Problems with Assisted suicide
I don't think assisted suicide reflects autonomy because it requires someone else to assist in your death and societal structures and values to change for everyone. It devalues life by ending it.
The case of Nathan Verhelst raises various relevant issues here:
"Nathan Verhelst was born Nancy into a family of three boys. The newspaper, which said it had spoken to him on the eve of his death, reported that he had been rejected by his parents who had wanted another son. He had three operations to change sex between 2009 and 2012.
"The first time I saw myself in the mirror I felt an aversion for my new body," he was quoted as saying."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24373107
This person had mental health problems after being rejected by their mother and felt the solution was a sex change but they were unhappy with the result and had an assisted suicide. His mother even reported she wasn't sad after their death in an interview. It is o clear that "She" identified as "He" other than as a means to please her parents.
Essentially this person was pushed to suicide by others and failed medical interventions.
Other people can make your life unbearable and then solve the problem they created by assisting in your suicide.
So I don't see the autonomy in being pressured by circumstance into taking your own life or in allowing someone's death to be a solution for societal problems.
The case of Nathan Verhelst raises various relevant issues here:
"Nathan Verhelst was born Nancy into a family of three boys. The newspaper, which said it had spoken to him on the eve of his death, reported that he had been rejected by his parents who had wanted another son. He had three operations to change sex between 2009 and 2012.
"The first time I saw myself in the mirror I felt an aversion for my new body," he was quoted as saying."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24373107
This person had mental health problems after being rejected by their mother and felt the solution was a sex change but they were unhappy with the result and had an assisted suicide. His mother even reported she wasn't sad after their death in an interview. It is o clear that "She" identified as "He" other than as a means to please her parents.
Essentially this person was pushed to suicide by others and failed medical interventions.
Other people can make your life unbearable and then solve the problem they created by assisting in your suicide.
So I don't see the autonomy in being pressured by circumstance into taking your own life or in allowing someone's death to be a solution for societal problems.
Comments (119)
This is a particularly unusual story because it involves a transgender person and assisted suicide. I am startled that the person was given an assisted suicide, unless it was the mother. Assisted suicide is particularly complex and controversial, just as euthanasia is. Part of this may be because people may be pushed into it with others as a way of rejection, especially the elderly and people who unable to look after themselves. In this particular case it seems like there were critical family dynamics which needed experience and, perhaps, some professional family therapy interventions could have been offered to work with the various family members as opposed to the focus being on the one individual in isolation. I am not sure where this took place because it seems an extreme story.
Suicide itself is a very tricky area. I have worked in psychiatric nursing and it is often the opposite to this scenario. People are often wishing to kill themselves and if a person is viewed as a suicide risk they are often placed on close levels of observation, such as having a member of staff at arms length 24/7. I have known people being nursed in this way for over a year. Of course, it is not as if anyone can be on such observations permanently and often the people who do kill themselves don't tell anyone their intent and plans.
As far as needing assistance, some people try to kill themselves and don't succeed, and may even end up disabled in the process. Others may make what is believed to have been most likely a gesture for help, such as an overdose, and die accidentally.
It was the Mothers child who was euthanised because of botched sex reassignment surgeries.
There is a lot of details about it online.
Here is another controversial case:
Shanti De Corte was waiting for a plane to Rome on March 22, when she stood just a few meters away from one of the two suicide bombers who detonated high-powered bombs. Miraculously, Ms. De Corte, who was 17 years old at the time, was not injured, but she never recovered from her post-traumatic distress disorder. The young woman suffered years of psychological pain. Supported by her friends and family, she requested euthanasia in April. It was performed on May 7, but her death was announced only a few days ago.
This young woman had an assisted suicide due to mental distress:
ttps://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
Apparently at at 23 she knew her life would never improve and everyone else seconded this opinion.
This seems like a win for terrorism to me that people can terrorise us into losing the will to live.
As someone who has attempted suicide in the past I was deemed not mental ill enough to be sectioned.
I am not sure how one gets oneself sectioned these days.
Despite having had suicidal feelings over the years I don't want the state to aid in my death because since prior attempts I have found some enjoyment in life. I got a degree and learnt a new musical instrument after feeling really suicidal but then I think new medication may have initially increased suicidal feelings as can be the case until it started having positive effects.
The psychiatric, psychologic and philosophical stance on suicide is confusing but nowadays it has been gone from a criminal act and taboo to being seen as divorced from mental illness and a valid choice.
I always want to stop someone from committing suicide and suggest a reason for them to live.
Only in the final stages of illness, when the patient is incapable of doing it alone. And that's the only time that assistance is legally available. Therefore, many of us plan our exit strategy while we are still physically able. The problem with that approach, of course, is that we die sooner than we want to, so as to escape being forced to endure months or years of pain and to spare our loved ones months or years of hardship - which, incidentally, also causes some relatives and caregivers to take pity on a patient and help them illegally, risking prison themselves.
Nobody is forced to choose suicide; nobody is forced to assist; it's entirely voluntary. Quite often, all the assistance a patient needs is not to deprived of the means to do it themselves, but that, too, is illegal under theocratic jurisprudence. That's the difference in pro- and anti- policy: the use of force and threat of punishment.
Yes. They can also murder and maim, enslave, torture, rape and imprison us. No anti-suicide law ever stopped a terrorist, an assassin, a revolutionary, a dictator or a plain old criminal.
Then don't ask for help. And if somebody offers, refuse.
An anti assisted suicide law would have meant this young woman would still be alive and there would be decades left of her life in which to truly and improve her mental health.
We need ill people to stay alive to try and cure illness. There are all manner of drastic interventions for mental disorders but now this young woman is completely gone. They could have removed part of her brain as they have done with some people or put in implants for deep brain stimulation tried all manner of legal and illegal drugs.
By her own account she was severely mentally distressed so how can someone in that position give informed consent?
But relating to my wider point we should be preventing, terrorism and mental illness and distress. If I had successfully committed suicide when I was a teen, the school bullies, the local bullies, the church I grew up in and my parents would never have been held accountable now I can advocate on the dysfunctional issues that lead to my suicidal ideation.
The mental health services should be there to help improve a mentally ill persons life.
They should in no way sanctioning suicide or rationalising it. But they have been compromised.
They found people are more likely to commit suicide after seeing a mental health professional. From my experiences the services can leave you feeling more hopeless.
Of course. Quoting Andrew4Handel
They are staffed by people and people have their own ideas about what they 'should'. That's autonomy.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
They have changed. Everything changes.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Which "they" is this that have found? And where did "they" find it? This does not appear to me a cause-effect relation. It doesn't seem to me unreasonable that troubled people try to get help, and only when it fails to provide the relief they seek do they choose the final option.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Of course health care services could be improved - not only in mental health, but all areas - if a society devoted enough resources to it. (Or refrained from driving so many of its members to despair.)
Forbidding yet another expression of personal volition doesn't improve them. Mental illness was not more effectively treated when anti-suicide laws were universal than they are now.
:up:
So why offer assisted suicide when you don't know what underlying issues or conditions a person may have and when you may not have explored all options and diagnoses?
Along with this my older brother died a couple of years ago from Multiple sclerosis that left him unable to communicate except through blinking and essentially paralysed. When he was in a coma twice we had to advocate to keep his life support on on his behalf but if he didn't have relatives to do this they wouldn't have known his wish because of his increasing communication issues over the years. After he survived pneumonia twice he met his wife and got married which he always wanted to do.
He had a quality of life that seemed objectively horrible in some respects but always wanted to be kept alive until, it was impossible to do so. My dad worked in Geriatrics (Care of the elderly) and he found people there were not eager to die even ill and in their 90's.
I think you can create a cultural that doesn't value life/longevity. I personally don't like any form of suffering but I don't think death is alleviating suffering it is ending existence.
There is extensive forms of end of life palliative care that try to reduce suffering to the minimum
I think autonomy does not make sense if you are going to kill yourself. You can't express autonomy once you are dead.
Have you got an argument for autonomy? We don't chose to be born, we don't chose our parents, our religious upbringing, schools etc.
I don't think we can have consistent autonomy without undermining many process in life including creating children.
People think we have a responsibility to those we create, a responsibility to others etc. If a man or woman has young children or even older children killing themselves can create a burden for them, for surviving relatives and friends and even lead to another suicide through grief and loss.
I haven't. As far as I know, no Canadian doctor under the new law does. And it's not as if compassionate caregivers haven't been assisting terminal patients all along - it's just they had to do it in secret or be punished by the self-righteous authorities.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Hence the need for a living will. Relatives very often do the opposite of what the patient wants.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Sure, and that's coming, when overstressed societies, besieged with one calamitous event after another, can no longer support their increasingly aged and infirm populations. But it won't be because I've opted out.
The values of this society haven't changed. I and a large minority never shared the Abrahamic religions' values: they were just foisted on us. When we became the majority, we finally shook them off.
But your values haven't changed because of that, and we're not forcing our choices on you.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Forms, yes - mainly pain relieving drugs, which are effective to some finite degree for some finite length of time, and sedation, which is not very much like living. Available beds, nowhere near as many are required. Elder care and long-term care facilities are already in crisis
which would be somewhat lessened if everyone could choose. But they already can't: far too many old people are crammed into overloaded, understaffed, poorly run - and often horrific - facilities. Out of sight, but still a huge drain on the health-care system.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I'll settle for until. Of-bloody-course no rights or freedoms continue beyond death. Not even in heaven, which, from all I've heard, is an absolute dictatorship.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
...until we attain the age of majority, whereupon we choose our studies, work, friends, lovers, homes, lifestyles, purchases, government representatives, churches, hobbies, entertainments, clothing, modes of transport, even down to the herbs in our kitchen window.
Everyone who lives in a society is bound by laws - and can choose to break those laws and risk punishment. The more restrictions lawmakers impose on citizens' personal lives - whom you may marry, where you may live, what institutes of learning you may attend, what you may read, what you may smoke, which water fountain you may drink from - the more oppressive that society is and the more law-breakers it has to deal with, and then the criminal justice system is as overburdened as the health care system.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Oh, yes, and forcing people to create children they don't want and can't support, but the forbidding society won't, either: more burden for the social services.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Also conversely, a lingering illness can - does - create burdens of entrapment, helpless pity, self-sacrifice, guilt, resentment and material hardship for the family. The terminally ill parent was going to die anyway, only the children didn't first go through a long period of waiting, watching them suffer. And the spouse who can't stand that any longer and helps the patient die, often commits suicide, too, rather than go to prison.
