Terry Pratchett is hoping he can die on his own terms:
And so I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer’s take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.
I hope for his sake that he can. Everybody should be allowed to opt out early, stigma-free, legal-entanglement-free.
This short NYer piece on the Letterman thing brought up an aspect of blackmail I’ve never considered before. James Lindgren, a law professor at Northwestern, is …
… the author of a paper called “Unraveling the Paradox of Blackmail,” which raises the question: why is blackmail considered a crime? The thinking goes like this: It’s perfectly legal for Halderman to write, or threaten to write, a screenplay (or an e-mail to TMZ) exposing the fact that David Letterman had flings with “Late Show” employees. It’s also legal for Halderman to ask Letterman for money as part of a business transaction. So why are the two things illegal when you put them together? In other words, Lindgren said, “Why is it illegal to threaten to do what you can do legally anyway?”
Most folks in the piece seem to think it should be illegal. Except the libertarian (of course).
Crowdsourcing an Ethical Dilemma describes the results of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to pose variations of the Trolley Problem to a bunch of strangers. For example:
…a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?
They varied the scenario and the number of people one would save, and charted the results. (via waxy)
