Comment by dkga
Comment by dkga 3 days ago
This. Life is such a precious random occurrence that failing to protect it in the face [dementia|physical disabilities|etc] is the real tragedy.
Comment by dkga 3 days ago
This. Life is such a precious random occurrence that failing to protect it in the face [dementia|physical disabilities|etc] is the real tragedy.
The alternative being when someone becomes inconvenient to others we should encourage their death? What good is compassion or empathy when the lesser in society could just go off and die, right? Why stop at incurable diseases? Political opponents, coworkers, nasty service workers, double parkers, lawyers, and many other groups cause a lot of anguish and suffering.
No. But I think that people should be able to decide when they want to end their lives if it is because of pain that won’t get any better, a terminal illness that causes pain etc. while they have all of their cognitive functions.
But we should put guardrails around if the reason for assisted suicide is not pressure from relatives, depression, etc.
How many “legitimate” assisted suicides are worth one questionable case? There are no foolproof guardrails, and you’re inviting moral hazard.
Doctor to a high degree of certainty know which diseases are terminal or cause a deteriorating condition that will cause pain where the person has all of their cognitive ability. That’s why I carved out Alzheimer’s or dementia.
I would argue that banning it is not an “easy solution” but in fact the hardest solution.
Nobody's saying that anyone should be encouraged to die. That is an evil thing. But that does not mean that people should not be permitted to choose to die vs suffer.
You are assuming no advance directive. We are talking about cases where there are advanced directives.
(Although there are cases I would be ok with it without--to me, what's important is the mind. To me personhood extends from first consciousness to last consciousness. Once you are sure the last consciousness has passed I attach no value to the body that remains.)
There’s no bright line. Suffering is a subjective experience. Lack of prohibition is tantamount to encouragement.
Right now, the political party in power openly wants undesirables, especially homeless people, to simply drop dead and stop bothering everyone else.
The relevant word during our fascist rise is schadenfreude. People not only want to see them drop dead for having the audacity to be dirty and unhoused - they want to see them suffer, hard, the entire time.
You gotta find a way to stop making the inflicting of pain on others pleasurable.
As I mentioned in a another comment, framing it as "how one is remembered" is leading to pointless tangents in this thread.
The important point is this: are you causing emotional, psychological, physical distress in the real world to those you care about when you have this disease? Yes or no. That's what I care about. Whether they are able to remember me well despite that, or poorly because of that should be completely secondary.
That’s irrelevant here. What is relevant is that we have a contempt for human life and a lack of charity. The teacher was not at fault for his condition. We should learn magnanimity.
Sure, we can think about how the burdens of caring for our family can be lessened as they age, or how we may help reduce that burden for our family, but family does have the duty to care for its members, and to place such considerations above the intrinsic value of human life is very sad indeed.
This is not contempt for human life. It is a recognition that sometimes as the body deteriorates that the quality of life becomes negative.
I watched both of my parents deteriorate in the end. The morphine blotted out my father's ability to form long term memory, if it wasn't in front of him things were like they had been before so much morphine was needed. There can be no value in such "life".
As far as I'm concerned not allowing people to end the suffering is a form of sadism.
I suspect this thread will go like many have in the past: there are two camps. The first has never seen a bad death and has a lot of opposition to people choosing to end their life. The second has seen a bad death and a lot of people would choose suicide before reaching that point. If it is a contempt for human life that means people have contempt for their own life and that doesn't make much sense. I can look at myself: I have been dealt a presumably genetic killer, I saw what it did to my mother and I will not allow that to happen to me. Do I have contempt for my own life because I expect the end to be suicide?
This is about assisted suicide. You can argue all day long about how you have the right to end your own life, but the real issue is whether you have the right to grant another person immunity from charges of homicide for facilitating your death. That is an entirely different beast.
> The teacher was not at fault for his condition. We should learn magnanimity.
This is equally true of conditions like paranoid schizophrenia or psychopathy. Sometimes a person is just born with wiring that makes you dangerous to others. Does this mean that everyone around them must have the magnanimity and charity to them attacking people at random?
Yes, everybody should be interested in getting them treatment, just like they are interested in getting people treatment who have leukemia, were born with a malfunctioning liver or need an artificial hip. Instead, they get thrown in prison for the rest of their life because they are evil and we all can feel good about having made the city safer.
People with leukemia want treatment and are willing to suffer uncomfortable treatment to get cured.
Paranoid schizophrenia have lower compliance rates and fairly large collateral damage. Psychopathy is a trait not a disease, but again, issue is that they do not cooperate and dont want to "cure". Psychopaths are fine as they are from their point of view.
It is just their victims who mind.
What does protecting life look like when one is literally losing everything about themselves that they value?
It's not like life stops when someone (with a grave an irreversible condition that causes suffering) dies. It goes on with the young generations (i.e. the billions of them!). I think too much clinging to a single life causes the whole (which is more important) to suffer. That's not to say we shouldn't value and respect elders, but clinging to life excessively is ignorant and potentially cruel, in my humble opinion. I defend the right to die in the face of incurable diseases that cause a lot of anguish and suffering.
I think clinging to life is partially rooted in an egoist/solipsistic metaphysics that you yourself are all that matters (to yourself at least, of course). Relax, we're just a small part of the cosmos. Ancient and immortal :)