(March 16, 2019 at 6:10 am)Yonadav Wrote: It's the prisoners who would be driving other prisoners to suicide. If assisted suicide were permitted in prisons, driving other prisoners to it would be a hobby of many of the prisoners. But probably the biggest problem with allowing assisted suicide in prisons is that the prisoners aren't really free to choose. To be free to choose, you have to be free.1. So your alternative seems to let them suffer and again this isn't my experience in the penal system.
Simply by not being free, there is already pressure toward suicide. Prisons have gone to great effort to remove to the greatest extent possible the means by which a prisoner might take their own life, simply because prison does induce suicidal tendencies among so many. I am pretty certain that you would be looking for a long time to find a prisoner who is permitted to have a length of rope in his prison cell as a personal possession. That is a means of suicide, and they are likely to use it.
And why would we give prisoners who are not free to make their own choices a choice that we deny to everyone else? If an incarcerated person has a right to choose suicide, then surely people who are free have the same right. If we are going to assist prisoners with suicide, then surely anyone else has a right to be assisted with suicide. It would make no sense to give prisoners the right to choose something that free people can't choose.
2. A choice is still a choice within limitation of freedom
3.This doesn't follow the fact we give a choice to prisoners does not mean we must give it to the general public
4. I'm not opposed to general assisted suicide.
Seek strength, not to be greater than my brother, but to fight my greatest enemy -- myself.
Inuit Proverb
Inuit Proverb