People who are against letting people choose their own death is having a selfish and evil stance, there is no way to excuse that.
Because then companies that happen to profit from your death have an incentive to convince you that you should die, using manipulative advertising and marketing.
Because then people who are highly depressed might kill themselves with assistance from a doctor, when an alternate route could cure them.
Because then the doctor might forge evidence showing that you wanted to be killed and it could be hard for the police to track down. Maybe they only use the attack against certain high-reward targets.
Because then somebody who is impulsive might agree to be killed when he would've regretted it later if he were still alive.
I tend to be in favor of this for people who legitimately want to die, but there's something to be said for the simplicity of "The autopsy showed poison, so we have a murder case." I could be convinced to make it illegal if somebody found some really plausible attacks that could be used against me; and could be convinced to make it legal if we found and required a scientific test with a legally-enforcable chain-of-custody that proved I was in my right mind when I asked to be killed.
On a sidenote: You can write a "Patientenverfügung" (loosely transelated: a patient's will), in which you stipulate that you don't want to be kept alive artificially in case of grave illnes.
This is respected by hospitals and doctors. Case in point was my mother, who had terminal cancer. The doctors gave her morphine to ease the pain and otherwise didn't do anything to prolong her suffering.
She died in a dignified manner.
We wouldn't always know in such cases, and there's often no way to know what a dead person would have thought years later if they would have lived.
But GP's point was that we don't observe bad consequences from the laws in Switzerland, all I'm saying is that it wouldn't show up when someone commits suicide.
* Force everyone who wants assisted death to go through medical discussion alone with physiologists / doctors, require it to be at least 20 sessions or whatever seems enough.
* Only make it available and legal for people with chronic pain or other diseases that make life suck.
* Require several doctors to be present, that don't usually work with eachother or have any other specific connection to eachother.
* Require to let the patient "press" the button that injects the overdose or whatever method is used.
Etc etc. The point is to make the process complicated and to remove any doubt that this person in question didn't want to die. Of course, it isn't completely safe but so is life and that is kind of the point.
I think people that have Alzheimer's and want to die should be able to be assisted.
Duress - could apply equally to euthanasia today too, couldn't it? If not, then take whatever magical anti-duress method we use now and apply it to this.
Alzheimer's creates a mental handicap that makes normal adult functioning impossible. You can literally ask the same question twice in two minutes and get two conflicting answers - with no memory of the previous answer, or even that the question was asked before.
In mid-stage Alzheimer's memory is so impaired that it's literally shorter than a spoken sentence. In late Alzheimer's even that disappears.
The solution in the UK is to hand over care decisions by Power of Attorney. If no relative is available for that, decisions are handed over to care and medical staff.
If assisted death is ever an option in the UK, it would have to be written into a living will while informed consent was still possible.
Obviously there are huge legal issues with that, especially if there's an inheritance involved.
That aside, people really do get to the point where they just want to die.
I've seen it twice now. In one case it was very clear indeed, and had been clear for at least a couple of years. In another it was less clear, but it was something my relative talked about openly.
Personally, having seen cancer and Alzheimer's close up, I'm really not convinced I'd want to wait around for a natural death from either.
When young and lucid, make the decision of what criteria would cause you to prefer physician-assisted suicide. Write that down in a document. Allow that document to have legal force.
In the US, we already have the notion of Advanced Health Care Directives, which allow for things like power of attorney, nominating a proxy decision-maker, and criteria were a caretaker is allowed, or even required, to stop providing life-extending treatment. Health care providers generally follow these directives if made aware of them.
Thinking about this sort of thing ahead of time is not something that people want to do. But, for people who do complete one (with sufficiently-rigorous criteria), it solves some of the ethical issues around consent and incapacity.
By the way, I strongly recommend more people complete an AHCD. I had to care for a close relative at the end of her life, and the fact that her wishes were written down on paper was an incomparable gift to me. This should really become more routine.
> Behavioural and neuropsychiatric changes become more prevalent. Common manifestations are wandering, irritability and labile affect, leading to crying, outbursts of unpremeditated aggression, or resistance to caregiving.[26] Sundowning can also appear.[31] Approximately 30% of people with AD develop illusionary misidentifications and other delusional symptoms.[26] Subjects also lose insight of their disease process and limitations (anosognosia).[26] Urinary incontinence can develop.[26] These symptoms create stress for relatives and carers, which can be reduced by moving the person from home care to other long-term care facilities.[26][32]
Clinically available assisted suicide could further embolden people to be really terrible to their elderly parents, and private screening with a doctor doesn't fix this.