Animal flesh is subject to the vagaries of nature; disease, injury, malfunction, debilitation and dementia. Being in this world is dangerous and ultimately fatal. All endings are inevitable; some are more gruesome and protracted than others. I just want to be allowed to make my ending no more awful than it has to be.
Arguments against Physician assisted suicide.:
1. Laws send social messages. An assisted dying law, however well intended, would alter
societys attitude towards the elderly, seriously ill and disabled, and send the subliminal
message that assisted dying is an option they ought to consider.
2. So-called safeguards are simply statements of what should happen in an ideal world.
They do not reflect the real-world stresses of clinical practice, terminal illness and family
dynamics. It is impossible to ensure that decisions are truly voluntary, and that any coercion
or family pressure is detected.
3. For most patients, high-quality palliative care can effectively alleviate distressing symptoms
associated with the dying process. We should be calling for universal access to high quality
generalist and specialist palliative care, rather than legalising physician-assisted dying.
4. Licensing doctors to provide lethal drugs to patients is fundamentally different from
withdrawing ineffective life-sustaining treatment, and crosses a Rubicon in medicine. The
role of doctors is to support patients to live as well, and as comfortably, as possible until they
die, not to deliberately bring about their deaths.
5. Currently, seriously ill patients can raise their fears, secure in the knowledge that their doctor
will not participate in bringing about their death. If doctors were to have the power to provide
lethal drugs to patients to end their lives, this would undermine trust in the doctor-patient
relationship. Some patients (particularly those who are elderly, disabled or see themselves
as a burden) already feel that their lives are undervalued and would fear that health
professionals will simply give up their efforts to relieve distress, seeing death
as an easy solution.
6. Once the principle of assisted dying has been accepted, the process becomes normalised
and it becomes easier to accept wider eligibility criteria or to widen eligibility through the use
of anti-discrimination legislation.
7. In modern clinical practice many doctors know little of patients lives beyond what the busy
doctor may gather in the consulting room or hospital ward. Yet the factors behind a request
for assisted dying are predominantly personal or social rather than clinical. Assisted dying is
not a role for hard-pressed doctors.
https://www.bma.org.uk/media/4394/bma-arguments-for-and-against-pad-aug-2021.pdf
1. Even with universal access to specialist palliative care, some dying people will still experience
severe, unbearable physical or emotional distress that cannot be relieved. Forcing dying
people to suffer against their wishes is incompatible with the values of 21st century
medicine.
2. Physician-assisted dying is a legal option for over 150 million people around the world. In
jurisdictions where it is lawful, there are eligibility criteria, safeguards and regulation in place
to protect patients.
3. Guidance in the UK for end-of-life practices, such as the withdrawal of life-sustaining
treatment, already contains safeguards to ensure decisions are made voluntarily, coercion
is detected and potentially vulnerable people are protected. There is no reason why these
safeguards could not be used effectively in assisted dying legislation.
4. The current law is not working. UK citizens travel to Switzerland, to facilities like Dignitas, to
avail themselves of physician-assisted dying, but this option is only available to those who
have the funds to do so. This often leads to people ending their lives sooner than they would
have wished because they need to be well enough to travel. There is no oversight under
UK law about who travels abroad for an assisted death; anyone who provides assistance
doctors, family or friends is breaking the law, which can lead to criminal investigations.
5. There is widespread public support for, and tacit acceptance of, physician-assisted dying
within society. Given this, it would be fairer and safer to have a properly controlled and
regulated system within the UK.
6. Some people, knowing that they are dying, want to be able to exercise their autonomy and
determine for themselves when and how they die, but need medical advice and support
to achieve this. Doctors should not be able to impose their personal beliefs on competent,
informed adults who wish to exercise this voluntary choice. Legislation would contain a
conscientious objection clause to protect those healthcare professionals who did not want
to participate.
7. The existence of legislation allowing assisted dying brings reassurance and peace of mind for
many people with terminal illness and their loved ones, even though only a small percentage
actually use it when the time comes
https://www.bma.org.uk/media/4394/bma-arguments-for-and-against-pad-aug-2021.pdf
:death: :flower:
[quote=The Unnameable]Youre on earth. Theres no cure for that.[/quote]
I would need examples of this "And the spouse who can't stand that any longer and helps the patient die, often commits suicide, too," can you cite one case or more. I would wager that there are far more cases of one suicide triggering another.
Suicide contagion is well documented in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide
You seem to be working under the false premise that assisted suicide is only being used on terminally ill persons or will stop their.
I was talking about how suicide in general affects others and that it is not just purely autonomous act because it has consequences for others.
Even in cases of seriously ill people having an assisted death relatives often don't want it to happen. (And most terminally ill people don't use assisted suicide in places like Canada)
I felt trapped in my brothers care when I started to care for him. My own mental health had improved so i started to get involved in with his care and moved in with him. Over the years I moved out and he got married etc but it went one for a couple of decades but people want to make sacrifices for other peoples well being. In some ways I also benefited from my involvement in my brothers care.
The would be great if it was true but it probably isn't. Peoples childhood probably profoundly effects their adulthood (that is another debate topic) and peoples attitudes correlate with their the society they grew up in and your picture is of a Western capitalist, individualistic model. Culturally situated so to speak.
In some societies married couples live with their parents or a parent moves in with a married couple. Society is less individualistic and has stronger notions of duty. Independence from others is not viewed as a good thing. Some types of dependence are seen as positive.
In the case of Nathan Verhlest in the opening post she was neglected by her parents leading to a need for complete emotional self sufficiency
but she/he tried to transition to male to win her parents approval which didn't work unethical surgeons experimented on her body to try and make her look as male as possible because surgeons can now apparently do anything to your body that you ask for
and then society provides the poison for her to exist life after a litany of abuse neglect and medical malpractice.
Because one often needs help in such circumstances then the issue no longer reflects a person's autonomy? Well, if that is the case, we have no autonomy in almost anything - because we get assisted in all aspects of life.
Nevertheless, if one does not have a say in what you do with yourself, I don't know what should count as having a say in something.
As for circumstances, many, notably cases of enduring and not-relieveable pain, severe mental disorders and, sometimes, very bad luck. If a person really wants to die, they will find a way - often a quite horrible one at that. Better to allow these things to occur with empathy, instead of moral grandstanding.
And sure, we should be careful in cases in which what's going on is no more than a temporary depression.
How does that relate to torturing people too feeble to defend themselves?
Yes, modern western people are free to and expected to make their decisions, which is why they are also held to account for their decisions. A 40-year-old never gets away with the plea: I was raised in a family of mobsters; it's my heritage."
Making a cultural issue of degrees of independence doesn't alter the issue of suicide. Cultural attitudes to suicide also vary. In the Old testament, all you had to do to be put out of your misery is "curse god and die" - no punishment, no afterlife. In Islam, suicide in the cause of furthering a national aspiration is not only allowed, but laudable, as it was for Sampson, and as it is for American soldiers. An ancient Roman was expected to fall on his sword, rather than dishonour his family, and of course, we all know about the Japanese tolerance of suicide.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
This is a bizarre situation. I have no reason to doubt your veracity, or the existence of unscrupulous and callous people, doing cruel and illegal things.
But why I should I be made to pay for their sins?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1983/03/12/the-koestler-suicide-pact/0e322224-2438-4b89-8e10-34564a557d67/
Quoting Andrew4Handel
That is the legal position in Canada, yes.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
How's that relevant to the assisted suicide law? People were killing themselves when it was illegal, and when it was legal, and whenever they felt it was their only escape from a fate they could not face.
Of course it affects others. Of course, everything one person does is disapproved of by some other persons. People disagree about all kinds of things, but they keep doing the things they disagree about, and nosy parkers dip their oar in , too.
.
The coming of each person into the world affects the world in some way. The way each person lives in the world affects the world, for better or worse. The time and manner of each person's departure from the world affects the world. Nevertheless, we keep doing all three.
It isn't necessary. There are plenty of people ready to help voluntarily. Many of the strongest advocates of legalizing assisted suicide have been health-care workers who had too watch too many patients suffer through terminal illness that no decent person would allow their pet to endure.
I am replying mainly to your reply saying that you always wish to help people from committing suicide. I come from that angle too, because apart working with suicidal people in mental health care I have experienced suicidal ideas and known people who committed suicide. It was while I was a student that I knew 3 people who committed suicide when I was a student that led me to train in mental health care.
In ethics, there is the ongoing issue of autonomy of choice and this may be related to the legal issues surrounding capacity to consent which is often seen as the benchmark of the ethics involved in psychiatry. Critical psychiatry may have taken over in the aftermath of the decline of the antipsychiatry movement.
On the subject of suicide, one book which I found useful is, ' Suicide and the Soul", by James Hillman. What he looks at is the way in which while suicide comes amidst despair it may also contain a hope or wish for transformation. To some this may appear as idealism but it may also involve the tightrope of the suicidal person's existential predicament as a search for choices which may go deeper than the surface of autonomy as theory bringing it more in line with the quest for authenticity.
That means they would be happy to receive the obligation, if I place it. But they may not take the initiative. They may not volunteer, in that sense. I must take the initiative by requesting them to kill me. Of course many kind and humane people will be happy to receive the obligation and accede to my request.
The question is: do I have the right to place such an obligation on someone, even if they would be ready to take it on? For health workers: do they have the right to accept the obligation, when they have a duty to preserve life and not to take it?
It's inhumane to stand by and watch people suffer, as you say. It is outrageous that the law punishes the humane alternative of assisting suicide. And it is outrageous of me to expect someone to end my life when their general and sometimes professional duty would be to hinder me from suicide. There's outrage all round and all of it has some justification.
What are you referring to? Palliative care is not torture. Prolonging someone's life is not the definition of torture.
Your position seems to contain a lot of hyperbole. Once enacted assisted suicide laws affect everybody. They affect attitudes towards life and death, palliative care, treatment and value of the disabled the treatment of mental illness.
You cited the example of Arthur Koestler and his wife. I will deal with the different cases you gave separately.
