Anti-euthanasia campaigners point out the what if you have a relative who just wants to bump off their elderly Mum and Dad without their consent? This happens in practice anyway, and often goes undetected as a 'natural death'. That isn't choice anymore than being forced to live is.
I'd rather be able to have on record what my wishes are in a situation where my quality of life is too low to want to be here anymore. How is that much different from people who have Do Not Resuscitate on their medical charts? Ad astra per aspera
Given the uproar that ensues when euthanasia or assisted suicide is debated, I don't think it is likely for the state to develop a narrative along the lines of "don't you think it's time you toddled off now, you burdensome thing?" It would be a severe breach of human rights to put pressure on people to die.
I suppose you can argue that the state does that with severely disabled babies by removing medical care that keeps the child alive. Perhaps withdrawal of care for elderly people would be a similar approach but they certainly couldn't actively end a life and legally get away with it.
The process of removing care and medical attention from either elderly or terminally/chronically ill people without their consent would be challenged (I hope).
One of the problems for the UK is that these issues are hidden and taboo. You don't talk about death. You don't openly look at the options. You don't admit that a burden has become too much and you need out - for both the ill person and anyone who is caring for them. It is the lack of openness I think that poses more of a risk for people. Ad astra per aspera
Human Rights - everyone has the right to life. For a public discourse to develop in favour of pressurising individuals to go before they are ready would involve continuous and systemic breaches of human rights legislation at all levels. The UN exists to monitor prevent such abuse by states.
Try to replace "life" in this case with "asylum if their country of origin is unwilling or unable to protect them against persecution."
Are you still optimistic?
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
The arguments are very similar on both sides of the coin. Stay alive, face abuse and indignity and not have the choice to go. Or have the choice to go and potentially be forced into taking that option sooner rather than later.
I don't think that my wish to make the choice to go when I am ready should criminalise someone else. But whether I stay or go, there is always the potential for wrongdoing.
How common do you think it would be for people to make such a choice? As pointed out elsewhere people can choose to refuse medical intervention. Choosing to cut short a prolonged period of pain and ill health is just one step on from that. Ad astra per aspera
Is not the right to live and consequently end your life as you see fit, as long as you do not harm others by your actions, an alienable right?
There are a number of ways to respond and think about that question, but a simple way to start is to ask what are your underlying assumptions? It appears that you are assuming that providing a legal right to die to some people has zero impact on others who would prefer to live under the same, hopeless circumstances. That is, a right to die is independent of a right to live, even if both rights can be traced somehow to the flowery language of the US Declaration of Independence. I question that assumption because it appears to directly contradict everything else we (meaning most people who visit this site regularly) have already implicitly or explicitly professed to believe about how the world works. Namely, we progressives reject the neoclassical assumption of individual omnipotence and omniscience when making choices and acting on them, which underlie all arguments for greater privatization and a very minor role for the state in capitalist society.
Instead we accept the institutional critique which underlies most "progressive" intellectual endeavors, such as feminism, critical theory, and most "pro-state" ways of approaching economics and other social sciences. In our framework for thinking, individuals have very limited power and knowledge about the world, so their choices are inherently biased by the language and institutional contexts in which they find themselves. "Bounded rationality" is the technical term for how progressive thinkers believe the world works.
So, if you don't believe that free-market economics is the default solution to a social problems such as inequitable distribution of medical care, then you are implicitly rejecting the idea that a truly individual choice to die is even possible. An individual's options are necessarily bounded by the possibilities presented to that individual by language, values, and other social structures. (That's the essence of the progressive argument against Laissez-faire capitalism.) And if that is the case, then just changing a law to make death a socially acceptable option for hopelessly ill people must also affect, most likely negatively, the ability of similarly hopeless people to choose the socially more inconvenient path of living longer while burdening the community.
Put more simply, I don't believe that the myth of individualism is true. Individual welfare, everywhere and anywhere, is mostly dependent upon relationships with the larger community in which one finds oneself, and inalienable rights are one form of such a relationship in our current, rights-based political institutions. Therefore, it's not possible to assume that a right to die is independent of a right to live. Rather a right to die necessarily diminishes a right to live, and vice versa.
And this means, as I said elsewhere in this thread, that legal suicide is simply incompatible with social medicine. It might be compatible with a completely private system of medical care, the Laissez-faire utopia, but I don't believe such a utopia is possible, and you probably don't either.
As for the rest of your argument, while I can certainly see why you are worried that providing the legal basis for terminally ill people to end their lives may have negative impact and prove counterproductive for people just as sick but not willing to stop fighting the disease(s) and die, I am struggling to see the rationality in arguments that advocate the widespread conviction that if one is suffering from immense pain and there is no hope for them, they should nevertheless be stuffed with all kinds of medicines and kept alive at all cost for the sake of not letting them die even if that be their wish!
The right to refuse medical interventions has been on the books since the Nürnberg Declaration in 1947. Which came about... for obvious historical reasons, shall we say.
