'Suicide pod' is completely legal and approved for use in Switzerland
unilad.com
unilad.com
Please remember that no matter what your position, others have very different views on this subject.
That said, I am somewhat of an advocate for people having the option to end their lives in some cases. I have seen first hand someone do it due to extreme medical hardship and it was intense but positive for them.
But there is the evidence that safeguards around these technologies suffer from the “slippery slope” problem:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070710/
We should be thinking very deeply about whether and how these kinds of technologies have their place in society, and maybe give us some deeper consideration.
People nearly always have the option to end their life, unless they are physically incapacitated. It's just a question of how big of a mess it makes.
I admit, the "barriers to entry" raises some troublesome contradictions to my mind. Do we set an age limit, and if so, what? What about testing for various intoxicants or anything else which might cause someone to be unable to enter even into a contract for a gym membership? But it seems to stretch out: will there be a panel to whom someone must justify themselves? Perhaps an essay ...
On the other hand, I am reminded of that quote from Patrick Stewart, "I have a strong feeling that, should the time come for me, having had no role in my birth, I would like there to be a choice I might make about how I die." Indeed, nobody tests for intoxicants or goes before a panel before producing an infant. Life is something which happens to you and not a great deal of fuss is made about the qualifications.
And make no mistake, we are each born owing the grave a debt. It will come due eventually, the question seems to be whether or not you get to set a time and a manner to it, or must it happen to you just as life happened to you? Without volition or selection of circumstance. Can we offer ourselves and one another the kindness we might bestow on a beloved pet?
I've no answers, only questions I find more and more uncomfortable.
Yikes. It seems like you would want a barrier to entry when it comes to legal suicide...
I'm pointing out the most obvious flaw with this conclusion.
Read some Camus and meditate on relativity’s reach; can’t ever know the abstract signals others feel. We’re not made of philosophy but mush and go propagating electricity.
Is it temporary if they stick around or are they role-playing?
You can’t ever actually know. Just argue rhetorical positions in symbolic logic. Not the same as being anyone else.
There’s no “flaw” as there’s no “one true symbolic rhetorical argument” to rule them all. Suggesting there’s a flaw implies there is.
Grow up. People dying has impacts on the world. Ignore them, decry the immorality of it all, or bury your head in Camus if you like.. it doesn't magically dispell any of it.
People usually think that they are acting with a sound mind, and in their own interests. Except that they often are not. This is ok when the consequences are less grim than death or permanent disability.
People get confused, depressed, angry, drunk, high, or even have a psychotic break.
I can acknowledge it may have an emotional effect on family/friends, but it isn't illegal to make someone sad or else breakups would be outlawed...
The pod here doesn’t need to mean that any psychiatric assessments are foregone, it just takes the doctors finger off the trigger (which is a good thing)
But either way, I think everybody overestimates the cosmic importance of death to people whose careers are waist deep in it.
Make it plain, make it official, tell people you've done it. That way your relatives and family can't keep you alive forcibly "because that's what they would've wanted" or some other misguided reasons.
Mine has clear instructions to pull the plug in specific situations and not to extend my life unnaturally.
One horrifying thing I've read is that industry actually often uses CO2 because it's cheap. Which causes hurtful and very emotional suffocation.
For example mice exposed to pure N2 show epileptiform behaviors (same with Argon or Helium but suprisingly not Xenon, maybe because it's somewhat anesthetic as well).
Helium seems to good for pigs.
The trouble is that most comparisons are against CO2 which is alltogether horrible with respect to every quality except the speed of death.
There seems to be not much research on pure nitrogen especially as pure gas.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175173112...
Even if you've spent your entire life, working hard paying into the system. The money for your retirement care has been spent already. Sorry you're poor and suffering. Here's an easier option out for you. Profits made on the sale of any viable organs.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-servi...
Regardless, if this somehow led to a significant percentage of the population committing suicide, wouldn't that mean we're not doing something right in society?
The program is called "medical assistance in dying" commonly referred to as MAID. A lot has been written about it the last few years. As you look, I highly recommend prioritizing the words of disabled and chronically ill writers, over those of their families and other supporters of it. It's a complex issue but IMO the only correct way to approach it is focused on the people most likely to make use of it.
Here is an example of the sort of thing we were worried about, and that was dismissed as a slippery slope. This person doesn't want to die per se, the support she needs is understood and achievable, but it will not be provided. Suicide is offered instead.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/woman-with-disabilities-nears-...
