One more question:
Would you also endorse the following views or is too radical?
Yes, I fully agree with the substance of the quote - the first two paragraphs express my sentiments in a nutshell, as does the title of this thread which I recognise as a quotation from Schopenhauer - although not wholly with its conclusion as to why. I don't think it has anything to do with profit
per se (after all, living people cost money and sick living people cost a great deal of money). The anti-choicers
are driven by power, however; the power they can exert over other people and what they do. The paternalism of the anti-choicers is everywhere, seeking to regulate what foods people eat and how much, how much they drink, their sexual behaviour, what risks they're allowed to take with their own lives (joining the armed forces and skydiving are OK; choosing to drive alone in a car without a seatbelt is not OK. How does that work again?) and a million other things great and small. This sort of paternalism draws its energy from treating competent consenting adults as rather dim and irresponsible children who have to be told what to do and how to live - and die - because the paternalists know better how to live somebody else's life for them better than the somebody elses ever could. In Kant's terms it's treating people as means and not as ends in themselves, by denying them the freedom to exercise their choices; to use a timely analogy today, as subjects of a monarch and not citizens of a republic.
I am dubious to say the very least about the existence of free will - while I don't outright deny it since I have no conclusive grounds for doing so, neuroscience is increasingly coming to suggest that it's an illusion. Nevertheless, as I believe torridon (apologies if wrong) wrote fairly recently, until and unless we reach the point where free will is definitively shown to be illusory, we (sometimes) act
as though we possess free will. While that remains the case I think it's important to respect people's choices, not only if we disagree with them but
especially and particularly when we disagree with them. It's fundamental to my idea of and treatment of human beings that competent consenting adults must be treated as such. People own themselves.
I read John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty at a tender age and never recovered; it was the one text that made me a die-hard libertarian. (In the strict philosophical sense, more usually associated with British English rather than current American English where it means something vastly different, which makes it a problematic term to use nowadays). Mill wrote:
... the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself. Advice, instruction, persuasion, and avoidance by other people, if thought necessary by them for their own good, are the only measures by which society can justifiably express its dislike or disapprobation of his conduct [...] the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection [...] the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right [...] The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
It's a stance from which I've never been given any reason to waver and many reasons to cling to all the more securely.
