Legalising assisted dying in England and Wales ‘may hamper suicide prevention work’
Whether we should or shouldn;t do it is one thing. But that that will be the result of doing it is indeed obvious.
Legalising assisted dying in England and Wales ‘may hamper suicide prevention work’
Whether we should or shouldn;t do it is one thing. But that that will be the result of doing it is indeed obvious.
Only lawyers could come up with a moral system whereby killing murderers or yourself is bad thing but the State deciding you want someone else to kill you is a good thing…
Thank you Grist!!!
I’d distinguish “assisted suicide” – the subject of the Bill in Parliament – from “assisted dying” which is what I recommend for a few hundred of the criminals behind the whole Covid mass murder imbroglio. Start with Boris, Hancock, and Starmer and then work your way down the list.
Should the judge who is chairing a fake enquiry intended to hush this stuff up be on the list? Opinions might legitimately differ. I must admit it would be fun to see a judge arrested, charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and hanged. But my own instinct is that it would probably be enough to confiscate all her wealth and her pension – which punishment probably ought to be meted out to thousands.
Anyway, the point is to be economic rationalists – change the incentives for next time.
What’s the betting our glorious State-funded NHS will have two teams, one encouraging you to top yourself and the other trying to stop you? Each with their own targets.
suicide prevention work
That’s coercing people not to top themselves, isn’t it? Just saying.
“May hamper.” The may is being asked to do a lot of heavy lifting and the appropriate counter is “On the other hand it may not.”
That’s coercing people not to top themselves, isn’t it? Just saying.
Yes, mentally ill people who are in danger of killing themselves should be coerced to take their pills instead of splattering themselves on the pavement. It’s better for everyone.
Libertarianism was never meant to be a suicide pact but here we are, eh?
So you decide if people are mentally ill? How kind of you.
So let’s turn that round the other way, Steve. Since there’s absolutely no evidence they exist, people who believe in deities must be mentally ill. So you should be coerced into taking medication?
BiS – I am mentally ill, and I do take mental health medications every day. I was coerced, but in a nice way, by NHS staff who didn’t want me to die after they found out about my plan to kill myself.
Funnily enough, I’m not mental about God. The part of me that remembers God loves us is the sane part. He loves you too, BiS, never doubt it. Life is good.
BiS, I have to support Steve here. The current scientific explanation for the existence of the universe is not materially different from “Let there be light.” The explanation for the fine tuning of physical constants that allow life relies on a multiverse concept that is not provable and cannot be provable. And don’t get me started on the invocation of inflation as the cause of the universe being so uniform. It has not been explained why it started and why it stopped when it did across causially unconnected distances.
My brother in law is as we speak, rapidly dying of cancer. There is no chance of remission, just a guarantee of pain, suffering and a continuing loss of dignity till the inevitable happens. There is also zero chance of an Esther Rantzen ‘a miracle drug has arrived so I’ve changed my mind’.
It would be nice if he had the choice to go peacefully or should he do a Patrick Barclay (R.I.P.)………..?
Adolfo,
My sincere sympathies, but hard cases still make bad law and this one is shaping up to be a very bad law. It’s symptomatic of the state ever since Blair: badly thought through and there for the feeelz.
Addolff! damn, I’m also watching the rugby.
Mr Greenie! Surely not the universal creation theory? It defies Okham’s Razor. The creation of a universe about 20 billion lightyears across for the benefit of a single species on a single planet very recently is hardly a simple explanation. And it gets worse if you posit it was created recently to look like that. You have a deity gets off on deceit?
but hard cases still make bad law
But isn’t that exactly what you’re doing? The societal proscription against suicide is almost entirely a Christian religious thing. The concept that you don’t own your own soul. So you’re just using the coercion argument to continue it. Christians don’t have any problems with coercion, as I pointed out in my first comment. One might say the entirety of Christianity is about coercion. Coercion is what Christians do. So what’s your problem?
I have sympathy for what Addolff’s described. His brother in law will be coerced into enduring end of life suffering by a load of Jesus creeps.
MG – You’re right, cosmology teaches that all matter, energy and spacetime itself emerged from a singularity, that emerged from ???
It’s the basest form of superstition to believe that things happen without causality or reason. But to believe literally *everything* happened for no reason at all is a species of nihilistic madness.
Which is why William of Ockham believed in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
Since there’s absolutely no evidence they exist, people who believe in deities must be mentally ill.
To be fair, there’s lots of evidence that people who believe in deities exist. :-p
@Addolff – “It would be nice if he had the choice to go peacefully”
Very much so. And not just for the immediately obvious reason. Often the knowledge that you can say “today” lets you enjoy what is left and sometime even to the point that you never say “today”, as seems to have been the case for Terry Pratchett who was a staunch supporter of assisted suicide.
