Assisted suicide

Suicide is not illegal. I can take my own life, and there is no legal prohibition on that.

Assisted suicide is illegal. I can't ask someone to assist me to take my own life, criminal law prohibits this (in UK and NZ at least, other more forward-thinking countries permit assisted suicide with legal constraints).

Does it make sense that suicide is not prohibited and assisted suicide is?

Where this 'inconsistency' really starts to look questionable is in the context of persons who are unable to take their own life by themselves because of illness. Those people, are effectively being denied the choice to take their own life. The denial you could say comes from 'fate' or 'God' or 'nature's course'. But does it really? I might not able to do the act myself because of the constraints of my illness, but I still have the faculties to ask someone to help me do it - that too is part of fate/God/nature's course, is it not? The ultimate denial of the choice in that situation, it seems to be, actually comes from the law (ie the legal prohibition on assisted suicide). Can the prohibition be justified?

it's legal in Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Oregon in the US



only inasmuch as the suicide as often as not does not survive to be prosecuted so what's the point of the law? and if they do they are usually in a bad way and it would be unusual punishment to prosecute them

I guess the point of the law would be in all those cases where the attempt is unsuccessful. The point of the law would also be that in prohibiting suicide, the sanctity of life is prioritized, which is obviously a value worth protecting.

I'm more interested in suicide and assisted suicide theoretically, rather than what perhaps might might policy reasons for the legal position as it applies to each.

What is the best perspective to assess say assisted suicide from? Autonomy? Dignity? Equality? Sanctity of life? or do we need some kind of a combination of different paradigms?

had a post prepared but biggie grmlin ate it

here's an older spiegel article on the subject

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,494275,00.html

It comes back to the definition of self, doesn't it?

I personally think suicide SHOULD be illegal. But it isn't, because the causal actor is also the victim. Whereas with assisted suicide, the causal actor is separate.

I'm not going to go into the philosophy of it, but rather focus at the practical implications. Someone finds me with a gun next to your body, BG, and I claim you "asked me to do it."

I get off :>

Classic example

http://www.crime.co.nz/c-files.aspx?ID=9911

"Honestly your honour, he said life was too difficult and asked me to shoot him, three times, in the face, and then chop chop off his hands, feet and head to make his corpse unidentifiable, and dump the remains into the rubbish tip. Seriously, that's what he wanted, I thought I was just doing a favour for a friend."

Remember the German cannibal case and the difficulty the prosecution had with bringing a case of murder against the cannibal? Because of the degree of consent of the willing victim.

Do!

Elaborate on why you think suicide should be prohibited. Isn't self-harm, including the ultimate act of taking one's own life, within the realm of autonomous choice of all rational actors?

As for your rather facetious example, when I talk about assisted suicide I most certainly envisage it only in the medical context and with clear restraints. We can get into a discussion about what those restraints should be (so that we can ensure a homicidal vadinho doesn't go around killing biggies, but that is a secondary question).

I'm rather interested in a philosophical/ethical/quasi-legal approach to the bigger question of whether you can justify a prohibition on assisted suicide and now that you have raised it, suicide as well.

Again, the slippery slope arguments really don't help. Plenty of countries have legalized assisted suicide, they are not - as far as I'm aware - resulting in cannibals or serial killers getting off murder charges. There are constraints that can be legally enforced (the Swiss clinic Dignitas for example puts the patient through quite a rigmarole before euthanasia is administered - forms, medical exams, psychiatrists' exams and so on - and the entire thing is taped so that there are no doubts whatsover about the individual's consent).

However did you read from that spiegel article I posted above?:

I just read the article. I've read about Dignitas in legal journals, and the process is described as fairly robust.

doctor assisted suicide happens all the time all around the world.

Some old lady who is in pain and with a terminal disease will just be administered more and more morphine till her heart & lungs just give up.

I strongly support assisted suicide in certain circumstances and i believe it is going to get more important as medicine keeps people alive longer (but not necessarily at a higher quality of life).

We should have a 'retirement' age :0

sounds like murder to me

where is her consent given in the process? to have less pain? or to die earlier rather than later?

Does it matter in a timeframe measured in hours anyway? What's wrong with pushing someone slightly over the edge and saving them from dying in excruciating pain and the family having to watch them suffer through their last hours, when they could peacefully slip away?

Many of the people that get to such a state would have died long before without having their life effectively prolonged through medical technology and medicine, so why not cut it off through the same means when it serves no purpose to continue.

Well, because sanctity of life is a value worth protecting? Surely we recognize inherent value in human life (regardless of the stance taken by its individual holder)?

/incidentally I agree with assisted suicide, this is just playing devil's advocate

if we are so concerned with the sanctity of human life then we would prevent humans from doing anything that we know is harming them - not just suicide. Ban smoking, ban high contact sports activities.

The state has the monopoly of violence, and unless we are preventing further violence (note my definition of violence goes beyond the commonly held one and includes property crimes), then we are usurping its role by killing ourselves.

