Euthanasia for non-terminal illnesses
April 9, 2015 at 4:18 pm
(This post was last modified: April 9, 2015 at 4:31 pm by Razzle.)
Why are so many people in favour of voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, not also in favour of it for people who are expected to live decades with their conditions? Surely it's even more important to allow it when someone is facing decades of suffering than it is when they've only got a few months to put up with anyway?
I have thought about killing myself many times due to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is incurable. A minority make a complete recovery (so in one sense they are "cured", but there is still not "a cure" because it's only a minority) but most will always have significant symptoms. If I ever do kill myself, I would want to use Dignitas, not an unreliable Do-It-Yourself job that might give me new disabilities, or land me in a psychiatric ward, and I don't want to have to do it alone, in secret, leaving my body for a family member to find. Where is the sense in forcing people to do that?
Much of the harm caused by suicide is entirely preventable: the trauma of finding a body unexpectedly, guilty thoughts about why they didn't tell you what they were thinking of doing, sadness about not being there when they died, or worrying about how slow or unpleasant the death was. Not to mention all of the money and resources governments would save if they stopped wasting resources on forcing people to stay alive in prison cells and in psychiatric wards. We wouldn't have such piss-poor psychiatric services around if they didn't prioritise suicide prevention above suffering prevention. We wouldn't in the UK have psychotic and manic patients locked up in protective police custody or strapped down in the emergency room for days because there are no beds available in the psychiatric ward.
Most of Dignitas' customers are not terminally ill, and a lot of people, including the non-religious and people who don't believe in an afterlife, seem to be against that. Why? I suspect it's a left-over unexamined cultural assumption from the Abrahamic religions, an unspoken dogmatic belief that conscious life is an inherent good (any other attitude would be insulting to the creator god), and therefore it's only acceptable to end it when it's not got long left anyway. The word "life" has a positive connotation in English, and the word "death" has a negative one. Why? Both in themselves are entirely neutral concepts: life because it can be either good, bad or neutral, and death because it can only ever be neutral, no one suffers when they're dead. Life is not in fact an inherent good. It might seem that way to happy people, but that's entirely subjective. The value judgement that happy people make about life is no more objective or reflective of reality than the view of suicidal people. If you feel that life is good, you're right. If you feel it's bad, you're also right.
I have thought about killing myself many times due to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is incurable. A minority make a complete recovery (so in one sense they are "cured", but there is still not "a cure" because it's only a minority) but most will always have significant symptoms. If I ever do kill myself, I would want to use Dignitas, not an unreliable Do-It-Yourself job that might give me new disabilities, or land me in a psychiatric ward, and I don't want to have to do it alone, in secret, leaving my body for a family member to find. Where is the sense in forcing people to do that?
Much of the harm caused by suicide is entirely preventable: the trauma of finding a body unexpectedly, guilty thoughts about why they didn't tell you what they were thinking of doing, sadness about not being there when they died, or worrying about how slow or unpleasant the death was. Not to mention all of the money and resources governments would save if they stopped wasting resources on forcing people to stay alive in prison cells and in psychiatric wards. We wouldn't have such piss-poor psychiatric services around if they didn't prioritise suicide prevention above suffering prevention. We wouldn't in the UK have psychotic and manic patients locked up in protective police custody or strapped down in the emergency room for days because there are no beds available in the psychiatric ward.
Most of Dignitas' customers are not terminally ill, and a lot of people, including the non-religious and people who don't believe in an afterlife, seem to be against that. Why? I suspect it's a left-over unexamined cultural assumption from the Abrahamic religions, an unspoken dogmatic belief that conscious life is an inherent good (any other attitude would be insulting to the creator god), and therefore it's only acceptable to end it when it's not got long left anyway. The word "life" has a positive connotation in English, and the word "death" has a negative one. Why? Both in themselves are entirely neutral concepts: life because it can be either good, bad or neutral, and death because it can only ever be neutral, no one suffers when they're dead. Life is not in fact an inherent good. It might seem that way to happy people, but that's entirely subjective. The value judgement that happy people make about life is no more objective or reflective of reality than the view of suicidal people. If you feel that life is good, you're right. If you feel it's bad, you're also right.
