Interesting challenge.
Is it better to be dumb and alive, or die smart?
I guess it depends, on how dumb you are.
It feels good to be intelligent, and it’s usually useful, but it’s not a necessity, so long as you’re intelligent enough to take care of yourself and your family if you have one, that’s what’s most important.
There’s a lot that goes into making us who we are besides our intelligence, physically, and psychologically, there’s our memories, if we still have those, our personality, principles and so on, our emotions.
We can still be of value to both ourselves and others, both from a subjective and utilitarian standpoint, even if we’re not geniuses, even if we’re a little slow.
However, you might be better off dead than in a persistent vegetative or a nearly persistent vegetative state.
It’s not a necessity for society to keep you alive, but a luxury, in such a state you probably wouldn’t be much good to anyone, even yourself, just a burden.
In such cases I don’t think there’s anything wrong with individuals/their families making provisions to have doctors terminate their life should their cerebral cortex become severely and irrevocably damaged.
For me, this is keeping in my line with my thinking, which I will call necessitism.
If anything about value could be called objective, it’s our needs.
These are the things which come closest to being absolute, and universal.
The physical needs are most important and pertinent, but the psychological needs are important and pertinent too, and sometimes it can be tricky to distinguish a psychological need from a want, and occasionally psychological needs might precede physical ones in priority.
In the case that you presented… well you see, society has needs too, and as social animals, barring a few completely asocial and antisocial exceptions, I think it’s a psychological need to want to be of some use to society, to be admired, to make yourself useful in some way.
While in a persistent vegetative state, on life support, you may still be alive, your physical needs may still be taken care of, it’s important to look at societies needs and not just our own, as well as our own psychological needs before we enter such a dreadful state where we’re almost completely deprived of a psychology.
While you need life support to keep you alive, society doesn’t need to give you life support, and so you are a luxury from societies standpoint, like a potted plant, but much more costly.
If a useless persons life is detracting from the needs of useful people, people who’re both more fully realized, actualized as human beings, and contributing to their own needs and the needs of society, and there’s no way to improve this useless person, than this useless person ought to be terminated, because the needs of the others outweigh the needs of any single individual.
However, if you can keep a useless individual alive, without it costing society or the environment much, than I would leave it up to individuals, and the collective, to decide, it doesn’t matter all that much either way, but from societies standpoint it’s a luxury, not a necessity.
While any single individuals life may not be too costly, since we presently have an abundance of resources, thousands, millions of such burdensome individuals could be very costly to it and to nature.
I think it’s an open ended question, how important it is to take care of others?
So you could say my necessitism has an altruistic, a reciprocal altruistic component.
It’s a hierarchy of values but there’s some overlap and probably some exceptions, but I think generally, the physical needs come first, then the psychological needs, then the wants, but we have to consider societies needs and natures too, as well as those few cases where psychological needs trump physical ones.
Still, I think this needism, this putting needs first ahead of wants is almost always a good thing, and I think we could use more of it, because the way I see it, and it’s a big subject, the biggest problem with society today, is that it has totally forgotten about necessity in its rabid, reckless and maniacal pursuit of luxury, consumerism, and it’s going to be the death of us and the death of nature, in my estimation and in the estimation of many others, increasingly.
Our problem is not that we neglect our desires, that is not our problem, so I wouldn’t worry about it.
Modern man tries to satisfy nearly every single superfluous desire that momentarily enters his head, and if he presently can’t, and he’s smart enough, he’ll invent some machine to fulfill it.
Advanced technology appropriated to serve our every grotesque, demented whim, it’s a sickness we have, and I think we all have it some extent, humanity is sick.
But this will all become more apparent after civilization collapses due to disease, resource depletion and nuclear warfare, that is if there’s anyone left to apprehend it, and it will happen, it is happening.
Unlike the left, for lack of a better term, or some factions of it, I see such as primarily an ethical or psychological problem, a question of values, philosophy, perspective, metaphysics, rather than an economic one, but it can be addressed from either angle.
It’s also a genetic problem, and some people may have this gene, this gene that causes people to be hypercompetative, and greedy.