I'd argue both are horrible trade-offs and can be somewhat lessened with better regulations.
A person must have the right to chose the terms of their own existence.
A person shouldn't be pressured into that choice due to costs.
A person must have the right to chose the terms of their own existence.
A person shouldn't be pressured into that choice due to costs.
I don't think this functions as a principle. It only seems like it applies very narrowly to the situation of ending one's life.
People don't have a right to choose where, how, or to whom they're born. They don't get to select which aptitudes they have or where they struggle. There's very little they can do to change a great many things about their lives, but this doesn't strike us as a "violation of their rights" as much as "a fact of the human condition."
I think you need an argument as to why the specific situation of choosing how and when to end one's life ought to be different.
Death does come. When and how is (usually) not chosen by the person who dies. This seems like it's as much a part of the human condition as the randomness around being born.
Obviously, you can't dictate what things happen to you, only how you respond to them.
> A person must have the right to chose the terms of their own existence.
In the sense that a person doesn't have the right to choose to die, and shouldn't have the right to make that decision on behalf of someone else
But the harder you make it to do so, the more likely whatever method they end up choosing will harm someone else.
A peaceful end with safe, regulated medications in an isolated enviroment is preferable to people jumping off buildings or in front of trains or in front of cars.
It's one thing to be able to do something, it's another thing to inform the person of the ability to do something and put pressure on them like this (a real conversion in Canada between a patient and hospital administrator):
> “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
And also jumping off buildings or in front of cars is a relatively uncommon way of committing suicide
Anecdotal tales of incompetence do not justify the removal of a person's basic right of self.
When Nazi’s put people in gas chambers they used these kinds of semantic arguments to brainwash people into committing atrocities. No one knows what happens after or when we die. We found out after years in the US, after executions by injection which was considered humane was actually excruciatingly painful but the prisoners couldn’t scream because they were effectively paralyzed. The whole idea of this raises red flags to me.
I don't see how that's possible. Sure, the egregious cases by healthcare professionals can be prevented, but I don't see how you can prevent the soft pressure from friends and family, or even just self imposed guilt on the part of the patient.
People who are sick often have to deal with depression. Feelings of being helpless and worthless are only going to be made worse knowing they are effectively choosing to be a burden by not allowing themselves to be killed. I would imagine a great many people who are not ready to die would do so out of a sense of shame or guilt and that seems really terrible to me.
Palliative care and avoiding treatment that unnecessarily prolongs life can go a long way to easing the difficulty of dying from illness and I think are more humane than asking, explicitly or implicitly, for the disabled or dying to decide when they should die during what is certainly already a very difficult time.