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How do people keep ignoring the actual argument? Killing good people is bad, killing bad people is good. This has been more or less the justification for war and executions from religious and non-religious people alike for thousands of years. And within the past 40 years the majority of people not only stopped believing it, but completely and utterly forgot that this is what other people believe. Just because some people believe in a constant function: "killing people is always bad", does not mean everyone who disagrees with them believes its pure negation: "killing people is always good." There's a ton of room for nuance.
Given that the vast majority of potential euthanasia recipients are "good people" according to most sane definitions, ie they are not mass murderers or foreign soldiers that represent an existential threat to the life and liberty of your nation, any belief system that believes "killing good people is bad" and doesn't make exceptions for the will of the person will think that killing them is bad. Sophistication is not hypocrisy.
Historically, after its conversion to Christianity, the Eastern Roman Empire became less likely to execute high status people guilty of crimes against the state and more likely to use exile, disfigurement, or imprisonment in a monastery. The reasoning was that this was a merciful punishment, since it gave the guilty time to repent of their sins.
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When we send a soldier to die in war, for no other reason than that it retains a territorial claim with economic benefit, we are making a transaction of human life for “communal wellbeing”. And this is common in history, including nearly all Catholic countries. A country which considered human life ultimately sacred would give up the territorial claim so that no lives are lost, provided it is a mere territorial claim with no further risk of aggression. But no one would do this. This tells us something important about our values: human life is not the ultimate sacred value, but can be transacted for wellbeing. (Consider also sending humans to work in mines.)
The argument “it is okay to kill bad people” must be rooted in something, not axiomatic. Why is it okay to kill bad people rather than jail them for life? Human life ceases to be sacred when it is a bad person? This isn’t the religious argument whatsoever.
I don't think this scenario has ever happened in the history of the world. Conquering powers that aggressively steal land from others typically only pause to consolidate their gains, reshore their power and morale, cooldown international outrage, etc, before continuing to conquer. And even if the particular nation decides not to go further, if it becomes known you explicitly have a policy of not fighting back against conquest plenty of other nations will swoop in to exploit this. Nations with no militaries and no allies very quickly cease to exist.
Nobody ever explicitly sends soldiers "to die", except in very rare and very evil exceptions. People send soldiers in the hopes that they live and their enemies die. Again, killing bad people is good, killing good people is bad. If your enemies are aggressive and unprovokedly attacking you, then they are bad and you are good, so every soldier of theirs you kill is acceptable, and every soldier of yours they kill is yet another evil they have committed. The fact that your own people die is a horrible tragedy, but the blame for it lies on the enemy for killing them, not on you for sending them in self-defense.
This is pretty typical natural rights stuff, which can be religious or not depending on whether or not you believe the natural rights are inherent to humans or derived from God. Everyone is born with an inherent right to life, liberty, property, etc. Violating these is not okay. But if you willingly violate them in others then you forfeit some of yours (in various amounts depending on how harsh a perspective one has, but generally proportional to the amount that you violated from others.) Your natural rights are contingent on respecting the natural rights of others, and if you can't do that then you don't get the respect of others for yours.
Think of the Faklands. The British, rightfully, exchanged the lives of British soldiers for an important geopolitical claim. The British, in their minds rightfully, also fought Indian kingdoms and revolts for an important economic claim… were these Indians going to invade Britain?
Falklands is the obvious example, but this is also disproven if you consider the way the Mongols operated. Fighting the mongols always leads to more death, but if you win, you are in an economically more valuable position (less taxes paid). If human lives are the terminal value than it would never be rational to fight off the mongols.
Falklands is once again the obvious example. There’s an enormous difference between a territorial concession far away and invading the homeland. France would not invade the UK if the UK relinquished the Falklands.
This is an unserious semantic argument. We can predict with 99% accuracy that the some soldiers will die. We choose that they die to secure economic benefit. You haven’t argued against this point: soldiers have died to secure economic resources throughout history, in conflicts over geopolitically important or economically valuable territory, in cases where there is no direct threat of aggression in the mainland.
If human lives were the terminal value and there is no added risk to your defense, then the rational position would be to continually secede territory always, regardless of economic cost. We can even draft a hypothetical scenario involving interplanetary war, to make our intuitions clearer. Planet A and Planet B are completely defended and cannot be invaded. B is about to take A’s valuable resources which will leave A poorer. I think almost everyone would say that it’s permissible for A to sacrifice their lives to secure the valuable resources, even though there is no risk of mainland invasion — because we understand that resources increase wellbeing.
Okay so it’s rooted in whim
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Literally no one, including today, sees territorial claims as being maintained solely or primarily for economic benefit.
Have you heard of guano islands? The sugar trade? Colonial possessions? The whole history of European war in the colonial era is mixed with fighting other nations for territorial claims wherein the territory has economic benefit and nothing else. Russia today is preparing for war in the arctic involving its territorial resources, and China over fishing areas.
Are you? Or do you actually think Russia is invading Ukraine to get a few more scheckles?
In the end, the question of geopolitical dominance for someone who isn't race essentialist or heavily religious or something like that rests on the economic benefits of being the local hegemon, and the disadvantages of being a fractured gas station. I don't think anyone in the Kremlin who matters really believes physical genocide of Russians is in the cards, so that leaves submission and destitution.
While this may or may not apply to Russia, there's several dictators who could easily negotiate an agreement with the west, of yielding power for what would be untold riches (compared to what they have now), but prefer to be kings of the ashes. Money isn't everything.
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The argument rests on the widespread occurrence of war over purely economic territorial claims. It does not rest on every territorial claim involving purely economic motives.
I'll go out on a limb and say even the wars that we see as "purely economic" in retrospect, were justified on other grounds to people fighting them at the time.
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Genesis 9, and all:
Isn't that an endorsement of the death penalty?
Right, I'm agreeing.
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