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The right to die and euthanasia is an extremely controversial issue. What is your take on it?
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518Take that step, and the culture starts on a very slippery slope. One individual makes a choice. A million individuals making a choice becomes a cultural movement with all sorts of unintended consequences.
The society will begin to make fine-line distinctions about which lives must be maintained and those which are dispensable. What starts as a seemingly bright line becomes blurry and - invariably - as night follows day, those blurry lines will conduce to an ethic of convenience.
Life is maintained and sustained not because it has merits on its own terms, but rather by a subjective standard of its quality and utility. What starts out as an illusion of compassion gives way to a matrix of considerations, biological and moral, about what lives are not yet eligible to be ended and what are.
Downward flows the spiral. The same ethic, by the way, that leads to abortion on demand and why the laws in most states still forbid suicide. The latter a residual of the belief that law ought embody an ethic that gives primacy to life and that the difficulties and circumstances in which life may exist at any moment are, in the ultimate analysis, of secondary importance to the value of life itself.
Put simply. the value of life is absolute and not dependent on the circumstances in which it finds itself. This then being a broader ethical and cultural question and not merely one of individual choice or utility.
The British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke wrote, "The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do as they please. We ought see what it will please them to do before we risk congratulations." Therein lay the problem with laws that permit euthanasia, abortion on demand, physician assisted suicide and indeed suicide itself.
(The last being especially interesting insofar as it functions more as an expression of societal values than as something that can be enforced at any given moment in time. Grant that such laws do empower law enforcement to prevent a suicide where it is in a position to do so.)
In any case, a society that premises its law as "Choice" - as euthanasia advocates must invariably do - effectively leaves open the question of the value of human life. It becomes not a standing principle, but a subjective judgment to each individual. In such a society, human life becomes not an end in itself, but mere instrument. Life becomes not an object whose preservation is the highest standard, but rather a convenience to be maintained or not according to the satisfaction of another's will.
Aristotle said that the first questions of politics are, "How ought we to live? What kind of a people do we wish to be?" The implicit answer of those who support euthanasia, abortion on demand, physician assisted suicide and the like is, in effect, that it is nobody's business. Predictable results follow. One cannot expect the society to absent itself from collective moral judgments on the value of life and then expect an ethical social order to result.
So, you have a guy in an amazing amount of pain for 18 months on serious drugs.
His wife and family have to watch, listen to his screaming, his tears and agony all that time, carry the PTSD for life.
Nope, that’s just unnaturally cruel and without any form of compassion
@ChrisMaster69 Well, if compassion is making life optional and determining its duration not on its intrinsic merit but rather on conditional qualifications, then I guess you have a point.
Just don't be surprised at how elastic the definition of compassion becomes and how quickly it elides into convenience.
The man you describe deserves all the aid that can be rendered to him. However, if a peculiar notion of compassion that ends the life of those to who aid ought be rendered.
Who, in that formulation, is aiding whom?
So if your son, daughter was in that amount of pain, even with heroin, you would simply want to prolong their suffering?
It’s a YES or NO answer.
@ChrisMaster69 No, I would get them medical care, psychological assistance and do everything possible to alleviate their suffering.
However, I would be hard put to call it compassion to kill him. That seems just a wee bit much - and this again ignoring the larger cultural ramifications under which we make law.
This lad was in a major surgical unit, tumours on all his nerve endings.
He was on strongest drugs he could get to alleviate pain but still screamed.
I was lucky, I was on morphine and maggots shoved in my leg.
Certain illnesses, conditions are completely untreatable and people just watch while the person they loved screams in pain.
Me I would want no one to go through it
@ChrisMaster69 You do all that you can and alleviate the pain as best you can. However, because of his illness to treat him as dispensable and to be tossed away hardly shows compassion.
His life is forfeit, in that formulation, because of his circumstances. We then console ourselves that it is compassion when all we did, by fiat, is to toss him over the side.
But life is not fair, hard and harsh decision are made.
To prolong suffering is feel,
Evil
@ChrisMaster69 Again, you have made the value of life not absolute, but contingent on its circumstances. You will set a criteria and you will decide when or if that criteria has been met.
Suddenly life is mere instrument and no longer an end in itself.
Try this mental experiment. Family and friends will NOT be allowed to decide when a family member is to be euthanized. Rather, the state will establish an administrative criteria and once that standard has been met, the life will be ended.
Is that compassion? If yes, then who decided what that criteria will be? If not, why is it suddenly compassion when a family member, for example, makes that decision?
Whatever the personal feelings in any case, once the value of life has been rendered contingent and circumstantial, you create a culture that will be on a long slippery slope. Indeed, you can see we are already there to some extent.
Freedom is defined as an in itself and not the means to the attainment of virtue. There is a word for that - decadence.
The level of irony, your profile says you work for the US government, a government with a huge track record of bombing people and killing innocents.
Ergo you still work for the government, so some lives are worth more than others
I couldn’t help but notice most of what you wrote is stolen off an article on google
www.bbc.co.uk/.../against_1.shtml
This is what you used
@Sheyhoney most of his long posts are stolen.
