"People do a poor job of predicting their preferences in
situations they have never experienced."
Rebecca Dresser, Precommitment: A Misguided Strategy for
Securing Death with Dignity, 81 Tex. L. Rev. 1823 (2003).
(Finding that a line about medical directives -- living wills -- can be basically be applied to the human experience as a whole.)
3 comments:
Based on recent personal experiences, this is one thousand kinds of true.
That is great.
I'm TAing in a history course about the Holocaust and we end up having to talk about this a lot. Not about preferences exactly -- more that you don't know how you would act if put under a specific series of pressures in a set of situations. You just don't. It is upsetting and unpleasant to think you could be a perpetrator of atrocities, but the fact is the majority of people asked to participate did so. Who knows what sadist lies within? I know that wasn't exactly the theme of your comment, but it is true nonetheless.
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