Here's a blog post written around the time when the "forseeable death" restriction was removed a couple years ago. It touches on and predicts specific cases that have since happened as described.
https://socialwork.ubc.ca/news/social-justices-poor-cousin-d...
> In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital's director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost "north of $1,500 a day." Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.
> "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."
> Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia. The hospital says there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue.
Canada, where the healthcare is “free”, but if you cost too much they’ll encourage you to kill yourself.
https://reason.com/2022/09/07/some-canadian-health-care-pati...
But in general I tend to agree that there should be some means to humanely end ones own life that doesn't automatically presume insanity. I think there's probably a reasonable middle ground to be had between the extremes of whenever and never.
I'm happy to go: I've experienced everything I wanted to. The longer I exist, the more living is becoming a burden to me.
Joke aside, I think it's important to explore the allowance of exits for people that want to end their lives, but at the same time I understand if people are concerned if easy suicide becomes easily available to the populance.
https://scifiinterfaces.com/2022/09/13/thanatorium-the-patie...
"The result is a quantity of green-brown tinted liquid (containing amino acids, peptides, sugars and salts) and soft, porous white bone remains (calcium phosphate) easily crushed in the hand (although a cremulator is more commonly used) to form a white-colored dust."
Everyone was brought into this world without their permission, they should be able to leave it in a safe and reliable way too.
Or you were nowhere/nothing, then you became something/somewhere, that action could be referred to as "brought into the world".
I think that the problem here is the fact that in some cases what might drive someone to taking their life might be preventable: either with therapy, medication, supportive people around them, or a mix of all of those. Or to call out harmful behavior when it occurs on the part of others, because humans can be really horrible to one another.
That said, I guess I agree with your take, even if it sounds very antinatalist.
Maybe with the caveat that we should decisively figure out whether anything happens after death (our best guess is that nothing, though we might eventually even stimulate a near-death experience in an otherwise healthy brain to explain away any hallucinations) and in the end let people decide: either keep existing in our imperfect world, with all of the good and bad about it, or choose... eternal nothingness, until the heat death of the universe.
I feel like you forgot the primary thing that would help people to stop thinking of ending it: being able to afford necessities.
I think a problem with this is that suicide is so "off limits" that talking about doing it can get you institutionalized. Some medication can have awful side effects (mainly talking about SSRIs) which some people may not wish to experiment with.
Overall, I agree that other options should be presented too. But the root of the issue is the stigmatization of it all.
I can never tell if this is satire or not. What does this even mean? Is this a bad thing? Is there some utopian goal where we somehow build some gizmo that can communicate with your consciousness pre-conception and get informed consent to 'being you into this world'?
> Is this a bad thing? Is there some utopian goal...
Depends on the person. I'm not personally looking for a consent system before being born, merely pointing out the fact you can be born and have no control over anything. Things like illness, defects, abusive parents, etc... so people should have a safe option to leave life too.
> Hines climbed on to the Golden Gate Bridge after feeling 'the most horrid, emotional, turmoil' he'd ever experienced, and has remembered since feeling 'compelled' to die until the moment he leapt from the railing.
> "I thought it was too late. I said to myself, 'What have I done, I don't want to die'," Hines later said. "I realised I made the greatest mistake of my life."
There are people who have no other options left except enduring the pain and deteriating life conditions for some, sometimes a long, months or even years, time.
And there are people who, by their circumstances, think what there are no options for them left.
To me, a device like this is about "having made that decision", being in control, and it being clean.
I'm a paramedic-firefighter. I have gone to every type of suicide you can imagine. And most of them are not "clean", even the ones you might think of. You can choke on vomit with an overdose. You can cause trauma (to yourself) by hanging. You can create a life threat for others (I've been to several suicides and attempts by CO poisoning) that we had to done breathing apparatus to get to the victim.
I think even the inventors of this device would say something like - we don't want suicide to be or feel like your only option, but this device can make it as ... dignified ... as it can be. And while not removing the emotional trauma of loss itself for your family, friends, or the person who finds you, it can be "one less thing" (which, when someone might be considering "all I do is cause pain and misery" can be compelling).
Well, other than mass murder, I suppose.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/12/27/fac...
This thing is illegal everywhere and has not been tested.
The whole point of such devices is to make sure it's done properly.
I assume that helium would not have the alert effect CO2 has - similarly to nitrogen which is probably too Henry to just it with a bucket as you describe.