You simply take a section and Google it.
I prefer original arguments than copy n pastes
The second hand embarrassment I feel for him is unreal lmao
@Sheyhoney @ChrisMaster69 To both of you. I am not sure to who your remark was directed, but nothing I offered here was taken from Google. At least so far as I am aware.
In fact, I come at this issue from a Burkean perspective and offered that. If you care to point to any specifics, I would be happy to reply.
That said, I did not make any references to any specific articles nor quote anything without attribution. (I note that the BBC piece you referenced was simply an amalgam of arguments made by various groups and individuals. Suffice to say, my arguments are not drawn from thin air but are, as I say, drawn from a consistent philosophical position.)
To which I would add, quoting John Maynard Keynes, "“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." I am not so "practical" as to think that I do not stand on the shoulders of giants.
P. S. Just to be clear, I derive my philosophical positions from the influence of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke and G. K. Chesterton among others. You will also find similar positions taken by various Christian churches, not least the Roman Catholic Church.
Suffice to say, I hope you will agree that these individuals and institutions did NOT draw their ideas from Google.
P. S. Oh, and if you will indulge me one more time, three books that I might offer for your perusal;
1) Statecraft as Soulcraft by George F. Will
2) The Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg
3) The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat
Though none of these addresses euthanasia specifically, they have provided me with an intellectual framework with which to examine that and similar questions. I commend them to you.
By my definition, euthanasia is something completely different. By my definition euthanasia is done without the person's explicit consent. I think that is something that is acceptable in only extreme cases.
I also support regular suicide under some circumstances.
I have a living will. Both my parents had living wills. All of the older people I know have living wills. A living will is basically the "Pull the plug" document, and it is legally binding in my state, and I'm pretty sure some others as well. Older people are fully aware that there may come a time when the quality of life is no longer worth it. They don't want to be a zombie on life support the rest of their life.
For some people, keeping them alive is torturing them.
As a doctor once said to me "There are times when it's best to let nature takes it's course." Just because it's possible to keep someone "alive" doesn't mean it's right.
I know these two people they had never met each other in their life but they both tried to commit suicide they both succeeded but they both got you come back the story that they've told me is identical to each other's if they've never ever met each other in their life people who commit suicide and aren't as lucky as these two if it got to come back to spread the message you do not want to commit suicide the message basically is you honored your life it was a gift you have to make the best of it we all have a destiny if you choose to take your gift away from yourself you will live the rest of your life alive is that being able to do anything you are in a little cage people walk by you every single day you got your choice you don't want to live life you're going to get that choice look at we are all energy we do not die we going to a different dimension energy Never Dies so could you imagine spending your internal life in a little cell letting people walk by you every single day you cannot communicate with you can be seen and not heard all of the rest of your eternal life I don't think so
a few years back I was in hospital with a leg wound. The guy in the next room had growths on all his nerve endings, he was in 24/7 pain and being given pretty much heroin.
he had been like this for nearly 2 years, with his wife and daughter having to watch his pain become critical over final 8 months until he eventually died.
if we let an animal suffer like that we would be branded for cruelty.
those that don’t support it, I hope you or non of your loved ones ever develop an illness where they are in 24/7 and you have to visit them daily.
For those that take the religious route, what a great god he is then to let one of his children suffer in horrendous pain for 18 months.
hopefully your religion handles you dealing with that pain of watching a loved one.
It's being supportive and helpful but acting like a big sibling.
If a kid is asking for a ton of candy, we both know it could rot out their teeth. In that moment though, they would completely enjoy it. The same with someone that wants to die in the moment. You have to ask yourself, is the best option as far as their whole life is concerned? Can they get past this and lead a good life after?
I think it all depends on the situation person by person and making sure it's the best choice for their overall quality of life.
My dad had several strokes, and then developed cancer, and he was just forced to suffer, for years, before he finally passed.
I told my brother, that if anything like that happens to me, just leave me in the wheelchair, in the sunlight, by the pool, but leave the brake off. It will be an "accident" and everyone will be better off.
I agree
The controversies are usually around who decides the death. The family, who hold the pay out ; or the medical experts, who get paid to keep them alive?
99.99% of cases the poor bastard doesn't want to die. They just want to get away from the shitheads looking after them.
yes especially beneficiaries of the will,,,
Assisted suicide is not about inconvenience. It’s about the pain and suffering of a sick and dying person and how much suffering they should have to endure.
It should be addressed by the person themselves in the form of a living will. If they do not have a living will, or some other legal method for declaring they would want it, then it should not be an option, for the exact reason you said.
If memory serves, I believe technically assisted suicide is not euthanasia. Because I think that euthanasia is deciding to kill those who are elderly or infirm. Then you have people who are kept alive through extraordinary means, and you remove the life support. That's not euthanasia either. And the final category is assisted suicide.
And I'm glad we agree about euthanasia.
Rather the persons should have an option to avail euthanasia when they are irrecoverably damaged.
So such option should form part of their will
Voluntary death and accompanied suicide. Basically when someone’s really sick and they wanna die
Pulling the plug in death bed no then itll be stuck in my conciousness