Arthur Koestler took his own life without assistance. His healthy wife committed suicide in her fifties as part of a suicide pact. Suicide pacts are ethically problematic and indicate an unhealthy relationship. Peoples life should not end when a loved one dies. It is reminiscent of Suttee where a wife was immolated or immolated herself on the funeral pyre of her husband in India. It is a recipe for abuse and coercion
"Controversy arose over why Koestler allowed, consented to, or (according to some critics) compelled his wife's simultaneous suicide. She was only 55 years old and was believed to be in good health. In a typewritten addition to her husband's suicide note, Cynthia wrote that she could not live without her husband. Reportedly, few of the Koestlers' friends were surprised by this admission, apparently perceiving that Cynthia lived her life through her husband and that she had no "life of her own".[75] Her absolute devotion to Koestler can be seen clearly in her partially completed memoirs.[76] Yet according to a profile of Koestler by Peter Kurth:[77]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler#Final_years,_1976%E2%80%931983
Koestler was a long time advocate of assisted suicide and was Vice-President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. It is not clear like in other cases of suicide advocates that he tried palliative care.
His suicide and others like this that have happened can be viewed as political acts.
They're not even allowed to. But, in a sense, they already took the initiative on all our behalf when they petitioned and testified before one court after another to get the law changed. And, as I mentioned before, it was tacitly understood in the health care community that both physicians and nurses occasionally succumbed to a patient's pleas for release, even while assisting was illegal. Taking that risk was initiative enough to convince me.
Quoting Cuthbert
I don't know about you; I trust them to make a decision they believe to be right.
Quoting Cuthbert
They may well consider their first duty to the patient, rather than an abstract concept of 'life'. they may consider "do no harm" to include refusing to shove tubes and needles into someone who does not want to undergo a treatment, or who has explicitly refused artificial life support. DNR orders have been in effect for a long time and generally followed - unless the family too charge and countermanded the patient's wishes.
Nothing about life is as cut-and-dried as the words 'give' 'preserve' and 'take' could begin to encompass.
Quoting Cuthbert
And was the authority that laid that "duty" on them more moral, better justified than the person's own case-by-case judgement?
I used to work at the coroner's office. We had bodies come in from hospitals and nursing homes of people who finally succeeded after many such well-meaning or legally enforced interventions. The agonies they endured just to end their lives demonstrates just how agonizing those lives must have been. I can't believe anyone has a duty to prolong such a life.
You keep pretending that's a viable option for everyone in terminal distress.
And of course, if you add the depredations of covid et al, plus rapidly aging population... it's not looking like an option for everyone.
Not your definition. It is the definition of many a professional torturer.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Fair enough. Political acts are required to effect political change. If changing archaic laws eventually changes social attitudes, that's all to the good for ex-slaves, children and atypical genders.
"Are Canadians being driven to assisted suicide by poverty or healthcare crisis?"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws
"After pleading unsuccessfully for affordable housing to help ease her chronic health condition, a Canadian woman ended her life in February under the countrys assisted-suicide laws. Another woman, suffering from the same condition and also living on disability payments, has nearly reached final approval to end her life."
"In February, a 51-year-old Ontario woman known as Sophia was granted physician-assisted death after her chronic condition became intolerable and her meagre disability stipend left her little to survive on, according to CTV News.
The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the ass, she said in a video obtained by the network. For two years, she and friends had pleaded without success for better living conditions, she said."
There is a lot about this case here:
https://www.milwaukeemag.com/tender-is-the-night/
"In 2002, they were visited by Anne Wanzer, one of Kittys college classmates, and her husband, Dr. Sidney Wanzer."
"Wanzer published a booklet through Hemlock Society USA called The End of Life: How to Deal with the System A Practical Guide for Patients and Families. In it, he outlines how to make a living will and do-not-resuscitate orders, and details methods of hastening the end of life: physician-assisted suicide, stopping aggressive medical treatments, not eating and using helium."
So this is apparently not a case of suicide through desperation.
.........
If Dan had a bible, it was Wanzers book, says Dr. Bruce Wilson, the Gutes doctor and friend. Wilson says he had hundreds of conversations with Dan and Kitty about end-of-life issues. Both of them said to me, We feel very strongly about how we want to go out, when its time.
Daniel intended to kill himself because he didn't want to live without his wife not because he assisted in her suicide. Her having dementia has the ethical dilemma of her not being able to consent.
This is different then the cases faced by people with poverty, poor healthcare access, mental illness, family pressure and other issues people are faced with when AS becomes nationally legalised.
There is a lot more relevant information in the linked article that I will come back to in later posts.
So, the burden of your argument is that every case of suicide researched and planned by persons of sound mind fail to meet your criteria for good reason?
The fact they were not yet terminal and helpless points to the premature suicides of people determined to die on terms in countries where that's against the law.
You're right that I was not thorough enough: didn't find enough spouses who had actually done their partner in, but merely collaborated in a suicide, before killing themselves. So we don't know, except for one, what would have happened to them if they were discovered to have collaborated or conspired in the spouse's death; can't be sure they would have prosecuted and convicted.
True. I concede, since I'm prepared top ferret out cases whether the spouse did kill the other, then recorded the fact, clearly stating that they were reluctant to face legal consequences and only then killed him or herself.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/campaign-groups-case-graham-mansfield-24561894
"In the US State of Oregon, which has assisted suicide, six in 10 (59 per cent) of those ending their lives in 2019 cited the fear of being a burden on their families, friends and caregivers as a reason for seeking death and a further 7.4 per cent cited financial worries. There are other problems too.
"Legalising Physician Assisted Suicide also seems to normalise suicide in the general populations. Indeed, academics who looked at this emerging trend concluded that legalising assisted suicide was associated with an increase of 6.3 per cent in the numbers of suicides in Oregon, once all other factors had been controlled. Among over 65s the figure was more than double that.
"At the same time testimony from Professor Joel Zivot, casts doubt on the myth being put forward by those who want a change in the law that patients opting for the lethal cocktail of drugs die a quick and painless death. Evidence from Tennessee, which uses the same drugs to kill people on death row as the ones used in Oregon, suggest the inmates die from drowning in their own secretions or what doctors call a pulmonary oedema. The Professor goes on to explain why in US executions, even though the person is sedated first, before the lethal cocktail of drugs is administered, the authorities have to strap down both the person's hands and even their fingers to stop them moving.
"Buts it's not just in Oregon on the continent that we see problems. In Canada, last year 1,400 people who were euthanised cited loneliness as a reason. At the same time limits on who could be killed, the so-called safeguards have been eroded or scrapped and the Government has talked about the millions of dollars introducing euthanasia has saved regional health budgets"
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/suicide.htm Florida and Texas way out in front of Oregon, Washington D.C., Hawaii, Washington, Maine, Colorado, New Jersey, California, and Vermont. Of course, we don't, in either the high or low suicide rate states know how many of those people are natives, and how went there just to die. (Florida, quite a lot, I would imagine)
... like when the family member who find the body destroys their suicide note to avoid the stigma.
People have always opted out, when they had a choice. All we've done by legalizing it is add the ones who had not had a choice before; who were physically unable to carry it out or forcibly prevented (by confinement, usually) from obtaining the means. And brought some out of the closet that would otherwise have been reported as accidental or natural deaths.
The problem of rotten lives will not be solved by forbidding a choice to people with rotten lives. As long as society is not willing to alleviate the rottenness of people's lives, they'll keep escaping any way they can.
And? Will the anti-choice people provide relief for the families, financial help so old people don't end up on the street, palliative care hostels, medication and social services to take care of their needs?
Pretty much like the anti-choice faction takes care of all the unwanted babies.
I could accept assisted dying in very specific cases where someone is terminally ill or who has a chronic incurable illness that is not a mental illness.
I still think it could lead to a slippery slope easily.
Yes; Soylent Green any minute now. But I suspect it won't be the result of legal laxity; there isn't time for a slide down a gentle slope.
It will the product of overpopulation and migrations putting unbearable pressure on human and natural resources. There will be a great many deaths from all causes: war, famine, pandemic, and weather events. Health services everywhere are already already collapsing. So are economies. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/how-there-will-be-blood-explains-crumbling-global-economy.html and governance, both from an inability to cope with the crises they face https://www.coffeeordie.com/on-the-brink-governments and from hostile takeover https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2022/global-expansion-authoritarian-rule
Totalitarian governments are not famed for providing aid and support for unproductive populations.
All these factors are converging.
For all I know, we, too, will soon have a jackbooted, Guns and Dollars type regime, and all my cherished, hard-won civil rights will be gone overnight.
I suppose it is to do with allowing people to be released from severe suffering. But after palliative care has been explored preferably.
I think my concern is devaluing life. It is easy to get to the position where you say "we are all going to die anyway so why bother." I think to value life we need to preserve and improve it. I think even with severe illness friends and relatives can value every extra day they get to spend with a sick person. I don't think being seriously ill should rob people of life of value.
I think some people who advocate for AS are advocating for it on ideological grounds and have a different life philosophy and theological stance etc . I think assisted suicide should be argued about on pragmatic or rational grounds but not based ones own personal beliefs. People have a wide range of different beliefs and values vying for a position
Some people believe in an afterlife some don't.
Agreed. Euthanasia, like abortion, happens with or without lawful assistance so on "pragmatic or rational grounds", assisted suicide should adequately regulated in order to minimize abuses or hazards but not criminalized.
I don't see how this is relevant to deliberating on the issue (except maybe to the one in need of assisted suicide).
So do I. Having had several beloved pets professionally put down after painful deliberation, and having killed a number of maimed victims of of predators, I very much hope someone will be kind enough to do as much for me. And they should not be punished for that kindness.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Explored... if available. Back when my mother was dying, our health-care and social services were still robust enough that she could be brought home, with equipment, supplies, drugs, a visiting nurse and someone to teach us how to take care of her daily needs. It was a harrowing enough experience, even so. Now, after Covid showed us the huge cracks in our elder- and long-term care facilities and stressed our (previously excellent) health-care services to the breaking point, I expect no such help to be available when we need it, even if we had family to do the unskilled part.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I understand that... from the POV of a member of the valued inhabitants of the world. But, look around with both eyes open. So-called civilized governments sentence innocent people to death every day, and send healthy, fit young ones out into battlefields to kill and be killed for no logical reason, and let people starve and freeze to death on streets, and pine away in refugee camps and prisons.... As a species, we have never valued life - not so's it shows in our actions. A few privileged pockets of history can make that lofty claim - yet, still without regard to the quality of their own citizens' lives, let alone the lives of people in subject nations, client nations, 'developing' nations, exploitable nations. Let's not at all consider the lives of other species. So, just what does this valuation of life really amount to? A strongly-held belief of a very few people and a platitude bruited by a majority who don't really care and enjoy the benefit of not caring.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Beliefs is what all such debates are based on. There is no pragmatic value in the life of someone who is unable to contribute, a waste of resources, a chore and tribulation to people around him and miserable in his own skin. There is only sentimental, religious or selfish value in keeping them alive a minute longer than they wish to be.
