With the discussion of whether assisted dying should be allowed in Scotland befing brought up again, I was wondering what other people thought of the topic.
Do you think people should be allowed to choose when to end their own life?
What laws need to be put into place to prevent abuses in the system?
How do we account for people changing their mind or mental decline causing people to no longer be able to consent to a procedure they previously requested?
No, for several reasons.
Death is final. There is no coming back from it.
A cure, or at least an effective treatment, might be just around the corner. HIV used to be a death sentence; it isn’t any more (and from what I understand, carriers can now have unprotected sex without passing it on). I wonder how much medical research into treating HIV wouldn’t have been possible without sufferers to try out potential treatments. Maybe it would still be a death sentence today if assisted suicide had allowed people to escape it.
There is no way to be 100% certain someone isn’t being pressured to die. If they answer all the questions correctly, that only shows they know the right answers; it doesn’t show they are being truthful.
Justifying assisted suicide on the basis of the worst cases is not sufficient. There will always be worst cases. Let’s say we define a limited set of the worst cases; those are now effectively solved and everything else jumps up a level. There is now a new set of worst cases. How long before someone catching the common cold gets put to death? You may say this is ridiculous but the worst case justification means that the cold WILL eventually rise to the top, and there WILL be arguments like “giving evolution a helping hand”, or “for the benefit of the species”, and as we will by then be routinely applying AS there’ll only be a low bar to jump.
If palliative care isn’t producing sufficient quality of life, we can put people into a medically induced coma (IANAD so there may be good reasons we can’t, but idk). There they stay until (a) a cure or treatment is available, or (b) they die naturally anyway.
Obviously this needs sensible public healthcare in place. Where medical treatment is expensive and life is cheap, this won’t work. I’m in the UK where healthcare is provided by the state and we have the luxury of considering life to be priceless.
For those who say we euthanise animals - well society in general doesn’t want to pay for their healthcare and doesn’t consider their lives to be infinitely precious. Also there is the question of how much they understand what is happening to them; maybe the terror of being hooked up to a machine would make their QOL effectively non-existent anyway.