I’m of split mind on things like this. If someone is determined enough, they’ll kill themselves whether they are ‘permitted’ to or not. Making it easy to gain access to ways in which you can kill yourself painlessly and through a means which they might be able to use your organs as transplants or provide your family more closure seem like good and cool programs. However, I also understand that there could be coercion and other problematic practices. I’m not sure I know where I fall in this case, there isn’t a ton of real evidence presented in this article and the expert’s opinions seem to fall a bit conservative for my tastes - while we should make reasonable efforts to fix the underlying problems which might cause someone to want to kill themselves I’m not certain that we can really know how much a disease state affects the mind of someone. Hearing loss may be unbearable for some, and perfectly fine for others, and we shouldn’t judge how much someone is suffering just because the disease state doesn’t seem difficult or troubling enough to another person.
I’m not sure I know where I fall in this case, there isn’t a ton of real evidence presented in this article and the expert’s opinions seem to fall a bit conservative for my tastes - while we should make reasonable efforts to fix the underlying problems which might cause someone to want to kill themselves I’m not certain that we can really know how much a disease state affects the mind of someone. Hearing loss may be unbearable for some, and perfectly fine for others, and we shouldn’t judge how much someone is suffering just because the disease state doesn’t seem difficult or troubling enough to another person.
it’s difficult because unlike physical ailment, where we can often very clearly benchmark and map out someone’s progression into the ailment, emotional ailment is very enigmatic to us. some people for example get better very quickly, some people can go through years or decades of treatment and not much happens for them. why? usually we don’t have a very good answer for that. sometimes there simply isn’t a finality to mental illness like a physical illness, and that really complicates the judgement here.
it’s also tough philosophically, because you have to grapple with the big question of whether or not someone can be of a “sound mind” while simultaneously expressing a desire to die, or to kill themselves. and even if someone can, is it possible to make some sort of objective framework by which to judge whether someone should be allowed to die, or to kill themselves? i think that most people settle into some form of yes on both, since we increasingly allow terminally ill patients to speed up their deaths so they don’t suffer–but i think most people would immediately balk at the idea that someone’s emotional suffering being any sort of similar justification, even though the principle of “wanting to prevent future suffering” is shared between the circumstances. at least from what i can tell in having the conversation, the latter simply doesn’t have the absolute finality of physical illness–thus, there’s always the prospect in your mind that a person will eventually get better. (but that in kind also begs the question: what if they don’t?)
there’s always the prospect in your mind that a person will eventually get better. (but that in kind also begs the question: what if they don’t?)
I think it’s important to view this through the lens of absolute suffering as well. Imagine we had some way to calculate suffering and recovery and we found out that it would take someone 50 years of suffering to get better. How old would they need to be for it to be okay for them to choose to die instead? Even when we deal with short term suffering, at what point do we get to make the decision for others whether they wish to be burdened with that suffering, or whether they’ve decided for themselves that said suffering is just not worth it?
It begs the question of how much autonomy should we be allowed to have? If it’s my body, do I have the choice to end myself? When should that autonomy be taken away from me? I think on the extreme edge cases, we can see why slowing down the process can help people from making impulsive decisions, but it ultimately comes back to a question you posed:
is it possible to make some sort of objective framework by which to judge whether someone should be allowed to die, or to kill themselves?
I don’t think humans will ever agree on a universal framework, simply because we’re in such a gray area. When is the amount of suffering enough to justify a death, is a question which people will have different answers to. How much autonomy should someone have over their own body is another question which people won’t agree on. You need to answer both to create a framework which allows people to choose to kill themselves.
This gets even more complicated with the linked article because we now have a government making some of these decisions and removing some barriers and disincentives from killing oneself. I no longer have to research and find a way to kill myself without suffering too much, if I so choose to do so, because the government is willing to handle that part. Is this an okay function for the government to do? In what cases? I think naturally people are inclined to allow this in extreme cases, such as terminal cancer or some kind of extreme suffering, but we are left with yet another question for which humans are going to disagree which is the role of government itself and what we are choosing to invest in.
I am disturbed