We are always in danger of supporting ideologies and programs that we don't know the full ramifications of.
This is why i am currently a mild moral nihilist. I don't think we can know whether are values are valid without some kind of arbiter like moral facts that doesn't depend on humans.
"Objectively immoral" is an oxymoron - or at the very least, a subjective proposition. I strongly believe it's immoral to force thousands of people to suffer for one's own inability to predict every possible consequence of every legislation. Others strongly believe it's wrong to end any life for any reason. Most people's moral stand is situational: wrong to kill some people, right to kill others; wrong to kill some species, right to kill others; wrong to kill foetuses, right to kill felons; wrong to let people own potentially lethal drugs, right to let the same people own intentionally lethal weapons... None of those are objective judgments, but some are more internally consistent than others.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Then we must never support any, because it is not in our gift to know the full ramifications of any action, even individual, rational action, and far less, group action on which we never achieve complete accord.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't have time to wait for God to enlighten me. So far, I've only heard any of His directives from men, and those directive didn't always make sense.
You reject the efficacy of palliative care. Having a child is forcing someone to suffer. I have been forced to suffer in many ways since birth. If your belief that it is immoral is not objective then what is it other than a statement of personal preference?
The consequences of the legislation have already being manifested in the cases I raised and the history of eugenics and the Nazis etc and judging some life not to be worth living.
This is a case where the direst consequences already happened and are not speculative.
I am an agnostic in general about facts and I believe pragmatism or agnosticism is a kind of solution where you err on the side of caution and in the case of assisted suicide if you allow only it in very clearly delineated cases for individuals and not opening the door to a lax permissive attitude to ending life.
I assume this doesn't apply to you but I was brought up in a hell and damnation church and household that believed the majority of people were going to spend eternity in hell and possibly a lake of fire as claimed in a few biblical texts and the Quran.
I don't think we can know that we are putting someone out of their suffering if we don't know what happens to consciousness after the death of our body.
It is a faith position either way.
I think if everyone knew what happened after death then dying would be easier. Some irreligious/atheists are so confident there is no afterlife they are not as frightened of death as other people. Some religious people are so confident about the afterlife they have a sense of reassurance. But who can prove one way or the other.
If you don't assist someone's suicide but give them good palliative care you avoid the ethical dimension of ending a life.
I also think untestable beliefs about after death can influence peoples values and actions but could be entirely false. As an antinatalist my solution is not to put another life in this Situation-Dilemma.
But this may be a case of strongly differing values.
No. I reject the claim that quality palliative care is available to all who need it.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
If you know it will be born with serious birth defects, yes. If you know it will be addicted, abandoned or abused, yes. In those cases, early abortion is the kinder option. A healthy baby, well cared for and protected, is open to some risks of suffering later in life, just as a volunteer firefighter, hydro maintenance worker or ICU nurse is at risk of suffering and dying from injury or disease; a police officer or soldier is expected to undertake a known risk of being killed or killing, being traumatized or maimed and causing the same to others. Life is a risky business.
(As it happens, my partner and I chose not to reproduce, but we did raise two children who were already in the world and at risk. I believe they suffered less in our care than might have in other circumstances - but it's also possible they could have fared better. I may have a negative opinion of some people's reproductive choices, but I don't try to force mine on anyone.)
However, none of these risks are comparable to the known, palpable, inevitable suffering of someone who has bone cancer, begs for the means of escape and being surrounded by jurists who tell him "No, because if we let you die, then some other people whom we don't consider eligible might also choose to die. You don't own your life; we do."
If the righteous really wanted to reduce the number of human deaths, they would shut down the arms trade.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Of course. Everyone's moral position is personal, whether through conviction or convenience.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
A lot of diverse issues in a little basket. The moral precepts of their vaunted Christianity didn't stop the Nazis any more than it had stopped the inquisition or the conquistadors. It wasn't permissive laws that led to those atrocities; it was very strict laws.
I personally don't religion should have any role in the running of a country.
That said religion can have a positive role in opposing negative government based on issues of conscience including criticising how the poor are treated. Religious people opposed slavery and so on.
So I would not say religious input was irrelevant even if it personally is to you. Can one persons morals and ideologies triumph? In the end one position is instituted as law after a competition of ideals.
I don't agree with this but I was always told that humans were innately sinful and deserved to suffer. (Yes it was an unpleasant upbringing) I find that a macabre and indefensible position now. There is the theology of total depravity that has been influential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_depravity
Yes it all is cruel but then even without religion, life, nature and people is cruel. Even without gods you can feel persecuted by fate and nature.
But my issue is that we don't know what happens after someone dies. For example if I knew I was going to go to heaven in some kind of idyllic setting that would give me motivation to struggle on and hope.
Should people have hope or should they not? And who is to decide?
There is a You tube video about a young man or teenage boy who died of bone cancer by committing suicide with his family around him. It says he refused palliative care. His family were investigated but not charged with anything.
Your positions is unrealistic because it is not just people with chronic illness and massive pain who seek assisted suicide the principle is that anyone should be able to choose when to die at any stage outside childhood.
My older brother had primary progressive MS that paralysed him and he repeatedly asked to be kept alive after pressure sores , several bouts of pneumonia, a tracheotomy, the inability to speak and being peg fed.
A lot of people in this condition including with Locked in syndrome do not want to die. And according to Canadian statistics I can link to most do not choose assisted suicide.
However why does the government have a duty to assist you killing yourself? Doctors do not have to prolong your life indefinitely and do give overdose levels of morphine among other things but giving someone a lethal injection or placing a poisonous pill on the tongue is the government killing you.
Suicide is not illegal in a lot of countries and there are few prosecutions for assisted suicide and few convictions and these can happen in extreme cases like the case you mentioned where someone slit his wife's throat. I asked my brother whether he might want an assisted suicide early on in his care and said to him that I couldn't personally help him. I would have not being involved in my brothers care if I thought I might be tempted to harm him.
But you trust the same governments and society to enact an ethical assisted suicide scheme?
I agree that we have to look at assisted suicide or euthanasia laws very closely and that it is an ethical issue worthy of the deep societal debate they have caused. I also agree with some of your arguments, but I question the coherence of your position as a whole.
David Hume was irreligious but:
"David Hume advised his patron, Lord Hertford to buy a slave plantation, facilitated the deal and lent £400 to one of the principal investors. And when criticised for racism in 1770, he was unmoved, writes Dr Felix Waldmann"
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/david-hume-was-brilliant-philosopher-also-racist-involved-slavery-dr-felix-waldmann-2915908
That's irrelevant. Anyway, search wiki & google.
I am not withholding medicine from anyone I am opposing the legalizing of physician and government assisted suicide because of a wide range of concerns that I have outlined already. I am not advocating prosecuting anyone for assisting a suicide either except on a case by case basis which already occurs in countries with assisted suicide when the suicide is suspect.
However Antinatalists often face the objection that if you don't like life you can just kill yourself.
I personally think that once you have created a life you have created a responsibility to make that life flourish. It is an easy way out for parents to say "well you can commit suicide?" and have the state facilitate it. It is something that people have said to me and health professions and other professionals can offer suicide over assistance as has happened.
Most antinatalist are strong supporters of assisted suicide so I am in a minority. I think the only way to avoid suffering is not to create more people, once you have created them suffering is inevitable and assisted suicide often happens because of suffering.
So it is arguable how much suffering assisted suicide prevents and some older people kill themselves when healthy to avoid imagined future suffering yet a lot of old people I knew died peacefully in their sleep without major disabilities.
Amen, Brother! Isn't it staggering that the Bible wants to micromanage human behaviour to the point where you can't eat shellfish or wear mixed fabrics, but owning another human being? No problem.
:100: :shade:
I have no choice. I had no choice - or only very limited choice - for most of my life but to live under governments that made discriminatory laws, stupid laws and lousy decisions. Every now and then, they get something right. I vote; I hope the government shifts to policies more in line with my convictions.
Maybe you can find a few, to defend the idea that religion is the problem. The evidence is that religious people can be humane and find solutions and campaign for rights and being secular atheist or even highly intelligent is no guarantee of reason or compassion.
If there were a raft of non theists/atheists/ the irreligious campaigning against slavery and racism that would be a great advertisement for them. Now it seems people just take credit for things they assume are a result of irreligiosity.
Martin Luther King was a Baptist minister.
That's the problem isn't it. Someone has to lose and we want society to run on our own terms. But I don't see why you would trust the government to a manage an assisted suicide considering their track record of eugenics and the current problems with it.
There certainly is the issue as how far can we trust the government and how much power can we invest them with. It may be that we just are stuck with our government doing a mixture of terrible and good things.
The solution maybe apathy and self preservation otherwise it maybe a long battle for ones values.
If your views become popular enough, there will be no more assisted and no palliative care and no food production or electric power, so the whole issue will be moot for the last generation of old people. If they can't commit suicide on their own, they'll either have to help one another or wait for God to finish them off.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I don't see this becoming a systemic problem. I have never heard a parent say that to their child. I have heard of a few parents killing badly damaged children out of pity, and a lot more killing undamaged children and many more infants, for various societal and personal reasons.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yet you keep telling people to seek help. What makes you think they'll get it? What makes you think that's a viable option for everyone who has a life they find difficult to bear?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
In the question of "who owns a life", religion is and has always been one of the two central problems. The other, of course, is its bed-partner, the military state, with all its hungry coffers and cannons.
Because I trust self-righteous, interfering power freak even less. I have no current problem with eugenics.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
And that's why I would rather have me than the government deciding when and how I'm allowed to die.
Take into consideration the bible is contradictory and long and can be used to support many different positions.
"Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven."
