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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32851 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html

This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.

I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.

I believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.

Exit rights to life are intrinsic, you just have to actually commit suicide. Granted, it's not easy, but it's not impossible either.

I tend to agree with OP that this slope has proven alarmingly slippery.

If we're taking for granted it can be done outside I'm not sure what exactly the difference between the top and bottom of this slope is.

In some ways it's a higher lift to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to get the state to sanction your death, in some ways it's a higher to off yourself personally. But you don't have a principal-agent problem if you're the one killing yourself. Besides, that option can't be legislated away. Not sure how I'd feel if it could.

When a society does not have medically-assisted euthanasia, the implied goals of the society are to improve people's situations so that they don't want to kill themselves. The goal will not succeed for everyone. But there's less of a, "Don't like it? Then quit" attitude.

Countries with ubiquitous medically-assisted euthanasia seem to have determined that in a lot of situations people should just quit instead of receive support or help. For example in Canada people are being euthanized because they are disabled and are not receiving the financial support they need, or they are unable to see loved ones due to Covid precautions. Patients have recorded hospital staff pushing assisted-suicide against their express wishes.

These people might be making the rational best decision for themselves at the individual level, but society might be failing them overall. When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.

For example in Canada people are being euthanized because they are disabled and are not receiving the financial support they need,

This is sorta misleading .From what i gather from the article, Canada's healthcare system is so bad that a handful of people are choosing euthaniza, not that they are being killed against their will or to save costs. It shows how despite how much people complain about healthcare costs in the US, which is an understandable complaint, things could still be so much worse.

In countries without Euthanasia, people being denied access to medical treatment leads to dissent, disagreement and debate over policy, and potentially, the policy being changed in future. Seemingly, in countries with Euthanasia, it (at least in this example) leads to suicides. Not all pressure valves are good. Euthanasia permitting greater misrule as angry people instead become dead people is a plausible problem.

I think our current governments would euthanise a lot more than just the elderly if they could.

I understand there are some aesthetic issues, especially with the actual transition from no-euthanasia to yes-euthanasia but I can't imagine that if we had always had it as an option that we'd seriously considered rescinding the option. Hospital staff pushing it is a whole other thing, I would certainly not want it incentivized in any way. Nature and society have always failed people and always will, we have to organize what we can around that possibility. The OP isn't an example of something society seems able to fix, despite much effort we cannot reverse this person's trauma, I think we should try but I also think we should try developing FTL travel and cold fusion but support other sources of transportation and energy production in the meantime.

When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.

Doesn't that require assuming that society doesn't prefer trying to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems? I doubt anyone who favors euthanasia in these circumstances is any less eager to find nonlethal solutions than people who oppose euthanasia.

This is intuitively correct. The kind of personality that goes into the helping professions are generally not indifferent go f*** yourself types.

Well they're not at first.

Do you know many nurses, firefighters, medical practitioners, etc? There's definitely a lot that do it for altruistic reasons, but you'll also find a lot of people who become extremely jaded and detached. And probably by necessity, as seing people hurt all day can destroy your mind if you don't put some barriers up.

But were it true that the care takers are always the caring people manifest, we wouldn't have so many instances of neglect and malpractice.

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