High decouplers will notice that, holding preferences constant, offering people an additional choice cannot make them worse off. People will only take the choice if its better than any of their current options.
This is obviously true if somehow giving a person an additional choice is literally the only change being made, but you don’t have to be a low-decoupler to notice that that’s very very often not true. For a specific and very common example: often other people have some idea what choices you have (and, in particular, if we’re talking about whether it should be legal to do something or not, it is generally fairly widely known what’s legal).
Pretty much everyone’s standard example of how having an extra choice that others know about can hurt you: threats and blackmail and the like. I might prefer not to have the ability to pay $1M to avoid being shot dead, or to prove I voted for a particular candidate to avoid losing my job.
This is pretty much parallel to a common argument for laws against euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc.: the easier it is for someone with terrible medical conditions to arrange to die, the more opportunities there are for others to put pressure on them to do so, or (this isn’t quite parallel, but it seems clearly related) to make it appear that they’ve done so when actually they were just murdered.
Agreed on most of the above, but on this particular point:
This is pretty much parallel to a common argument for laws against euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc.: the easier it is for someone with terrible medical conditions to arrange to die, [...], or (this isn’t quite parallel, but it seems clearly related) to make it appear that they’ve done so when actually they were just murdered.
I would expect the opposite there. If assisted suicide and stuff is legalized, I expect that to come with high standards of “There should be a notarized signature, multiple witnesses, a video from the person in question stating their intentions, and they walk into a building where some official people first take the person into another room and say ‘Are these men coercing you? We can have our security staff subdue them and bring in the police’”, etc., designed specifically to make it hard to cover up a murder like that. And the existence of that option should push a chunk of regular suicides in that direction, making it less plausible that someone would commit suicide in the “traditional” way where they give no one any warning, may or may not leave a note, etc.
I would expect the standards to be high while the practice is new and very controversial and the cases are few… and then gradually the process gets more streamlined.
Protests against assisted suicide are easy to coordinate; protests again removing 1% of the bureaucracy around it are not.
Do we really need 7 witnesses, or is 6 enough? It is okay if the doctor performing the suicide is also one of the witnesses? And his assistant is another one? How clearly must the person speak on the video? What if they can’t speak at all, is it fair to deny someone the “basic human right” of assisted suicide just because their ability to speak is impaired? What if taking someone to the next room would be logistically too difficult, e.g. because they are connected to some kind of life support? … Twenty years later, the doctor checks a box saying “the assisted suicide was done according to the law” on the form, signs it, and that’s it.
I think this is oversimplified:
This is obviously true if somehow giving a person an additional choice is literally the only change being made, but you don’t have to be a low-decoupler to notice that that’s very very often not true. For a specific and very common example: often other people have some idea what choices you have (and, in particular, if we’re talking about whether it should be legal to do something or not, it is generally fairly widely known what’s legal).
Pretty much everyone’s standard example of how having an extra choice that others know about can hurt you: threats and blackmail and the like. I might prefer not to have the ability to pay $1M to avoid being shot dead, or to prove I voted for a particular candidate to avoid losing my job.
This is pretty much parallel to a common argument for laws against euthanasia, assisted suicide, etc.: the easier it is for someone with terrible medical conditions to arrange to die, the more opportunities there are for others to put pressure on them to do so, or (this isn’t quite parallel, but it seems clearly related) to make it appear that they’ve done so when actually they were just murdered.
Agreed on most of the above, but on this particular point:
I would expect the opposite there. If assisted suicide and stuff is legalized, I expect that to come with high standards of “There should be a notarized signature, multiple witnesses, a video from the person in question stating their intentions, and they walk into a building where some official people first take the person into another room and say ‘Are these men coercing you? We can have our security staff subdue them and bring in the police’”, etc., designed specifically to make it hard to cover up a murder like that. And the existence of that option should push a chunk of regular suicides in that direction, making it less plausible that someone would commit suicide in the “traditional” way where they give no one any warning, may or may not leave a note, etc.
I would expect the standards to be high while the practice is new and very controversial and the cases are few… and then gradually the process gets more streamlined.
Protests against assisted suicide are easy to coordinate; protests again removing 1% of the bureaucracy around it are not.
Do we really need 7 witnesses, or is 6 enough? It is okay if the doctor performing the suicide is also one of the witnesses? And his assistant is another one? How clearly must the person speak on the video? What if they can’t speak at all, is it fair to deny someone the “basic human right” of assisted suicide just because their ability to speak is impaired? What if taking someone to the next room would be logistically too difficult, e.g. because they are connected to some kind of life support? … Twenty years later, the doctor checks a box saying “the assisted suicide was done according to the law” on the form, signs it, and that’s it.