Colossians 4:1
Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death
Exodus 21:16
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28
When a man strikes the eye of his slave, male or female, and destroys it, he shall let the slave go free because of his eye. If he knocks out the tooth of his slave, male or female, he shall let the slave go free because of his tooth.
Exodus 21:26-27
A government can lock people up for their sex lives, substance use, faith and ideals, habits and games, but it can't make them stop being who they are, needing what they need, feeling how they feel.
It can, however, improve their circumstances so that they may not need self-medication and escape; may not feel helpless and hopeless. And it can make their environment less dangerous so their inevitable mistakes and poor judgment has a lower cost to society.
Medicine was used metaphorically. I know you are opposing it and I know your concerns and some of them are good. I just question the coherence of your position as both an anti-natalist and arguing against assisted suicide.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Prosecuting on a ' case by case basis' is suspect from a criminal law point of view as there is a danger that prosecution becomes arbitrary. This is against basic principles of criminal law and fair trial. So we need guidelines.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, but I am thrown into the world, without having been asked. The onus is maybe on my parents, but I might want to end it and there is no argument against that, especially since on your terms the world is such a bad place we should not put people in it.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, but why should I suffer? If I want to go, than I go and you should at least understand that since the world is a rotten place on your account. Now, of course it would be great if I could do it myself, but some people can't and need assistance. You seem to hold the view that assisting them is wrong in and of itself, but that position does not seem to be very coherent. You wish to end suffering. Terminating the life of one that suffers may end it.
I an not an antinatalist nor am I uncritical on the issue of assisted suicide. I share some of your concerns. The most strong argument against it, is that ending life becomes an option just like all other options and that it becomes socially accepted to end the life of the sufferer instead of trying to improve it, when costs for doing so are considered excessive. In a day and age where we are fond of measuring, caluclation and efficiency, decriminalizing assisted suicide runs the risk of becoming standard practice because we simply do not want to pay the price for keeping someone alive. I am also critical of the individual autonomy argument. Choices are never made in a vacuum, people exist in networks with others and take those others into account. We should be very wary that people feel they are a burden to others and therefore want to end their lives, especially since the law treats it as ' just another option in the great marketplace'. Those are all concerns that deserve the utmost attention. However, that does not make it wrong in itself to do so, it just means it has to be regulated with utmost care. As Vera said, it has been done for ages, only in secret. Sometimes doctors will be in a conflict of duties, on the one hand to obey the criminal law and on the other to end the suffering of their patient. Such conflicts should not rest on the shoulders of individual doctors.
As for the cases you cite, I think they make your argument weaker so I will not go into them. You do not know the facts of the case, you make unwarranted assumptions that people with a mental illness cannot suffer intolerably etc. In short you have no idea what you are talking about, neither do the others here, neither do I. Even if a mistake is made in an individual case, it says nothing about the underlying principle. Therefor it is best to argue in the abstract.
Laws are necessarily made in the abstract. But they're also made within a political and economic framework of what is possible. In a culture strongly influenced by religious factions, certain ideas cannot be considered for legislation - as had been the case with birth control and gay rights. In a debt/profit economy, the source of funding for any proposed legislation determines its viability.
Quoting Tobias
It's not so much that we don't want to pay the price of keeping people alive - we cannot afford to.
A number of factors to consider on the economic side: demographics - aging population, longer pensioned life, fewer young people to take their place, fewer employed people and funding: shrinking tax-base, mounting national and household debt, rising price of insurance, almost insurmountable price of a medical degree, technological advances that can artificially extend an unproductive life at $1,000/day/patient - that's without medical interventions; if there is surgery involved, the cost goes through the roof. And that, of course is assuming that facilities and staff are available at all.
Even the best health care systems are already under severe strain. One more round of the current pandemic will collapse even the most robust.
So, if governments make it illegal to help people die, they will be helped illegally - as before - or stored away somewhere until they die, in whatever conditions, whatever agony - as before.
My post was actually more directed at Andrew than you, because I feel we are mostly in agreement... I would not advocate criminalizing euthanasia. However, I do advocate regulating it very meticulously as it is an important topic worthy of social debate.
Quoting Vera Mont
Well it is certainly true that law is made within a cultural and political setting. Law is a child of its times. I do not think that money is the only source that talks though. There are interesting puzzles in this regard. the lobby power of corporations is much larger than that of the environmental movement and still environmental legislation is strengthened. Not enough for many, but still. Law making is also a popularity contest, it is balancing interests, ideology, there is no one size firs all. I live in a country with liberal euthanasia laws by the way. Here, the subject is regulated by law.
Quoting Vera Mont
Yes and sometimes hard choices need to be made. However, I do side with Andrew when he argues that euthanasia laws may also be a symptom of a careless society. The notion that we do not sacrifice people for the greater good, but we do our utmost to keep them on board is meaningful. I think it is a great good to have a society in which people feel that if they find themselves in great peril, others will come to their aid, including the government. It gives a sence of security and with that allows people to flourish and feel at home. I value that sort of thing.
That's the ideal, and many good people have been striving to do so. But privileged elites have always, everywhere, been indifferent to the condition of people who were surplus to the feeding of their own wealth and power.
I don't believe we are a careless society; by and large Canadians tend to be compassionate and civic-minded. Or used to be. As the waves of crisis - influenza, fire, flood, windstorms, blizzards, power outages, road accidents, emotional trauma: more emergencies - keep coming, the resources, notably medical staff and hospital beds, are never replenished, let alone expanded to meet the need; patient backlogs keep building up. The cost is not only financial: the last two years have taken a severe toll on production capability and even more in human resources.
And all the while, conservative factions are growing more radically right-wing and aggressive, striking down humanitarian legislation enacted by their progressive predecessors, defunding programs that relieve the burden on caregivers. The first impulse of the far right is to forbid and punish - which invariably exacerbates the problem. I honestly don't believe the center can hold. It almost doesn't matter what's legal now, or what new federal laws come into effect before the next election: they won't last.
The only thing I am getting is the eagerness to allow someone to die. Nothing about the value, profundity and continuation of human life.
I think killing someone or allowing them to die is at odds with valuing human life and we are not just animals to be put down in a mercy killing or put out of our misery.
In a lot of debates I am getting a sense of a lack of profound values, a creeping meaninglessness. And I sense it is influenced by atheism/secularism and the refusal to comprehend any kind of supernatural spiritual element to life.
If you have nihilist, spiritless values I think people are entitled to impose value on you because by rejecting value you have no argument they should value your opinions.
What about them?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Almost everything in human history attests to a species not valuing human life. As I've mentioned before, live has value in proportion to its quality. If the live-valuing moral factions in the US were serious,
they'd stop allowing guns in every household, where
Many of them impulsive youngsters, not sick old people.
I use empathy for morals. It's done me all right, so far.
You are entitled to oppress me, because you consider me unfit to live my own life, while you walk arm in arm the gods. Got it.
The reason we shouldn't kill people.
And that is how one draws a perfect, self-containing circle.
People fought against the Nazis to end the Holocaust. The transatlantic slavery was ended. Apartheid ended. Women got equal rights and so on. We continue fighting not euthanising people because we no longer value life because we have given up on our species.
It is absurd to protest against the state keeping you alive.
Political suicide is an expression of ones values is unethical in my opinion. And bringing in laws that endanger other people to me is unethical.
And it clearly is not about extreme cases of suffering but the push is for anyone to be able to end their life at any stage which I see no reason for society to grant which would lead to anarchy. Society needs to value life not be involved in hastening its demise.
Yes indeed and those are political choices. Assisted suicide or euthanasia laws may play into that hand, because if we do not have to keep people alive, and it becomes socially not to, we can cut more beds. That was what I was arguing against.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Ahhh you are beginning to think, always be wary when that happens. I'd suggest, think again, because you are probably wrong since a whole host of people advocate euthanasia laws and they do so with utmost integrity. That their opinion is different from yours is another matter, but to put them (or us) in the corner of the amoral is simply an insult.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Neither should we be irrationally delivered to the power of God who decides when to live or die without us having a say in the matter. Isn't it actually an indication that we hold autonomy in high (perhaps too high) esteem in that we are allowing a choice?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Que? I think you have no business calling my values anything. And by no means are you entitled to impose values on me or anyone else. You like to play God that is the problem. No one here says life has no value. Some of us are saying we should have a choice whether to love or die especially in great misery. That is not nihilist, that is putting your faith in individual rationality.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Of course not. The sentence seems to be incorrect by the way. But no, euthanasia is no indication we have given up on our species, but is an indication that we have moved from a discourse around fate, death and God choosing the time to go, to death being a state which lays in the realm of choice. Now there are good reasons to be wary of such a move and I outlined them, but it is a gross oversimplification to see it as merely giving up on our species.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Autonomy ends with death, but the decision to die is made autonomously. I think that full autonomy discourse is bogus but I also think your logic is flawed. And no, society does not have a duty to facilitate every person's deathwish. That is why the matter needs to be meticulously regulated, not oversimplified like you appear to be doing all the time.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Why? If the state forces me to be alive contrary to my wishes it is not and in a state of intolerable suffering it is not. That is what criminal law does. The state criminalizes acts of individuals. In this case acts by doctors. Doctors are asked by patients, deeply suffering patient usually to end their lives. They cannot comply because they would face prosecution. As a terminally suffering patient, why would it be absurd to protest against that state of affairs? The doctor by the way has also reason to protest because he or she is forced in a conflict of duties.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
We are not bringing in laws, we are taking them out. Assisted suicide is criminalized as it is. Intolerable suffering may to some be more dangerous than death.
Hardly. Which politician orders up a flood or a snowstorm or a pandemic? Those are realities with which real, live, present-on-the-scene health care, rescue and emergency workers have to deal with. There are too many of those and too few of them. No politician is able to pull a few thousand doctors out of his hat. People with chronic debilitating illness don't have ten or twelve years - it would actually longer - for a new crop of graduates, even if higher were offered without tuition fees immediately.
Quoting Tobias
The 'because' doesn't fit. They were already doing it when they themselves legislated against assisted suicide and abortion, against gay rights and birth control, against science education and school lunches, against environmental protection and worker's safety - but for guns, prisons, executions, militarized police and even more tax-cuts.
Not because of erosion of humane values, but because the things they were for required lots of gullible votes and they presented their platform of 'againsts' as the moral choice.
That is what happens when you live in a society and in a democracy.
