261–270 of 870 posts
M. Scott Peck wrote a book about euthanasia long ago. I wonder if people still read Peck. “Denial of the soul,” that was the title. The foundational belief for euthanasia must be that there is no soul.
Am I denying that aliens exist? I’m not a native speaker but it sounds weird to me.
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I wouldn’t call someone dealing with cancer and the loss of his wife sound of mind within one week of the loss.
He had apparently expressed his intention before she passed. I do not know all the details and this is second hand, but he apparently had a plan.
(Assuming the argument against capital punishment is that mistakes are often or sometimes made)
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To my mind the main obstacle is kind of orthogonal: how do you protect the people who don't want to go, being pressured or manipulated. I agree that if someone is really, independently and committedly deciding to go, you shouldn't stop them. But how do you express that test in a bureaucratic, legalistic framework? In a friend's family, there was a big rift as one family member in direct line of inheritance was accuse…
What you’re hitting on is the inescapable truth that there are problems government institutions can’t solve.
Either way, the government is profoundly involved.
Either the government is in the business of telling us we cannot end our own lives in humane and medically-assisted ways, and that medically assisted deaths are equivalent to murder with all of the attendant legal issues.
Or they are in the business of enforcing rules about how those medically-assisted deaths can happen.
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"tyranny" also seems like a concept mostly unrelated to the topic at hand. Practically speaking, nobody can really prevent you from taking your own life.
If only that were true. Someone unable to move is unable to take their own life without assistance. A surprisingly large percentage of people go through some horrific experiences before their bodies completely fail.
Denying this assistance isn't really "tyranny", though, even if you do accept that suicide is a right.
Nurses/doctors don't like to speak up about that part and people don't want to confront it. But MAID is probably the more humane option in these cases.
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There is no "we". There are people and their bodies and their wishes. And authoritarians who want a say on it. Doesn't matter if nice sounding words like law and democracy are used to describe the tyranny.
I share your view, but it gets crazy complicated when you're dealing with homicide (I'm using this word to mean it's literal definition: 'death caused by another person', not to mean a crime occurred necessarily). Euthanasia is controversial for a lot of reasons. Some people worry that authoritarians will use it as a way to "purge" or, such as here in Canada, as a way to "reneg" on health care obligations that tax pa…
To your point about "Some people worry that authoritarians will use it as a way to "purge" or, such as here in Canada, as a way to "reneg" on health care obligations that tax payers are paying for."
In another thread the Canadian poster talked about someone who decided to go through with ending their life and one of the things they mentioned was "They had to drive 100km to the nearest dialysis clinic."
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To be honest, my grand parents both died in their nineties and their last two years were really sad. It was not so much the physical decline but the mental one. At the end, while technically alive, so little of who they were as persons remained, they might as well have been dead. I fully understand someone in their 80s knowing the end is near choosing to leave on their own term.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I wondered, when you described feeling "really sad" and the sense that people "might as well have been dead," I'm wondering if you're speaking about your own emotional response or trying to convey how the individuals themselves felt about their situation? Edited to sound less harsh
You do sound harsh by the way.
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To be honest, my grand parents both died in their nineties and their last two years were really sad. It was not so much the physical decline but the mental one. At the end, while technically alive, so little of who they were as persons remained, they might as well have been dead. I fully understand someone in their 80s knowing the end is near choosing to leave on their own term.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I wondered, when you described feeling "really sad" and the sense that people "might as well have been dead," I'm wondering if you're speaking about your own emotional response or trying to convey how the individuals themselves felt about their situation? Edited to sound less harsh
> At the end, while technically alive, so little of who they were as persons remained, they might as well have been dead.
It sounds like there was some severe mental decline. When undergoing this kind of mental decline, does anybody remain happy? That’s meant as a genuine question, not rhetorical. Of course I’ve heard of the cases where people are constantly scared, feel unsafe, confused, etc. But I wonder if there are more peaceful examples that just make “boring” stories, and aren’t recounted.
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it because obvious that euthanasia happens in the US all the time [...] So the hospital withheld IV hydration and provided a morphine drip and he was gone in 36 hours I had a family member with late-stage terminal COPD opt out of further treatment. They were in respiratory crisis and were going to be intubated for the nth time with no real hope of recovery, and so they said "fuck it" and delined further intervention.…
I have, thanks. I'll always remember his last words to me, "You're a prince."