15.9.05

WELL: In a sure sign I have waaaay too much free time on my hands, I found myself wondering after my Ethics and Public Policy class (in which there was widespread agreement with the notion that human life has no intrinsic value, only what it gets from the utility it can provide) whether one can marry that sentiment (that sometimes, it produces a better net utility to die rather than keep on living miserably) with what I understand to be the key insight of the Coase Theorem (that, absent transaction costs, the efficient outcome will occur regardless of who has property rights) to argue that it really doesn't matter who actually ends up doing the killing in such cases, because, obviously, I think that particular utilitarian intuition is extremely wrong, and just a hop, skip and a jump from a perfect justification for eugenics and genocide, which leaves me to wonder if I'm perverse enough to see if I can make that argument actually work (to demonstrate how completely insane it is, of course).

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