You are being protected against those who would do you harm by a police and army and laws exist to create a framework for civilisation.
And it is poisoning the well or guilt by association. There is no logical connection between the positions.
The Nazis had the death penalty, genocide, involuntary euthanasia and assisted dying.
It is like polluting other peoples characters based a complete other persons collection of ideals. That sets the the bar of the debate low and inflammatory.
Like this?Quoting Andrew4Handel
vs
Texas and Florida have the most guns and the highest suicide rates. Both forbid assisted dying. Texas is second in executions; Florida is 15th. Texas banned most textbooks; Florida was third.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Quoting 180 Proof
In what sense?
The value being....?
Oh, yes: We can tell God we didn't really kill them, we just put them in cold storage for You. Sure, He'll buy that.
I am basing that on this thread and people contributions, you are linking people who don't want assisted suicide to people who support the death penalty and want lax gun laws.
I am in the UK we don't have lax gun laws or the death penalty and I oppose the death penalty, corporal punishment, indoctrinating children in religion and I strongly oppose the death penalty and support abortion. Your position seems to depend on hyperbole and slurring the opposition. I have personal relevant experience that I have referenced.
People on your side appear to assume they are right and have the good on their side ( for no reason) maybe without the slurring the opposition, hyperbole, bad faith arguments and a heavy dose of personal ideologies your position would be much weaker.
Not causing someone's death and devaluing life. Not causing suffering but not ending life. Not making the value of life dependent on one subjective individuals evaluation.
I do not live in the US of A.
Assisted suicide is illegal in the UK. It doesn't follow logically or causally that the forbidding of assisted suicide leads to high suicide levels and lax gun laws.
Are you claiming that follows logically or are you just trying to claim some kind of logical inevitability.
"The good" is not a concept I consult for my decisions. In fact, I doubt such a thing exists or can be defined. I see an injustice, I object to it. Just that simple. I don't accept your moral superiority or your entitlement to other people's lives and deaths.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I'm in Canada, where we already won. In the US, things are much worse, and since there are person there whose well-being is of concern to me, I keep abreast of the situation. Which is dire.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Keeping the not-quite corpse on ice until God sees fit to collect them. (BTW, we're charging the family $1200 per day and taking up a bed in which 28 viable patients might have recovered in these seven months if You had not seen fit to collect them, but, hey God, we didn't snuff this one, so we did good, yeah?)
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No. I made the comparison between the kind of suicide they try to prevent and the kind they don't try to prevent. I'll settle for 1:10. And the accompanying usual group of political choices.
In the democratic process you cited, it represents the winners. Those are their choices.
I see this as hyperbole. In the case of Graham and Dyanne Mansfield you cited earlier
"In evidence from Professor Sikora, by the 23rd March 2021, her life expectancy was between one and four weeks"
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/you-killed-your-wife-tried-24558942
This type of palliative care is used at end of life and not to keep someone in a coma for years or it would not be classed as palliative care.
I am just looking for evidence people value human life. I started this thread with examples including a 44 year old and 24 year old who had assisted suicides for mental health reasons not terminal illness and whose lives were shortened considerably. How is that valuing human life?
Assisted suicide had never just been used on people right at the end of life in severe pain (unless you can provide evidence of this) it has been used to shorten viable lives.
I also raised the cases of my brother who didn't want an assisted suicide despite being paralysed among other things and the case of myself who had undiagnosed cognitive conditions that I received no help for and nearly ended my own life because of the side effects of these conditions.
Quoting Vera Mont
I was referring to specifically myself and how I think defeasibly about the issue at hand and not second-hand guessing about the valuations of "others" or "society".
Says who? And If true, so what? The ethical problem only arises in circumstances where lives are shortened unsafely and / or coercively.
I hope you've gotten some help since then. And if you're against assistant suicide, Andrew, then don't you use an assistant or kill yourself. That said, it's incoherent and biased of you to advocate denying criminalizing others for making those choices for themselves.
Okay. Only eight viable patients, then? Same moral principle: she's not really alive, but she's not technically dead, so we didn't make her suffer and we didn't kill her. Still not sure how many gods would buy that side-step. You cut the god-given suffering by four weeks. Maybe when they finally do die, the victims have to finish out their sentence in purgatory. After all, god is not mocked.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I didn't claim to value "life". As I explained several times, I value individuals, their autonomy and the quality of their lives. If it has value for them, I would try to help people preserve their lives, however miserable or difficult. If I had the power to improve their lives, I would do that. My very simple policy is: If you can't repair them, let them go.
If the lives they are in, that they experience from hour to hour, has no value to the persons living them, by what authority (in the absence of a sense of moral superiority) could I overrule their assessment? In the cases you cite - presumably because they stand out for some reason - I imagine that the patients were spared many years of torment, rather than only a few weeks, which is the more common situation. Then again, going by the precedents I do know about, they probably would have found a way to do it themselves.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I would not have interfered in either of your decisions. But you want to interfere in mine.
It is a political choice how much emergency capacity you entertain. The Netherlands had to send ICU patients to Germany because we did not have enough beds. Germany did. The height of the tuition fees for instance. Lower them and you will have more doctors. Not immediately, so the shortages now are the result of past policy choices. They might have been legitimate, mind you, but it is not as if there were no warnings. We know extreme weather will occur more often, we know that our hyper mobility makes us vulnerable to pandemics etc.
Quoting Vera Mont
This will have to be unpacked for me. I am not thinking it is because of erosion of human values we create euthanasia laws... You use a lot of ' it' and ' they', so much so that I have trouble understanding your argument.
So is climate change, but knowing that doesn't alleviate the present problem or mitigate the much larger future problem or increase the available resources for whenever the polity is ready to throw out the bums and install a civic-minded, smart administration. With every hurricane and coastal flooding. more infrastructure is destroyed. How many hospitals did Katrina take out? And she was a pussycat, compared to storms yet to come.
Quoting Tobias
Yes, sorry. I'll see if I can sort it better.
I had alluded to the conservative parties - everywhere, not just in the US - moving rightward, striking down laws for personal autonomy and cutting social programs, including health services.
To which you replied:
Quoting Tobias
By which I assumed you meant liberal governments' permissive suicide laws encourage conservative governments to cut health-care on the pretext that old people will have been killed before they need it.
I contend that this is not a cause-effect situation.
Quoting Vera Mont
That's not why they do it. 'It' is the policy of allocating resources from agencies of public service to agencies of control. 'They' are the aforementioned right-wing political parties which are taking over governance in much of the world.
I.e. They are not concerned with the value of human life, and never have been; their attitude didn't change when the law was relaxed.
What they are interested in is central, lock-step power, protecting concentrated wealth.
To which end they wooed and won the religious fundamentalist, the racist, the xenophobic, the economically insecure voter blocs by appropriating their simple, punitive values.
There is a clearly traceable history of this trend in the US, which devolved from Nixon to Trump and may end in much worse: a competent megalomaniac. I see the etiology and current state of affairs in Canada. I don't know how it came about (other than through the Middle Eastern debacles) in Europe, or how it will play out in each nation. You're in a far better position to see that side and predict what comes next.
No, then hard choices need to be made. I have no qualms with that. However, for some that time comes quicker than for others. It is odd that the Netherlands being an equally rich country as Germany is, has less ICU capacity. That has to do with political choices and might well have to do with the sanctity for human life ingrained in the past WW2 generations of Germans. I feel we have an odd debate because I feel we are in agreement, but you are not agreeing with me :lol:
Quoting Vera Mont
Well it does not alleviate the present problem but it is an important acknowledgement nonetheless, if only to establish degrees of responsibility. I do not know what a civic minded smart administration is. I doubt though that when we install it, presto, all our problems will be over. I also do not know what kind of different policies such a government would enact. It is easy to complain from outside.
Quoting Vera Mont
Well they never say it out loud of course. I also do not think it is a 'cause and effect situation'. I am thinking along the lines of social discourse. Already we see people wanting raise insurance rates for people living 'unhealthily'. We are moving towards a society which, rather akin to the early 20th century, sees mishap as a personal issue. There is a tendency to frown upon looking at the state for aid (except when you are a bank of course...). Euthanasia laws (for all their good intentions) may be coopted into this line of reasoning. 'Do not look at the state to keep you alive, we will only do so when we still see some benefit in it, after all you can pay for it yourself, or choose death....'. If euthanasia comes to be defended on efficiency grounds then I think we have indeed overstepped ethical boundaries. Even though, it is acknowledged, we cannot keep someone alive at excessive costs even if they wanted to. Making it subject to a cost benefit calculation though, is the the other extreme.
Quoting Vera Mont
I tend to agree, but, that said.... well, the religious. conservatives may well be concerned with the value of human life and oppose it on that ground. There is a plethora of conservativisms.
Quoting Vera Mont
Yes, conervativism, in its radical variants, tend to place a high amount of value on law and order and on tradition, which opposes change and therefore protects existing imbalances of power.
Quoting Vera Mont
Yes, in my corner of the world they call this cocktail populism.
Quoting Vera Mont
I tend to be careful with prediction but the trend I see is similar and to me similarly worrisome. I do not know though whether it is proper conservativism. Populist parties often couple the law and order values with economic policies that might well be agreeable to the progressive left. Not all, but some parties do. I do also think it is the result of a gap the left has indeed left. The traditional progressive parties have failed to formulate an alternative. They have been implicated in the decrease of the welfare state and the increase of the precariat. They profile themselves on cultural issues which their traditional rank and file does not have time to consider as they are in economic dire straights.
The only real difference is optimism vs pessimism. I think we'll run out of time, resources and options before the [relatively; numerically] insignificant matter of suicide, assisted and otherwise, can be addressed in any systematic way. I think far bigger and more urgent matters will take up all our attention and efforts...
At this moment, hydro repair crews are working their tails off all around the province, trying to restore power to dozens of communities. We are in a good position, because we invested in diverse sources of heat and light. The technology has existed for decades to make every house and village energy-self-sufficient, and the Liberal governments made some progress in that direction, but every few years a conservative government came along to undercut those efforts: one step forward, one step back. As the conservatives gain strength and keep shifting rightward, the forward step is just to regain lost ground, then one step backward, then two steps back.
... until the final collapse of our civilization. Many civilizations have collapsed before, and I'm pretty sure their comfortable middle classes also refused to contemplate the possibility that their own could go the same way. What comes after is open to interesting speculation.
