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Comment by chrisbaker98 | Hacker News Reader

> It's immoral to force someone to do something they don't want to do.

It's trivially easy to think of counterexamples to this statement.

Please present them instead of coming with a (bad-faith) shallow dismissal. I'm sure many here would find value in the perspective, even if only to try and find flaws in the argument.

Using "bad faith" like this destroys any and all meaning in the phrase. It also directly violates the hacker news guide lines.

I don't want to not kill you.

I don't want to safely dispose of this industrial waste because that is too expensive and time consuming.

I don't want to feed my children.

I don't want to drive the speed limit.

I don't want to pay for that.

I don't want limit my amplifier's output to 1500 watts on the amateur radio bands. (edit: 500 watts on HF in France!)

I don't want to provide the good or service I have been paid for and I don't want to return the money.

I don't want to add to this list anymore....

The blanket statement is obviously untrue. For example: people are forced to obey the law.

But if you only want to talk about suicide: we already "force" suicidal people to stay alive via suicide prevention measures (nets under bridges, restrictions on drug purchases etc.) that make it harder or less convenient to kill yourself. These measures reduce suicide rates and I'd say they're moral.

Okay, so what if we're only talking about "assisted" suicide? If someone really wants to die, should we let them? I get where you're coming from, but let's not pretend it's always this simple. Suicidal people aren't famous for thinking rationally, and just because someone says they want to die that doesn't mean we should take it at face value. There are already cases in Canada of people seeking euthanasia not because they're terminally ill but because they're poor, and see suicide as preferable to poverty/homelessness:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanisin...

There's the "slippery slope" we were warned about.

PS I'm not sure what you think "bad faith" means, but my post was not written in bad faith.

> via suicide prevention measures (nets under bridges, restrictions on drug purchases etc.)

Those are all negative, in those cases you're not allowing someone to do something (which is different from forcing someone to do something). There are other forms of suicide prevention though, like forcing suicidal people to take medication

In the UK, if you want to kill yourself by overdosing on paracetamol, then you're forced to visit several different shops (because you can't buy more than two packets at once) then spend a long time tediously popping each pill individually out of the blister pack before you can swallow them all. (The pills don't come in bottles because bottles make it too easy to quickly pour a fatal overdose of pills into your mouth).

These measures won't stop a truly determined person, but they stop a lot of people. It's well understood that erecting even a minor inconvenience in front of a suicidal person can be enough to keep them alive. Popping all your paracetamol out of the packaging takes enough time to give you a chance to reconsider the whole thing.

By forcing someone to do something, we prevent them from doing something else.

If we qualify this as acts that don't directly impact the actions or choices of others does that limit the obvious counter-examples?

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