@Steve – “It’s the basest form of superstition to believe that things happen without causality or reason. But to believe literally *everything* happened for no reason at all is a species of nihilistic madness.”
The “first cause” argument has been rather thoroughly considered from at least Aristotle. And it’s inconsisitent nonsense. If everything needs a cause, then a god does not provide it because that god by the same logic also needs a cause. Whatever argument you come up with to claim that a god did not need a cause can be applied to anything else. Quite apart from the fact that there is no logical reason why anything needs a cause.
@Steve.
There’s a helluva difference between causality & reason. The second implies intelligent intent. Although I can understand why the god bothering community have spent the last 2000 years conflating the two.
Quite apart from the fact that there is no logical reason why anything needs a cause.
Now that’s really illogical. One can usually work the cause why anything is as it is. And if you can’t you’re not trying hard enough. But there’s little doubt religions deny cause & effect. That’s the fekkin point of them. One of the problems I have with S. Americans, who pretty well all have been aggressively brainwashed with Catholicism since birth. They have real problems understanding cause & effect. It’s fucked up the entire continent. If you believe in the intervention of dio, you’ve little incentive to achieve anything. It’s easier to indulge in some god bothering & wait.
I’m always reminded the second thing stout Cortez did after gazing upon the Pacific was to kidnap some natives on a raft & rob them.
It was Cortez in the poem. In real life it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa.
‘The current scientific explanation for the existence of the universe is not materially different from “Let there be light.”’
Using “scientific” for the speculations of cosmologists, string theorists, or the like seems a bit bloody rich to me. These guys are not scientists in the sense of Copperknickers, Kepler, or Newton.
Hell it wasn’t so long ago that the strange cove who was Astronomer Royal seemed to believe simultaneously that we’d all die as the atmosphere became a grey soup from being laden with tiny particles of pollutants and that we’d all die from too much global warming caused by the bright sunshine.
“The current scientific explanation for the existence of the universe is not materially different from ‘Let there be light.’”
Apart from the bit with the magic pixie, of course.
Charles – Quite apart from the fact that there is no logical reason why anything needs a cause.
Logic requires causality. If things happen for no reason and Nothing can somehow spontaneously create Everything, good luck trying to make rational sense of anything.
BiS – There’s a helluva difference between causality & reason. The second implies intelligent intent.
Yes!
Although I can understand why the god bothering community have spent the last 2000 years conflating the two.
No! Like most low-information atheists, you are simply unaware of the history of Christian thought, beyond the surface level child’s understanding you (understandably) rejected as a child because it was boring and don’t tell me what to do, Daaaad. The unfortunately ignorant are usually the most confident expounders of notheism. No offence.
Quite apart from the fact that there is no logical reason why anything needs a cause.
Now that’s really illogical.
No, it’s tautological. You and Charles get the Dunce cap on this one, laddies. You both believe in magic. (Sorry I don’t make the rules)
One of the problems I have with S. Americans, who pretty well all have been aggressively brainwashed with Catholicism since birth. They have real problems understanding cause & effect. It’s fucked up the entire continent. If you believe in the intervention of dio, you’ve little incentive to achieve anything. It’s easier to indulge in some god bothering & wait.
But you believe you exist because a magic space explosion happened with no cause or reason. And yet you claim to be rational.
Who’s the real crazy one here? Thundercats! Sorry, BiS, I don’t subscribe to your religion.
Dearieme – Hell it wasn’t so long ago that the strange cove who was Astronomer Royal seemed to believe simultaneously that we’d all die as the atmosphere became a grey soup from being laden with tiny particles of pollutants and that we’d all die from too much global warming caused by the bright sunshine.
Simpering pseudoscientific poppycock.
Statistically, most of us will die from asteroid collisions, pumas or autoerotic asphyxiation.
To quote Max Plank: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Therefore, magic pixie!?
It’s just the god-of-the-gaps thing, isn’t it: as more and more phenomenon were exposed as natural and explicable, the role of gods was commensurately reduced to irrelevancy until all we’re left with is first cause. And theists “solve” this question by positing an inherently more-complex magical creature, whose own existence for some reason requires no explanation.
It would make it easier for us atheists to take you religious types seriously if you could decide which one is the right one.
As Ricky Gervais said: “There are about 3,000 to choose from. Basically, you deny one less God than I do. You don’t believe in 2,999 gods. And I don’t believe in just one more.”
