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If you have cancer, and have been sick for months or years, and are in great pain, is death the worst thing to happen to you? It may be bad for your family and loved ones - but for you, it may very well be relief.

Mercy and palliative care is something I think forgotten all too often in medical care in the US, we focus so much on the cure at all costs, and less on the outcome or realistic outcome rather.



When you say "you," you are failing to properly account for the dynamics of human identity. I am not just a brain in a body. I am a fully engaged social being. The "me" that dies is not the whole me. I identify as part of a human culture.

And yes, if that human culture dies -- if humanity goes extinct -- then that is just about the worst thing I could imagine. You can scale that down any number of ways, but at no point will I agree that death isn't bad. I don't care if it's a single cell, a single organ, a whole person, or a whole room full of people. It's only as good as the value it produces for the whole, and my personal suffering is not a factor to that insofar as it doesn't disable my contribution.

And I didn't say death is the worst thing that can happen to you.




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