Other times, the arguments may be correct but actually make the case for euthanasia. It is true, for example, that some people might feel “pressured” to commit suicide because they don’t want to be burdens on their families or the government. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this — in practically every other kind of situation, it is usually considered pro-social to care about the impact your life has on others.
I tend to think of that as not, actually, being a defence. Others may differ of course.
What do you call someone who believes human life has inherent dignity and value?
A right wing extremist, natch.
I can see arguments for both sides. My view is that if a person is to be free then their life is their own to end if they wish. Their reasoning is theirs just as with everything. But then there is significant reason to worry about people being coerced.
Must admit I tend to dither on this one.
I dislike the thought of someone suffering endlessly with no hope of it stopping. But I also dislike the thought of someone being given the chop when they would prefer to continue living.
I suppose what this really means is I’d hate to have to make that decision.
Bogan, but it should be your decision. The same people arguing against ending a ‘life’ (abortion) because the baby doesn’t have a choice are also those against allowing the terminally ill the choice because, reasons.
The Canadians – (apologies, I couldn’t find the exact clip on its’ own, but it is the first one in the link): https://choiceclips.whatfinger.com/2023/01/03/dont-get-mad-get-even-top-10-memes-watch-maga/.
I have no desire to go but I do not want to be a burden to my family or anyone else. No one is putting pressure on me, it is my choice.
There is no easy answer to this, as much as we wish it were so.
’First, I will show that the MAID program is currently small…’
This slope is only a tiny bit slippery…
I regard the argument that you can’t have euthanasia because a small number might be coerced in the same way as I regard mandatory internet filters because there might be children getting access to porn – busybodies nannies saying “no” as they’re too lazy and incompetent to come up with something that gives the majority what they want while protecting the minority.
A while back I read a bit that was meant to show how the “slippery slope” argument was fallacious. The author gave numerous examples that went “they said if we did ‘A’ it would lead to ‘B’, well it did and now we’re OK with ‘B'”.
Could well be that not too long from now we’ll be OK with the gov’t putting people down if they’re a “burden”, but that might not be a good thing.
Euthanasia is inevitable given the scale of the social and economic costs of coping with those who are old and very ill. But the compelling reason for allowing euthanasia is the individual cost to someone of dying slowly in agony when they’d rather die quickly and painlessly.
So a sensible approach is probably to try to design laws that safeguard strongly against coerced dispatch. They won’t be perfect but nothing human ever is. It should still be possible to achieve more good than harm.
I used to worry about the role of doctors and nurses in the process but during the pandemic so many showed themselves to be heartless and thoughtless brutes that I dismiss the idea that they’d mostly suffer great emotional cost. Just tell them it’s just another deadly vaccine they’re giving and they’d be OK with it.
I’d say we seem to be comfortable with people being coerced on all sorts of other matters, so why the particular objection to this one?
The inconvenient aspect of always weighing up the pros and cons of every moral argument is that it can lead to equivocation where a moral absolute does better service.
Could well be that not too long from now we’ll be OK with the gov’t putting people down if they’re a “burden”,
I mean, we’re ok with aborting hundreds of thousands of healthy babies a year, handing out free sex changes on the NHS to the children we don’t kill, and – shh! – we don’t talk about the grooming gangs anymore.
Pretty sure we’re only a couple of news cycles away from worshipping golden calves (calfs?), human sacrifice, cannibalism and Sir Keir Starmer.
The use of the word moral always makes me want to reach for a firearm. There probably isn’t a more misused word in the English language.
I’m old enough to remember when the government, supported by a significant portion of the population and most of the elites, was considering vaccination mandates, supported by an App so that you couldn’t get in to restaurants, pubs etc and you may even have been denied health care, they even got as far as sacking care home workers and others for not being vaccinated.
Much as I believe in people’s right to determine their own journey in to their grave I’m really uncomfortable about where this could lead.
Canada has abolished capital punishment and instituted voluntary euthanasia.
They won’t kill a mass murderer, but they will kill your granny. Evidently, this is considered moral up there.
I used to worry about the role of doctors and nurses in the process but during the pandemic so many showed themselves to be heartless and thoughtless brutes
It’s the heartlessness and thoughtlessness which worries me. Doctors and nurses were a-ok with the Liverpool Care Pathway and similar murderous schemes.
What will the Left say when certain groups of people are deemed “burdens” on their families or the government? Like those drug addicts and violent criminals they’re always trying to protect? What about welfare cases, illegal immigrants and kindergarten teachers who push gender ideology? Or are we only murdering the disabled?
– Doctors and nurses were a-ok with the Liverpool Care Pathway and similar murderous schemes.
Yes, and this was with euthanasia being illegal. Imagine when it’s not.
. . . but they will kill your granny.
The Canadians (MAID) are looking at killing your poorly children without your consent.
