Hacker News Reader

Should we keep medical assistance in dying illegal because bad eggs offer it outside the legal framework of their job in bad faith?

The Christine Gauthier case is used to justify the idea that the government will use it to reduce spending, when what happened to her is appalling, but was absolutely not something the government employee that offered it to her had the legal permission to do so.

What the Quebec law regarding medical assistance in dying does is guarantee its existence as a medical act. It does not allow any low-level government employee to offer it wily-nily to anyone. It is a medical act, reserved to doctors, to discuss assistance in dying.

> Just look at the end of the article. It gives several examples of the kind of thing that allows me as a utilitarian to say that the suffering of a few terminally ill is not as bad as the harassment of countless vulnerable people.

Countless vulnerable people haven't been harassed. There are 12 documented cases in the history of MAID in Canada where someone was allegedly offered MAID innapropriately. There have been inquests and reports that have counted them. Not one resulted in a death. Christine Gauthier's experience couldn't be substantiated when they reviewed her records, but they did find in that investigation that a single case worker had offered MAID to 4 veterans.

On the other hand there have been over 50k successful petitions for MAID most of which were for people with Cancer.

As a utilitarian, you should presumably look at the actual numbers, and balance the tens of thousands of people who chose not to suffer agonizing deaths against the 12 documented cases of people who were offered MAID as an option when they think they shouldn't have been.

To be fair to the grandparent, you can’t fully audit whether the cases of the people who successfully petitioned, because they’re now dead.

You can petition for MAID, and get approval, and then choose not go through with it.

And those cases could definitely be audited, but that will be a limited and biased sample.

I think these are valid concerns, but I would also say that there is an underlying issue with medical malpractice and disregard for the suffering and needs of certain groups of society which we tend to brush under the rug. I'm going to assume the concerns you have probably don't stop at just euthanasia - mine definitely don't, and I worry that a ban just makes the issue more... abstract, and PR-friendly.

If an individual in a difficult life situation comes to the state for help as a last resort, and there is a chance the representative they are assigned would recommend they should consider just dying as their last resort, the state has already failed to protect someone vulnerable, and obviously won't be giving them the help they deserve/need/should be entitled to as a human.

Any wrongful death is horrible, but I sincerely believe a "representative" like this and the harm they inflict is going to have an almost identical death toll, even if it's by way of consigning people to sub-human lives of physical or mental torment instead of pushing them towards a tool that "everyone" understands we need to keep a close eye on. My utilitarian take would be that many would happily extend the torment of the terminally ill and suffering, as long as they don't have to deal with the suffering their neglect inflicts on countless vulnerable people and the terminally ill already. (For e-clarity, I don't mean to imply that's your motivation here!)

> If an individual in a difficult life situation comes to the state for help as a last resort, and there is a chance the representative they are assigned would recommend they should consider just dying as their last resort, the state has already failed

Medical assistance in dying is a medical act, reserved to doctors. Just like a car salesman can't legally recommend you an abortion. No one in the government has the legal right to discuss it, even less offer it.

Yes, my point was that that person having a position where they are able to do that is already wrong. If a car salesman was telling every woman that came in they should get an abortion, there are places that person should be, and none of them are a car dealer's.

The Supreme Court then?