I could forgive it if someone were a psychopath and only through suicide could they prevent further harm.

Surely under that view the state can delegate violence in certain circumstances - like the right to self defence?

You could view suicide (for the purposes of this discussion i will take that to mean medical reasons for suicide) as avoiding further suffering (violence?).

Sanctity of what life? The ability to artificially keep someone as a vegetable? Or worse to keep someone alive for our own sense of gratification? Life is more than a heart beat and pupils that constrict.

Further to that if death is a certainty (or as close to as you can reasonably assume then why keep them alive against the hope that a medical development will a) be found b) be tested and approved in a few years c) be affordable to said person.

We put injured animals down all the time because it would be inhumane to let them live. Why not do the same to those who can rationally choose for themselves?

It's a slippery slope argument, however.

Implicit in all of these comments is that life by itself doesn't have value, it's only the activities enabled by that life that matter. So there's no point keeping someone alive if they're not "active."

From then it's a quick jump to killing people because their existence isn't "of value", like Lecter killing the guy in the orchestra

Because, arguably, a choice to die is not rational, it's in fact irrational (because it has the effect of ending someone's ability to self-determine through ending their existence). And if self-determination vests in only rational beings, then by virtual of choosing to die one becomes irrational and thereby not entitled to self-determination.

All life. The moment you start assessing 'quality' of life and deciding which ones are worth discarding based on qualitative criteria, you reject the notion of sanctity of life. But you still have to give a reason why sanctity of life should be rejected.

Sanctity of life taken to an extreme is very paternalistic. But it's not so much about protecting people from harming their health, its rather about not permitting them to take their own life.

Sanctity of life is also an argument relied on by pro-life activists in the context of abortion.

Your position is based on the rights of state?

Do you actually believe that humans are rational actors....or just mere pawns of the magical mystical notion of state?

For the 50 billionth time

Human rights are given by the state.

... not hard...

Humans are merely biological machines, whereas the state is abstract.

what are you bringing HRs into this for?

it's not a right to be a rational actor, you either are or you aren't.

I mean, we can make this a discussion about HR if you ant, but trust me you don't wanna go there.

Does the sanctity of life extend to keeping people alive as much as possible, no matter the cost (in $$$ and suffering). No i dont think it is an absolute at the moment so why should we pretend? You could argue that there is a difference between actively helping someone end their life and merely withholding medical treatment but thats not the strongest of arguments either in both circumstances there is the ability to effect two outcomes.

If we use limited resources as an excuse for not saving everyone we can then why not say that if someone wants to end their life, (& has a rational reason to do so) it means there will be more resources for being able to save someone with a curable disease.

Im not sure it is for anyone but the person concerned (where able) to decide based on their own qualitative criteria. We can judge to some degree the probability that it is a rational process or not. There are of course pull the plug type situations that are a bit different.

So if sanctity of life is limited by our right to self-determine (ie choose for ourselves to die), then how do you get around the argument that choosing to die is an irrational decision thereby ridding the individual of their right to self-determination?

(i refer to a 'right' to self determine only because it makes it shorthand for saying that self-determination is actually that which makes us human, so its more than just a human right)

I'm not sure I agree with that at all. There are many situations where choosing to die is rational. More to the point there's arguments that we aren't all that rational. If we pretend that we are why does choosing to not choose any more disqualify you from choosing? What other right or obligation suddenly replaces that?

It seems you are saying that an irrational decision makes us unfit to self determine?

Are you?

Because you are implying we somehow have a right to our own life?

While I don't agree with assisted suicide, I believe we could find a compromise: an application for governmental death. This wouldn't be suicide, per se, but would be based on a governmental analysis of the costs/benefits of continued existence of the person in question, and would have the same result.

Situation:

90 year old lady, husband has died and family doesn't visit very often. Many physical illnesses/ strokes/ heart attacks, difficulty breathing. Mental facilities still entact.

Wants to die and has done for the last 10 years.

If she is capable of high (ish) rational thought then why is wanting to not live any longer proof of irrational thought? To me its further proof of her capacity for self determination. To choose to die before another stroke or just time robs you of the ability to be measurably rational is completely rational.

I'm having trouble explaining it because I believe it to be obvious/self evident/ ...right.

Yes. Irrational in the sense that it actually has the effect of destroying one's ability to self determine.

(this is not my argument by the way, its an argument put forward by pro-life/anti-self determination freaks)

I think the point you are making is that a decision to die can be a rational decision in any given case. That's true, but a pro-lifer would not permit assessment of rationality in individual cases, because for them the choice to die is ipso facto irrational.

I'm saying that as rational actors we can self-determine. This is not a right, (I mean its not just a right), its part of the definition of being a human being.

How do you define a human being?

How does an ability to make decisions somehow conflate to a right to act on those decisions?

It's like saying as a rational actor I can identify a need to wipe out Australia.

So you don't think that self-determinism also implies an ability to effect the choices made through action? By the way, I never said that your right to self-determine is absolute.