Quoting Tobias
But you can imagine it: government that puts the needs interests of the citizens before those of its military or financial or religious or political elite, designs policy, enacts legislation and allocates funds with those priorities.
Quoting Tobias
I didn't suggest anything of the kind. If we ever installed such an administration, we could begin to solve our problems; unless we do, all the problems will keep growing bigger. Events - catastrophic events - won't wait on us to come to our senses.
Quoting Tobias
That happens anyway, when we run short enough of everything. It already does. Increased privatization of health care and emergency services, plus the recent overwhelming challenges, means exactly that, even if it's not spoken aloud. People are already dying in emergency waiting rooms in Canada. How they/we feel about suicide recedes as an issue for a growing number of people who can't get cancer treatments or surgery to relieve pain or even an appointment with a GP. It's not a question of how much we value life in general; it increasingly and inevitable becomes a question of how many can be preserved at all.
Quoting Tobias
That's what I said. The ruthless right-wing collected into its support base the religionists by offering to ban their moral bugaboos: assisted suicide, abortion and same sex marriage. It collected the xenophobes by offering to build walls and secure the borders against migrants. It collected the white supremacists by offering to shut down the BLM movement, keep the Confederate symbols and arm more police. It collected the financially insecure by convincing marginally employed people that cutting tax for business, destroying unions and relaxing environmental protection will result in job-creation; that cutting back on support for the homeless, mentally ill and higher education will increase the spending power of decent, hard-working like you. They have collected the paranoid by offering to increase national security and taking up a tough attitude toward other nations. It collected the 'rugged individualist' fringe with anti-science, anti-institution, anti-state conspiracy propaganda (laughably easy with social media), letting them arm and organize, and inciting them to oppose medical protocols and election results.They have collected these factions that normally would not be under one flag - like God, Guns and Trump - through relentless propaganda. And since the crises keep coming, there is always a scary thing to blame on the scapegoat of the week. The more people are anxious and insecure, the easier they are persuade that only "a strong leader" can save them. Come to Poppa!
Quoting Tobias
I'd be interested to know how that platform reads. Once in power, it doesn't matter what they promised. The communist dictatorships put that kind of program forth as their agenda, but actually do the opposite in power. The fascist-leaning ones the same. I know our premier promised to expand education and health care capacity before the election, and he cut both immediately after he got a majority, plus opened the Toronto green belt to 'development' in the face of public outcry. He has five years to wreak whatever havoc he wants - and those trees and schools and clinics will take much longer to regrow once he's gone; the soil and water will stay polluted. This is always the case: construction is slow and costly, especially when it must be preceded by extensive cleanup; destruction is fast and cheap. He's not even on the far right, and he's already caused a huge amount of un-undoable harm; the new federal conservative party leader is much worse. And so the handcart to hell gains momentum.
You would have interfered because you want assisted suicide legalised which would mean I could have been drawn to an assisted suicide before knowing I had autism and ADHD. You would have compromised the tricky process of diagnosis and enlightening social attitudes towards cognitive disabilities.
You want to throw vulnerable people under the bus with health systems that are complex and easily compromised and societies marred by social inequalities that make slow progress.
You want a law that effects everyone because of a personal preference. And you fail to comprehend the vulnerability of people who don't want an assisted suicide under your legal system.
You don't have a right to be be killed by someone else and by state legislation, if you do that right has been invented on your behalf and it is not a natural right.
Rights are invented not natural.
You could have been drawn to jump off a bridge without any help from me. Are you going to make bridges illegal - just in case? Quoting Andrew4Handel
And buses. Outlaw buses, in case I'm drawn to throw somebody under under one.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
I won't compel you to come here.
You really are pushing this too far. The entire world does not exist, and millions of other people should not have to suffer, for the sole purpose of safeguarding your specific personal vulnerabilities.
No you are throwing millions under the bus and the integrity of the health and care systems and the value of life due to your desire to have someone help kill you. Something you could easily do yourself. Where suicide is legal millions of people are not using it only a few thousand at the most and a minority of the terminally ill.
I have already provided evidence of who is being affected by assisted suicide such as the poor, the lonely and victims of abuse from others.
Quoting Vera Mont
There is a bridge that attracts suicides in Bristol UK where I live, it has phone booths on either side for phoning the Samaritans suicide help line. It has guards monitoring each side and cameras. Most bridges like this have phone numbers on them for suicide charities and people volunteer to patrol them looking for distressed people and peoples lives have been saved.
That's where we came in. Old people in reasonable health are killing themselves long before they need to die, and in unnecessarily painful and messy ways, for fear that if they are no longer strong and independent when the time is right, they will be forcibly prevented from dying, by someone thinks the world should march to his superior moral drumbeat.
Your society is already, according to that bridge business, expanding a lot of its resources to protect some vulnerable people from themselves. You want everything to be organized around saving you from yourself, and if it means depriving everyone else in the world of the freedom to make decisions about their lives, well, you figure you're worth that little sacrifice.
Statistics please.
There are quick accessible ways to potentially painlessly kill yourself if you are able bodied.
And if you don't fear death.
If people don't have access to advanced palliative care how would they have access to assisted suicide?
Your side of the argument are doing your own scaremongering and convincing healthy old people that they could face and unpleasant and unbearable death.
Several of the most prominent terminally ill assisted suicide campaigners died peacefully and or quickly in the end
Terry Pratchett: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett#Death
.
"Pratchett died at his home from complications of Alzheimer's disease on the morning of 12 March 2015. He was 66 years old.[59] The Telegraph reported an unidentified source as saying that despite his previous discussion of assisted suicide, his death had been natural."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Kevorkian#Illness_and_death
"Kevorkian had struggled with kidney problems for years.[61] He was diagnosed with liver cancer, which "may have been caused by hepatitis C," according to his longtime friend Neal Nicol.[44] Kevorkian was hospitalized on May 18, 2011, with kidney problems and pneumonia.[1] Kevorkian's condition grew rapidly worse and he died from a thrombosis on June 3, 2011, eight days after his 83rd birthday, at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.[1][5] According to his attorney, Mayer Morganroth, there were no artificial attempts to keep him alive and his death was painless"
I can cite several more if needs be
Yeah. Like helium and carbon monoxide. But as I recall, those people I cited who took your recommended exit, didn't count because they were in favour of assisted suicide.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Weeks in a hospital bed with 24 hour care on constant morphine drip vs 10 minutes in your own bed - after the two-week wait time for the paperwork. Multiply by number of chronic, long-term and terminal patients who would prefer to stop having to cope.
Lots of people don't have access to either. But those states make it easy to get a gun - problem solved. So what if a mentally ill suicides decide to take a theater or school full of companions along, oh well, thoughts and prayers and flowers on the sidewalk - same time next week?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
In the end. The last two minutes may seem quick, and loss of consciousness may seem peaceful to an onlooker, but it was preceded by quite long periods of slow unpeaceful illness.
I don't know what cancer treatments and surgeries you've undergone, how many dead people you've seen or autopsy reports you've read, but for myself, I'm never convinced by the press release, or well-meaning stranger saying "He didn't suffer."
Yah, he did.
Quoting Vera Mont
Sure, but there is always a bigger problem to address. Quoting Vera Mont
Possibly. But why then write about anything? I think we are in a unique position to recapture lost ground.
That, once, our civilisation too will collapse is a given. We are like the old Norwegian Gods. They knew ragnarok would come but they saw it as their duty to postpone it as long as possible.
Quoting Vera Mont
I am not certain that many governments do not try to do that. They are however stuck within an interplay of forces including those of very powerful market players. I do not know if it is the government that is the issue, or whether politics is more and more played outside of regular political circles. Politics is conducted in many places. Citizens also seem less interested in having their say in politics. I think therefore the chaleng is a different one, how to make politics more participatory and accessible especially for people who are not often heard.
Quoting Vera Mont
It is a matter of how much we value preserving everyone and how hard we are willing to try and of course what to sacrifice for doing so.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Well if their suffering was uncurable who are you to say they should live? Your premise is simply that mental illness is no good ground for euthanasia, but it may well be. If one suffers unbearably and incurably. You question the doctors who have conducted the diagnosis, but you have no credentials to credibly make such claims.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
The onus is on you to show that a health care system that provides for euthanasia is less caring than one that does not. Doctors, who deeply care for their patients generally perform euthanasia out of care for that patient and his or her suffering.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, being a victim of abuse may lead to terminal and unbearable suffering. That is terribly sad, but is it any better to be a victim from abuse, suffer immensely and being denied a way out? The problem is you treat the issue in an unsophisticated way, there is only right or wrong. Of course unbearable suffering is wrong and yes, it is always sad if a life is ended on request. The question is what regulatory regime leads to the least amount of suffering, while keeping basic human rights and fairness intact.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
No Andrew, you want that. Forced assisted suicide is a contradiction in terms. The law which we have created is outlawing it. We have right now a law that affects (not effects) everyone. Having that law is not the default state, it is the product of a regulatory choice.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
The problem is that those who needs assistance generally are not.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
So? What does this, or any anecdotal evidence you provide have to do with the issue at hand?
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes yes yes, we need more because it makes your argument so much, like, stronger. Who cares how campaigners for assisted suicide die?
We have a pretty good indication of how well governments and societies do that in the way the Covid pandemic has been and is being handled. We also have a pretty good overview of the public responses to government efforts. It's given us a fairly comprehensive picture of humanity in crisis...
...and from here on, it's all crisis, all the time.
Yes, there is some remote possibility of saving civilization. It's just that I lack faith in our collective will to save it.
Can you provide any evidence for this claim? I can provide evidence to the contrary.
My Dad was a geriatric nurse for the largest part of his working life working in a hospital for the elderly. He saw lots of old people dying and he didn't witness a demand for an assisted death but did witness people reluctant to die. He died this year and was not eager to die despite a range of health problems including chronic back problems and diabetes.
One of my Sisters was a community nurse for ten years who also witnessed people dying and she didn't support assisted suicide and talked about how good palliative care could be.
My late brothers illness left him severely disabled, paralysed for several years and only communicating by blinking and he wanted to be kept alive until the last moment when his body completely gave up. (It's called a desire for life)
None of the nurses and care workers involved involved with him expressed an opinion on assisted suicide that I can remember but none of them advocated it loudly if they held that opinion.