BiS,
When I hear the word “expert” I reach for my … custard pie.
These days “expert” is on a par with “moral” for gross misuse and abuse. Woner if there is a moral expert out there?
Re slippery slopes, and why they are real phenomena not just a fallacy, Chris Snowdon often recommends the paper “The Camel’s Nose Is in the Tent: Rules, Theories, and Slippery Slopes” by the economists Mario J. Rizzo and Douglas Glen Whitman.
http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/camelsnose.html
Slippery slopes have been the topic of a spate of recent literature. In this Article, the authors provide a general theory for understanding and evaluating slippery slope arguments and their associated slippery slope events. The central feature of the theory is a structure of discussion within which all arguments take place. The structure is multilayered, consisting of decisions, rules, theories, and research programs. Each layer influences and shapes the layer beneath: Rules influence decisions, theories influence the choice of rules, and research programs influence the choice of theories. In this structure, slippery slope arguments take the form of meta-arguments, as they purport to predict the future development of arguments in the structure of discussion. Evaluating such arguments requires knowledge of the specific content of the structure of discussion itself. The Article then presents four viable types of slippery slope arguments; draws attention to four different factors that, other things equal, tend to increase the likelihood of slippery slopes; and explores a variety of strategies for coping with slippery slopes.
It is excellent and I thoroughly recommend it.
@Lurker – “there is significant reason to worry about people being coerced.”
There shouldn’t be as there is coercion in the absence of assisted suicide – forcing people to stay alive who want to die.
@Boganboy – “I also dislike the thought of someone being given the chop when they would prefer to continue living.”
Any framework for assisted suicide needs a way to verify that the person really does want to die and it’s not some temporary desire that will pass. This is probably best done by a lawyer rather than a doctor as determining what someone wants is not normally the main job of a doctor, who will assume that a patient wants what most people would want in the circumstances, but a lawyer is accustomed to drawing up a will or representing a client in court ro similar where they need to do what the client wants, however silly it seems to be.
@Dennis, Inconveniently Noting Reality – “They won’t kill a mass murderer, but they will kill your granny. Evidently, this is considered moral up there.”
If I give you $100 voluntarily, that’s a gift: if you force it from me, that’s theft. Consent is fundamental to morality and the law.
“I know we talk about ‘the Great Reset’ and Build Back Better’ and ‘Net Zero’ and ‘population control’ and ‘digital currency’ and ‘Social Credit’ and stuff like that all the time, but any talk about us seeking to totally control your lives is nothing but far right QAnon conspiracy theory so shut up.
“Incidentally, we’ll be offering you Medically Assisted Death soon. Don’t worry. It’s purely voluntary.”
Moral absolutes, Meissen Bison, are the way to start wars, civil and otherwise.
Saudi Arabia and North Korea are run on moral absolutes.
No thanks.
I have my own moral absolutes, sure, but I don’t insist they are others.
Any young person who choses to begin the pathway to gender reassignement must be unquestioningly supported and given access to Hormone therapy and surgical procedures at the earliest opportunity without challenge.
A 70 year old with a terminal condition however has to die in pain.
“Any framework for assisted suicide needs a way to verify that the person really does want to die and it’s not some temporary desire that will pass. This is probably best done by a lawyer rather than a doctor as determining what someone wants is not normally the main job of a doctor, who will assume that a patient wants what most people would want in the circumstances, but a lawyer is accustomed to drawing up a will or representing a client in court ro similar where they need to do what the client wants, however silly it seems to be.”
I seem to remember that abortion in the UK was introduced on the undertaking that it was only when two doctors independently agreed that being forced to have the child would cause irreparable mental damage to the mother. We now have abortion on demand. I would thus conclude that introducing euthanasia subject to the agreement of ‘professionals’ would undoubtedly result in a similar trajectory.
To be honest you’d probably get a better standard of moral arbitration if you said you had to get the agreement of two time served bricklayers before you could top yourself legally. I think the last few years have shown us that the morals of so called ‘professionals’ are somewhat flexible.
When they shift the Overton window be careful not to fall out and roll down the slippery slope
We’ve just wrecked the economy and a lot of children’s lives to save some coffin dodgers from a bad case of flu.
So now to save a few bob on care home fees we’ll encourage the sick to snuff it.
But obviously this policy can’t be enacted for sufferers of Altzheimer’s because of the impossibility of informed consent.
This isn’t an Overton window or a slippery slope, it’s balancing 5,000 devils barefoot on a wobbly pin.
“But obviously this policy can’t be enacted for sufferers of Altzheimer’s because of the impossibility of informed consent.”
They’ll soon change informed consent to ‘assumed consent’ – unless Granny opts out before she goes doolally she is considered on the Death List automatically.
Chester: I have my own moral absolutes, sure, but I don’t insist they are others.
No more do I. If there was anything unclear in my earlier contribution that led you to an absurd comparison with political regimes of which you disapprove then of course I apologise.
