It’s fine. I got my answer: you have no idea why you want to live, no value commitments of any kind, and apparently zero interest in anyone or anything but yourself.

Thanks for the answer. I hoped for something less cynical, but the truth is what it is.

Hey, you’re the mindless husk here. I don’t expect you to do anything purposeful. Morality is for losers amirite?

That wouldn’t be enough to cover care for dementia, meaning someone else will be footing that bill if you get sick. You’re deluded and narcissistic.

A small amount you can be saving for your kids, or for actual worthy causes.

People like you are why this world is ending. You’re a selfish nihilist who loves no one and cares about nothing and can’t even articulate why he’s alive. Grotesque.

Keeping your mindless body alive helps the economy just fine. What it doesn’t help is your loved ones or hungry children or the rainforest or whatever it is that you care about — which I’m now realizing is nothing. You care about nothing but your own self.

It sounds like you haven’t heard of insurance. It’s not free or magical. Someone has to pay for it, and afterwards that money has to be wasted doing exactly what I described. Money and manpower that could have been spent doing literally anything else, such as feeding hungry children or saving the rainforest.

You’re essentially setting aside cash NOT for your loved ones or in service to some worthy cause, but to keep your mindless body alive.

Here’s how your answer sounds to me:

“I would rather pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to waste people’s time wiping my ass than help future generations and my loved ones by passing away with my mind still intact at a moment of my choosing.”

Who is paying for your nursing home?? Do you imagine the people are there wiping your ass because they enjoy it?

Did it seriously never occur to you that if you get to that stage everyone would be wasting resources keeping your mindless body alive instead of, say, feeding hungry children and investing in their future?

This is circular. If you had dementia, you wouldn’t like living, because you’d be a zombie, and even if you did still like living (doubtful), you’d be an enormous burden on those you love, which would presumably undercut your “joy” at being a mindless husk. So why the fuck would you want to keep living in that case?

And I gave you my answer- I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t want to end my life unless it has to end.

WHY? That’s what I’m asking you. You haven’t even attempted to answer this question.

Dementia is a spectrum of neuropathology, so you’ve effectively ignored my question. But ok, let’s go with your specific example. Why would you keep your father alive in such an undignified state? You’re describing him as playing with “child-level jigsaw puzzles,” meaning he’s barely sentient and someone has to wipe his ass, which is a horrifying indignity. Literally my idea of hell. Are you punishing him? Are you punishing yourself?

Humans are supposed to transcend the mortal realm, so why this obsession with remaining alive even at the expense of everyone around you? I guess I’ll never get an answer.

I defer to you on whether your particular life was worth living. The question is why you would want to live if your mind, your character and memories were gone — if you were a burden on those around you and could no longer engage in self-reflection or abstract reasoning. What would be the point?

I want to be alive as long as possible.

Yes, but why? I understand that you want your body to remain alive even after your mind has gone and you’ve become a burden on those around you, but I’m asking you why.

I do not believe in an afterlife, so I want every single second of life on this planet I can possibly get

So unless there were an afterlife, you’d want to live a life that wasn’t worth living? Why?

Honest question, why are people so obsessed with living? I’d want to be euthanized at the first sign of dementia. Just give me like a week to get my affairs in order. It’s bizarre that people would rather exist as mindless husks than die peacefully at a time of their choosing.

Maybe it’s fear. Most humans live and think like animals whose impulse to survive overrides rationality. Or is there another explanation?

I genuinely want to understand.

Pointing out that killing women and children is bad is “divisive.”

Amazing.

You’ve really never encountered a biology textbook, huh?

Give them their Darwin awards.

This kind of thing tends to happen when frugivorous apes attempt to eat meat for no reason.

The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.

I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.