Suicide: An Ethical Delimna

[robvalue]

I don't have any problem with suicide. I think the argument that life is always preferable to death is absurd. A life can be almost nothing but pain and suffering, coupled with the knowledge that it almost certainly won't improve.

I've come damn close myself, a few years ago it was all I could think about 24 hours a day. I was actually hoping I would get an incurable, fatal disease so it wouldn't be my fault.

Overall, right now, if it didn't affect anyone else I would most likely off myself. But it would hugely impact several people, have a lesser but significant impact on others, and would remove the potential I have to make the world just that little bit better. So I weigh things up and say my life is bearable enough that I feel it would be selfish to end it.

I hold hope that my health improves so that one day suicide will not even be an option. I have made promises that if ever start making actual plans, I will discuss it with my wife immediately. It has never got that far yet.

I can't stand the "right to life" people. What they are actually promoting is the "right to enforce other people's decisions about life". If they lived 5 minutes as someone in constant agony, and in the throes of the darkest depression, they would be begging for it to end.

So in conclusion, I think its everyone's own decision and there should be no stigma attached. The only caveat is the case where you have good reason to believe the person is not in their normal state of mind, and that there's a good chance they will return to it. Then I would say you can make a moral argument for stopping them. If they're not in their normal state of mind but almost certainly won't return to it, then this new state of mind is their normal state. If that is unbearable to them, then let them end it.

I also have no problem with extremely carefully actioned assisted suicide. And not just for terminally ill people. I dismiss ridiculous slippery slope arguments like "people will be killing their grandmother and getting away with it!" No, they won't. Not any more than they are already doing anyway.