"There are many other (non peer-reviewed) surveys of British doctors' views in the public domain, a total of fourteen of which are thoroughly reviewed in the seventh appendix of the 2005 report of the House of Lords Select Committee on the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [24]. In addition to these is the submission to the committee by the Association for Palliative Medicine of a survey of 610 members carried out in 2003 showing 565 (93%) opposed legalising assisted suicide. "
https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6939-10-2
There is a range of studies I can find eventually including when where the public were questioned about the definition of assisted suicide and it was clear a lot of people did not know what it was and what it entailed and support for it dropped when they knew the true definition.
What you provided was evidence that people who disapprove of assisted suicide disapprove of it and don't discuss it with people who do approve of it. I have similar anecdotes, and more recent senate committee hearings.
This is not complicated, though some people want to complicate it, drag all kinds of unhappy teenagers and dysfunctional families and what-ifs into it, claim superior moral judgment and plead extreme susceptibility to suggestion, saying that easy and painless death should not be available to people who ask for it, because it might then tempt people who could be helped in other ways, and making cheap and fast death available to people who want it will somehow diminish the capacity of the system to provide other kinds of help for those who need it, and besides the people who do want it already have easy ways available, but my wanting to make them legal will somehow make them more attractive to people who don't want it.
It's actually quite simple:
Most people don't want to die. And if they can be helped to live, that should be their choice.
Some people do want to die. And if they can be helped to die, that should be their choice.
Not yours. Not mine. Not their daughter's. Not Judge Dredd's. Not Kevin Stitt's.
Where did I do that?
My dad worked with the Elderly for decades. I had a discussion with him and he talked about his experiences of working with the elderly not about whether assisted suicide should be legalised and his experience that they often were reluctant to die. Neither of us were on a campaign trail or doing political advocacy.
He is also the person who encouraged the doctors in intensive care to keep my older brother alive and not turn off his life support and after my brother survived that he went onto meet his wife and get married and lived for another 10+ years.
I went into hospital in the ambulance with my brother when he had pneumonia But I couldn't stay and advocate his wishes because I had a severe cold and had been up all night with him so I had to go home to bed.
My brothers carers and may have supported assisted suicide but didn't express that in the years I was involved with them. The other evidence I provided in my next post was a survey of doctors and palliative care experts
You provided no evidence but claimed people that work with the ill and dying strongly supported assisted dying.
I don't know anyone who is politically campaigning against assisted suicide. I have not been involved in politically campaigning. Your position is the most political it seems. Voicing concerns is not politically campaigning.
The people who have the most autonomy are the people with the most interventions and assistance and the most access to resources.
It is not a Natural state. We are not created through or with our autonomy. We are unable to care for ourselves for several years so cannot rely on our autonomy as we are reliant on parents and other adults.
If we have a desire to be a doctor or pilot etc we need pre-existing societies structures like scientific institues, roads, money and welfare systems. The more of these societally created tools the more we can fulfil our desires. There are few desires we can fulfill if left alone in the wild. So we are in something of a social contract where we are provided services due to cooperation and giving up some freedoms for others.
Assisted suicide is being pushed by people who are already privileged have increased autonomy given by others through societal innovation and support not the truly disenfranchised who have been the biggest victims of euthanasia and have lives determined unworthy.
Lack of desire to live can often be associated with and induced by helplessness, learned helpless and disenfranchisement and that was my experience of feeling suicidal. Not autonomy and choice. Feeling pushed to die by suffering or fear of is an experience of coercion.
Because tou say so, nice.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
You are confusing principle with practice. No one is purely autonomous. However, treating people as means to an end as Kant would have it requires that we treat people as autonomous authors of their lives. That people need each other does not mean that one can make decisions for them. Sure I am reliant on my parents up until a certain age, however when I am 'of legal age', I can decide for myself how long I stay out at night.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Excactly, well according to social contract theory, but that matter is best left to another threat.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Where is that sort of thing taking place and who is advocating for state sponsored murder? Euthanasia does not mean the state gets to decide to kill you. It means the patient gets to decide, within certain legal limits and subject to procedures designed to make sure utmost care is being taken by the practicing physicians, to end their lives aided by others, provided the physician that does so is also willing and in agreement.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, by all kinds of things, including intolerable and endless suffering.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes and we should be very weary and take the utmost care that it does not become subject to coercion. However is it a good argument to ban the practice altogether? Is that a proportionate measure to that threat or should it be regulated in a way that makes sure people remain uncoerced? In the Netherlands where we have such laws, pysicians will not just put you down (at least they should not lest they commit manslaughter) because you have lost the will to live.
If one could "easily do it", then assistance euthanizing oneself wouldn't ever be needed; but it is, thus the issue.
[quote=Benjamin Franklin]Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.[/quote]
Seems to me, Andrew, what your position 'criminalizing the choice of whether or not to assist or be assisted ending one's life' amounts to is the tradeoff Ben Franklin warns about.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
With or without the option of well-regulated assisted suicide, "the poor, the lonely and victims of abuse from others" will always be adversely affected, so your "evidence" is moot.
Maybe I missed it but I didn't see a definition of it here. Listening to debates on this on You Tube people used the autonomy argument there but failed to define or justify it as if we all agreed on something before hand (Begging the question).
Quoting Tobias
You can only safely stay out at night because of a social contract and a police service.
Some people are attacked when walking at night so this doesn't prove you have an autonomy that is not provided or dependent by social structures.
I think the theory of social autonomy leads to antinatalism and defeats itself because autonomy is not possible due to the nature of procreation and fundamental lack of consent.
Quoting Tobias
But they have done that.
Were they debating in a society where the law requires adults to take responsibility for their actions, then it was something they all agreed on before this particular tropic became a subject of debate.
If one is assumed to have control over one's actions, one is considered an autonomous adult. Once the age of majority is reached, the citizen is entitled to vote, sign contacts, buy property, marry without parental consent, choose where they will live and what work they do, beget and raise children. And if they attack you late at night and you call the police, they will be arrested, tried and punished - just like grownups who are expected to pay their taxes, keep their promises, fulfill their duties and make their own autonomous decision.
Shouldn't obligations and responsibilities come with rights and freedoms?
Says you... there are a lot more theories about how society functions besides the social contract. Actually, it is rather unlikely that a police force exists because we have sat down and signed a social contract bringing it into existence.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Confusing principle and practice again. Our autonomy is safeguarded by social structures, it is no invention of them. In fact many of those social structures are there because we feel we are autonomous beings.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
We are not autonomous beings before we are born, we are when we are born and enter into life. Of course, vulnerable as we are, we are cradled within the family, society, a bedrock of rules etc, but with the purpose of becoming individuals, people realizing their autonomy. You might think whatever you want, however the idea that antinatalism somehow lays waste to autonomy as a philosophical concept is not very current.
From what I have read I infer that you do not have a firm handle of what autonomy means. Autonomy does not mean you can do everything yourself as you seem to think. It means that you are at liberty to shape your life freely and you should be able to do so within the confines that you do not compromise the autonomy of others. So yes, if I want a wife and kids I am dependent on someone willing to marry me and procreate with me. I might not find her. However, I am free to pursue that aim. That is autonomy. It pertains to this situation 'in casu' as follows: I should be free to decide for myself the way I will die. Willing others who assist me should not be prevented from doing so because the state should not impinge on my choice unless there is a more pressing moral concern. There are some I think, as I outlined above, that is why judicious regulation is necessary. My autonomy still carries a lot of weight though. The default is not that I am no autonomous choosing individual, delivered to the will of the collective. The default is that I am. You are a closet totalitarian Andrew.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Probably. People also have murdered others in the Netherlands. That does not mean Dutch laws on murder and manslaughter do not function. People have also driven their car without a license god forbid. Proves nothing.
How does one realise their autonomy?
They can't choose their genes, their parents, their country of birth, their sex and so on on.
A lot of theorists no longer believe in free will. How are autonomy and the belief in no free will compatible?
I don't think that necessity to get a job or to work/strive to avoid starving is autonomy
but brute necessity. If you need someone to assist and legalise your suicide that does not indicate autonomy either.
At best committing suicide by your own hand is autonomy but not involving others and enforcing legislation that effects others.
Autonomy has a large discussion page on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomy#Philosophy
This topic can also be linked to the topic of personal identity which I made a thread about as well and who is it that persists over time. If, as I mentioned earlier, you are put in a coma before dying naturally does that person in a coma have interests? Who is this autonomous individual? Peoples beliefs and identities change through time and this applies to peoples suicidality and value towards life.
One realizes ones autonomy within a framework that allows you to realize it. Parents that constantly belittle a child and raise it to become an insecure adult unable to make any decisions by itself compromise the child's autonomy. So does a state that prescribes you how to live your life.
Whether the will is really really really free or not does not matter in this regard. Choices appear before us. When I asked how I want my steak I cannot just say 'well, it is predetermined anyway how I want it, have a go at it', no, I need to make a choice. I am happy with that, I can say 'red', or 'well done' or 'a point'. When the owner tells me 'bro you get your stake well-done, no excptions', then I do not have that choice and I feel positively peeved. Notice how free will does not matter one bit, but autonomy does.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, it is. So? That is why many advanced states are welfare states. It means people have a fall back option and will not be exploited. However I fail to see the connection to the matter at hand.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Why not? It simply means I need help realizing my choice. If I choose to relocate, I need someone to assist me too. That does not mean that my decision to relocate is not made autonomously.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Look, there you go again. We have legislated against assisted suicide. That legislation is enforced. Allowing assisted suicide comes down to non-enforcement of the penal code. Again you seem to think that disallowing it is somehow the natural state of affairs, but it is not. It is a product of regulatory activity. Again, you have the odd idea that autonomy means doing everything yourself. Autonomy relates to choice, not to having all the resources to realize them without help of others.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes it can possibly be, but why would we, eh? Let's not muddle the subject.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Possibly, but he does not have the capacity to articulate them. In such cases we grant guardianship to someone else.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Yes, people change, so? That does not imply we have to force them to be alive against their will, because we feel there may be an off chance that a chronically suffering patient might have a miraculous recovery. The point of euthanasia laws is that they allow assisted suicide under certain conditions. In the Netherlands one is that the patient has to be suffering chronically. Again, doctors do not terminate life based on a whim. At last they are not allowed to do so.