On cosmology, I suspect it is, in a sense religious. To do cosmology requires math & to do math requires constants. It requires uniformity. That the physical laws have to be the same everywhere in the universe. That the velocity of light in a vacuum has to be the same at every place & time. I can’t actually see any reason for that to be true. Where does the universe require it? Why can’t the universe be granular & constants changing? But that would be an anathema to cosmologists because it would deny them the the only tool they have to be cosmologists. So they keep pursuing unfindable dark matter & energy which makes their sums add up. In other words, at heart, cosmology’s a belief system.
Same with the religious. Their deity is the tool they use to explain their world. Maybe it wasn’t a bad one a couple of thousand years ago. Man’s first attempt at science. But it lacks the tools of science. For instance, every theory should be falsifiable. And you can’t have anything less falsifiable than believing in something that doesn’t exist.
To do cosmology requires math & to do math requires constants. It requires uniformity. That the physical laws have to be the same everywhere in the universe. That the velocity of light in a vacuum has to be the same at every place & time. I can’t actually see any reason for that to be true. Where does the universe require it? Why can’t the universe be granular & constants changing?
Scientists (including cosmologists) do their best to test their assumptions of uniformity of physical laws and constants over space and time. You can measure the fine structure constant in light from galaxies that was emitted billions of years ago and a long way away, but it (so far as we can tell) appears to be the same as we measure it today in a laboratory on earth,
I’m with you on dark matter/energy, though again there are scientists looking for alternative explanations, e.g. modified Newtonian dynamics.
If the velocity of light varies over time. Which is another way of saying the clock tick of the universe changes, it would be very hard to detect because c is the basis of the measurements. Possibly impossible. But it’s going to change what you’re observing at great distances & thus back in time when time itself was moving at a different rate.
But you believe you exist because a magic space explosion happened with no cause or reason. And yet you claim to be rational.
Who’s the real crazy one here? Thundercats! Sorry, BiS, I don’t subscribe to your religion.
Cause & reason are very different things. There are theories what may have caused the Big Bang, if it happened. But why would it have to have a reason? An atomic particle may split & cause a neutron to be emitted. You suggesting your deity is the reason it split? You’re barking. The units of information to keep tabs on every atomic particle in the universe would be exponentially greater than the number of particles. And then you could do a similar regression for the information units. Ad infinitum. And your mythical Creator would have to do this or your creation myth can’t work. It’s hardly a simple explanation for anything. Apart from nobody actually reporting sighting the guy since AD30 something.
You’re doing the same as the S. Americans are doing. Looking for a reason why a dice lands 6 pips up. And don’t really accept they can cause better lives for themselves by doing the things produce better lives.
For the laughs, my religion’s Candomble. I like the orixas. They’re believable. Gods you do deals with & take appropriate actions when they don’t come through on the arrangement. They’re certainly more believable than your one.
To add to the above. “Reason” in the sense Steve’s used it, intelligent direction, denies cause & effect. You can’t have both operating at the same time. Either the deity is operating the universe or it isn’t. And this really would have to be down to the sub-atomic level. Changing water to wine isn’t some easy party trick. It requires transmuting oxygen & hydrogen atoms into carbon & other elements. Same with Lot’s wife & the salt. For every sub-atomic particle in the entire universe?
Big ask for any deity, isn’t it?
And the only ones got told about it were some goat fuckers in the middle east?
A significant shift in the value of c would be readily detectable. Is it possible to make compensating changes to all the fundamental constants/units in a way that would be more or less undetectable? Sure, but it’s (Occam) more plausible to assume that they really are unchanging, absent any evidence to the contrary; and if we detected any sniff of such a thing happening, that would be quite convincing evidence that some deity had its finger on the scales.
I gather in this theory the fundamental constants/units do change in that way because they’re dependent on the value of c. And a photon emitted there then, arrives here identical to a photon here now.
The idea’s not particularly novel. Science has a long history of describing the universe using the tools it has at the time. If one sees religion as a science of describing the world then god/gods can be an explanation for all sorts of things using that as a tool. Like Steve’s divinely created universe. Current math explains it differently with different tools. Doesn’t mean it has to be correct though. Different, maybe better tools may produce a better result without all this elusive dark matter.. Can’t say I’m particularly keen on going back to the deities theory. Which deity, for a start? Thunder & lightning gods? I wouldn’t mind my Candomble orixas. They’re quite an easy going bunch. They certainly don’t regard suffering as a virtue. Drumming yes.
On the other hand there’s my deep suspicion of the scientific establishment to be taken into consideration. A lengthy & widespread search for a totally undetectable particle is the sort of funding sinkhole you’d really want to be involved in, wouldn’t you?