Charles: forcing people to stay alive who want to die
You made this case in another thread. Who is exerting this baleful force or do you think a benevolent state should step in and establish a board of commissioners to rubber-stamp accelerated DNR mandates (and I use the word advisedly) on the diseased, decrepit and deranged? (Just nod,dear, and we’ll know what you mean).
The argument is terrible. The anti position is ‘people will be pressured because they are deemed a burden’, the response to that is not ‘that’s ok because people tend to consider this anyway’. The problem being identified is the pressure… without it, and with people deciding of their own accord that they do not wish to burden others, there is no problem.
I am entirely pro-euthanasia. And I think an individual is entitled to weigh in the impact their living has on others.. after all, if you are already suffering greatly yourself, you may suffer further if you see that your doing so is weighing down the people you love.
But the problem of people pressurising their not-so-loved ones is clear and real and can’t be waved away with logic. It is a horrible inevitability of legalising euthanasia and if you want to be in favour of it anyway, you have to accept it as a downside. Just like if you are against, you have to reconcile with the forcing people to live in pain.
BoM4 – if I was of a conspiratorial mind, I’d say 2020 was the beginning of a campaign of more or less open psychological terrorism by Western elites, against their own citizens, that shows no signs of abating. The gloves are truly off now after the beatings they took in the Trump/Brexit elections, and they’ve hastily updated their tactics to make sure there are no more potentially unpredictable Trump/Boris style populist speedruns.
We’re trapped in a sadomasochistic relationship with weird perverts who read the Guardian unironically, is what a crazy person who believes in conspiracies would say.
Chester – Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Unless it’s about racism: racism is bad and you are bad for not centering the struggle of Black women in your allyship. Ugh, (CW: criticism) I just feel like you’re not as committed to Black Lives as I am, Chester. Have you even SEEN the new Dr Who? Not only is he Black and Gay, but I especially enjoyed the episode where he breakdances on a cardboard box to confuse the Daleks.
They’re such a musical people.
Phil – This isn’t an Overton window or a slippery slope, it’s balancing 5,000 devils barefoot on a wobbly pin.
Splendid.
Jim – We now have abortion on demand. I would thus conclude that introducing euthanasia subject to the agreement of ‘professionals’ would undoubtedly result in a similar trajectory.
Nevertheless, I expect this is one of those things that’s about to become mysteriously uniform across the Western world, like we’ve got to “keep up” with “international best practice” and whatnot. Yooman rites lawyers an all. International frameworks. The entire, by now familiar, dog and phony show of pure, liquid, 100% expert-approved, Fact Checked, peer-reviewed bullshit and media astroturfing they pull out of their fetid jungly nether regions when claiming men can have fannies and you’d better not fly in a plane or Hurba-Durva-Hoofengrinch will cry herself to sleep in her recycled organic locally grown bamboo retard cage.
Idk, maybe a society that wants to kill itself should put itself out of its misery. But that’s not what we want, as evidenced by the Boris landslide and our (still inchoate) Great Escape from the EU. It’s our mad rulers who want us poor and sick and dead and preferably with fancy new nonfunctional genitals.
You don’t need to be Sammy Davis Jr to know Something’s Gotta Give, tho it might just be the collective “us” to be honest. But hopefully it’s the collective Them we issued a great fuck-youening to as recently as 2019. No matter how hopeless, no matter how far.
Kevin B – They don’t call it Clown World on account of how it turns up drunk to a children’s party. Well, not exclusively because of that.
Anon – interesting.
PJF – The Canadians (MAID) are looking at killing your poorly children without your consent.
Grim, intit. Chesterton was right again, PJF.
When are you going to accept my Lord Jesus Christ as your own savior? We can be God-pals (Russian Orthodox)
It speaks volumes that most of the pro-euthanasia crowd tends to be in countries with government-run healthcare. Who decides the age of consent? Who decides the difference between assisted suicide and murder? Who decides which methods are appropriate? Who decides which reasons for checking out are acceptable? How easy would it be for healthcare providers and hospitals and the NHS to cover up genocide with a concept this convenient?
Anyone who thinks that governments won’t abuse this should be introduced to the tens of thousands of pensioners who having contracted COVID in 2020 were mercilessly put down with Midozalam so as to “not overwhelm the NHS”
Yet as my father said to me about Euthanasia, “why are we prepared to show a dog a degree of mercy we won’t show to a human being?”
I agree with Steve on this – give the elites any opportunity and they’ll murder us enthusiastically
“Coerced to stay alive”
Not an absolute if one is able to demonstrate “mental capacity” – I heard of one elderly gentleman who simply refused to eat the meals provided and starved himself to death – slow and painful but eventually successful.
@john77
So if all cars were banned except those you built with your own hands, you’d say that that was not effectively banning cars? Don’t be silly.