paralysis, etc. She had little to look forward to except more of the same, but worse each time.
My hypothetical was not merely being locked in, but being locked in and in constant agony. You can substitute whatever you personally feel is the worst possible existance - the point of the hypothetical is to imagine whatever you view as being the most suffering, least desirable way to live. You could add blindness and deafness to the equation if that helps.
Really doesn’t matter at this point, it’s the Smapti show. But in any case, I doubt you’re going to find anyone else on the boards that’s going to argue on that side anyway.
Ahem;
May I suggest you confine your arguments with me to positions I’ve actually stated? I mean, feel free to talk about this with the people actually putting those views forward. It just seems kind of a waste to ask them to me, too.
And, again; you’re saying that she had a fine, nigh-enviable life to look forward to on the one hand, and a terrible, worst-scenario-you-can-possible-imagine on the other. She picked number two.
How is she a coward for rejecting something you’ve gone to great word length about being easy, and choosing to hasten something you consider the worst thing you can imagine?
“I really hate spiders. They’re the worst thing possible. Wait, that girl had to choose between having a free hamburger and holding a spider, and picked the spider? What a coward!”
She gave up what could have remained of her life because she was afraid that it wasn’t always going to be as good as it had been, and she did so in a way that let her completely duck the actual mental and physical experience of dying.
That makes her a coward.
A coward takes a bunch of pills and dies in their sleep in a numb daze. A brave person faces it head-on and stays lucid and fully aware until the end.
Alright, let’s check that up against your list of what makes death the worst thing you can conceive of;
Ok, so; she still doesn’t get heaven, or hell, or ghostliness, or purgatory, or solitude. She “just fell asleep and never woke up again.”
She doesn’t appear to have avoided anything of the qualities of death that you speak of as being the most terrifying thing you can possibly conceive of. You keep saying (now) that in fact she was scared of living her life, the life that you have been (up until now) going to such lengths to talk about as being full of hope and life and joy and such things - but hey, even if you’re correct, she still picked the most fear-causing thing. So, again; why does selecting the thing you fear most in the world over something you consider to be easy make her a coward?
She chose death over dying. That is cowardice.
Ah, so you can conceive of something more terrifying than death, then? All that talk about the nothingness of death being the most terrifying thing you can conceive of, how “something is always better than nothing”, that was incorrect? You’ve changed your views?
And in doing so, she didn’t feel enough pain to satisfy your needs?
I don’t know if this qualifies as tele-sadism, or masochism-by-proxy.
Dying is the scary part of death. I apologize if my previous statement was insufficiently detailed for your liking.
She missed out on the life she would have had.
She had an obligation to kill herself. We shouldn’t waste effort or resources on hopless causes. Off on the ice flow with her. Every society has recognized this truth.
The part you just described as the scariest part of all?
I am glad she missed that part.
I’m not looking forward to that part either.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to pussy out and skip it.
That’s no problem at all. So long as it’s merely insufficiently detailed and not wrong, I’m happy to continue to hold you to it all.
So, since it’s the nothingness that is the true basis of fear of death for you, and since Maynard took it upon herself to meet that sooner rather than wait for it, she took the braver course, correct? Because something is always better than nothing, and she selected the worse course?
And people wonder where Republicans come up with the “death panels” stuff from.
The braver course would have been to continue existing. She chose to duck having to experience that.
The fact that she deemed death to be preferable to life only proves that she was insane in addition to being a coward.
Smapti chooses the cowardly answer in virtually every hypothetical offered (choosing not to make a tiny risk to free slaves, choosing to cause suffering to others over dying one second sooner, etc.), so he has no credibility in calling anyone at all a coward.