In genuine cases of wanting out, I support it, but I'm not sure how to design the right controls around it to be fully comfortable with it.
Note: It probably doesn't just bankrupt old people here… I've seen whole families affected by last-ditch efforts to squeeze out a few more months. Second mortgages. College funds. It's horrifying. (live in US, from Europe)
This then became enshrined in law as well as in medical practice (though in medicine there has long been a recognition that not all life extending medical practice is compatible with medical ethics doctors are still bound by the laws of the land and in plenty of cases doctors that assisted with suicide have been charged with murder).
Quite a few countries have now moved to the point where in the case of grave illness or pain you have the ability to request an end to your life.
Having said that, I'd like to make the case for keeping it illegal because I believe there's a strong case to be made. Killing yourself should be a unique, extraordinary event in both your life and the lives of those around you. We should never make a system out of killing people, because systems can be gamed.
In a way, this is much the same discussion as the old "would you torture a terrorist to determine where a nuclear bomb was waiting to go off?"
Yes. Yes I would. I would consider such an act to be horribly immoral, and I might regret it to the day I die, but yes, I would. Likewise I'd take my own life or help people I love take theirs -- but I would worry over whether I did the right thing or not. If I were a religious person, I might consider my act immoral. But I'd still do it.
Once you create a system out of killing people -- people go in one side, forms get filled out, and dead people come out the other -- you've taken a step towards the state arbitrarily deciding who lives or dies based on its own system of value and not the individual's. So in a way, you give up much more in this fashion than if you simply outlawed it and never prosecuted. (Which is probably what happens 90% of the time in countries where assisted suicide is illegal.)
So yeah, I'd torture the terrorist. But I'd raise holy hell for any system of government where torture was a accepted way of doing things. Good grief, can you imagine what just a little tweaking would do to a system like that?
Speeding is illegal. If you want to speed on the way to the hospital because somebody you love is in danger? Speed. By all means, speed. I'll be the first person to protest any law enforcement person that tries to stop you.
But speeding should probably still be illegal for systemic reasons not related at all to your loved one being ill.
I challenge how you square your belief with libertarianism
If you say it illegal for a person to commit suicide you are staking a claim to their life, you are saying you own them
That is about as far from libertarianism as you can get
I made an argument that from a systemic standpoint, it's better to make illegal and never prosecute than it is to create a governmental machine around it.
Please understand, I'm perfectly happy with it being legal. I'm simply trying to describe why there's a strong case for it remaining illegal (and un-prosecuted)
You realize that we're not talking about people freely deciding what to do with themselves, right? What we're talking about is a bunch of new laws, committees, and processes where a person's life can be terminated, sometimes directly by the state. I'd think this is a much worse situation than simply having officials look the other way.
If we were talking about removing all laws around what folks do with their lives, that'd be a different thing entirely. That's where we should be. But nobody is talking about that.
Selective enforcement of laws is evil, unreliable and stupid - it's counter to the very reason we have laws.
I want it to be legal to end one's own life because the consequences of that choice are hard enough on one's family and loved ones. It need not be made harder.
What sort of choice do you want your family to face when it's your turn? Do you really want their hands tied by the risk of imprisonment when your time comes?
But then again, you being a libertarian, are probably not aware of such intricacies.
Intelligence Squared Debate: Euthanasia Should be Legalised https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge7dlzMCbos
They talk about examples from patients in states where its already legal (under some circumstances).
No one wants to suffer. And no one wants to see other people suffer. But the truth is suffering is a part of life.
Some people I know and love have suffered their last few years of life. And other people I know and love have taken their own lives. My personal experience is that the individuals who allowed death to come on its terms, instead of rushing to that conclusion, left everyone around them with more strength, peace, happiness, and personal growth.
The people who ended their life because they didn't want to suffer anymore left a wake of suffering and trouble around them when they went.
It's unfathomable why you wouldn't see the difference.
It's a failure of empathy to equate emotional pain that was going to happen anyway with the kind of pain drugs can't deal with. I really can't equate your stance to anything but sadism on a massive scale. Suffer, so I can avoid feeling bad for a little while and pretend the end is not so bad.
As I wrote in my original post: > People who are against letting people choose their own death is having a selfish and evil stance, there is no way to excuse that.
I understand that people oppose such freedoms, but I find it to be selfish and evil. Just look what you wrote: > left everyone around them with more strength, peace, happiness, and personal growth.
That is only proof of my original statement.