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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32850 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’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task, and only to the extent of their actual physical inability. For example, quadriplegics who can still move their heads get a setup where they get a button that they can press that will inject them with lethal drugs, people who have enough motor control to inject themselves could have the drug delivered to their beds, so that they can pull it into syringe and inject themselves, and people who are “just” depressed, but otherwise physically fine, get no help whatsoever.

I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it, and if they can’t bring themselves to do it, this strongly suggests that the person is not actually fully into this. The person in question has, allegedly, two prior suicide attempts. Normally, most suicide attempts from young women are just performative attempts at getting attention, so they are not meant to succeed, but here it is more likely to have just been ineptness at getting things done, given that you do not sign on a professional to do the job done if it’s just performative. Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.

This way, while healthy young people killing themselves will still be a tragedy, at least nobody will be complicit in this. Euthanizing healthy young people due to “mental health trauma” seems akin to me to deciding that giving heroin addicts as much heroin as they want is actually a perfectly good solution to the problem of heroin addiction, or, at even more basic level, giving a child a candy any time they ask for one. Indulging someone else’s wishes is not always good for them, and killing a healthy young person is definitely a central example. We should inculcate virtues, instead of maximizing expressed utility functions.

I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task

What about the people who have to clean up the bodies?

Yeah, everyone gets to keep their hands clean if that person who jumped from a skyscraper did it w/o any help, but now we've got possibly traumatized pedestrians who just saw a body smush itself into the ground and a pile of flesh, blood, and guts to clean off the streets. Assisted suicide avoids those and doesn't make as much of a mess.

If you were anti-suicide, I would get your view, because minimizing the cost of a suicide from the public eye actively harms your goal, but you're not anti-suicide.

I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Killing yourself gruesomely in public is deplorable, same as defecating in public. We manage to have people avoid doing the latter, we can also have them avoid the former. Just because you want to kill yourself doesn’t mean that you’re released from all societal expectations as to your behavior. For example, a mother of small children killing herself to escape from her psychological or mental issues is despicable: you are expected to provide for your children without shirking the responsibility.

That I allow people killing themselves doesn’t mean I condone that decision in every circumstance. My view is rather (and this is also a response to /u/VelveteenAmbush) that suicide is in some situations not a sign of mental illness, but instead a quite reasonable decision given the circumstances. If a 20-something girl tries to off herself as a result of “psychological trauma”, yeah, I think she most likely should be involuntarily committed. However, keeping elderly, sickly and suffering people alive despite their wishes is pointless and disrespectful.

I don't think people are defecating in the streets over their trauma. In any case, my point stands - making it so that suicide attemptors must do everything themselves means that most are probably going to undergo messy deaths. Even in the case of ODing on drugs and alcohol or whatever leaves a body to be discovered, and who knows how long that takes. If you allowed people to go to, for example, a euthanasia clinic, you ensure that we know about it ASAP and that there's no rotting body left for someone to unfortunately chance upon.

Frankly, I don’t find this whole angle of “who sees the body” to be very interesting. It is highly unlikely that this will affect my thinking about the issue in any significant manner. Finding someone’s body is normal, if not exactly everyday part of human existence. I don’t think that the issue of dealing with dead bodies should be the driving factor in the matter.

I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it

Jeez, call me old fashioned but I think we should stop them, involuntarily commit them and treat their mental illness.

If we know how to treat it - surely. If the treatment is "put them on hard drugs to make them a functional vegetable" - maybe not. Some old fashioned solutions are out of fashion for a reason. I agree that we should try hard, but there should be a limit of how hard. I have a feeling in this case the limit hasn't been reached, but it should exist. There should be an exit, just not to be used outside of most dire circumstances.

The process and values involved in that 'treatment' are awful though. If you take someone borderline suicidal and put them in temporary-jail with a bunch of differently insane people - maybe they even become friends, as in the OP - is that really going to help? Pair that with the frequent overuse of antipsychotics. And the life-denying nature of most of the 'therapy' treatments - convincing someone that, actually, self-care via burgers and 'live, laugh, love' is the true purpose in life to avert suicide isn't that much better when the person was, in part, depressed due to the initial (true) hollowness of that.

(Obviously, the person who euthanized themselves in the OP didn't have anything resembling a good reason to do so. But grandparent's suggestion that 'if you want to kill yourself, just do it' has some merit - one's instinctive desire not to is just evolutionary knowledge of how useful & powerful life is, and abandoning that should require understanding and confronting that personally, at least)

The process and values involved in that 'treatment' are awful though. If you take someone borderline suicidal and put them in temporary-jail with a bunch of differently insane people - maybe they even become friends, as in the OP - is that really going to help?

Yes, of course it's going to help when the alternative is just to watch them finish dying in the first place.

I am not suicidal, but I would definitely kill myself over being subjected to involuntary confinement and medication by the current medical system, unless I agreed with their understanding of what was wrong with me and what they planned to do about it. The casual cruelty that happens in environments like that is worse than I imagined, and once I saw it for myself, the necessity of escaping that fate at all costs became very clear. To be completely dehumanized is a fate worse than death.

Well the idea is that they'd prevent you from killing yourself while you were committed, and once you were released, you'd no longer face that dilemma.

Have you read Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay? When your remaining lifespan is expected negative value, suicide is sane.

The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd. I'm entirely supportive of assisted suicide for the terminally ill and those with untreatable severe chronic pain, but this ain't it.

The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd.

There are people who assert that suicide is always wrong. I think this argument is "haggling over the price."

I remember when liberals accused George W. Bush of haggling over the price because he favored the death penalty but not abortion. Of course you'll probably consider that a principled distinction, but price-haggling always feels principled when it's our team, doesn't it?

No I don't, there's nothing wrong with price-haggling. You'll just use different arguments for it.

I think the kid with PTSD and the decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee are comparable. You think they're qualitatively different. Fine, make your case, or at least describe it with more detail than "beyond absurd". At least specify some sort of metric.You can't just construct reference classes by appeal to absurdity.

Some people think that eating meat is always wrong. If you think it's okay to eat pork but not to eat human flesh, are you "haggling over the price"? I'm not sure what purpose your comment serves.

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Ok, you win. Suicide should be forbidden under all circumstances, because otherwise people will use any exception you grant, to argue for allowing young adults and teenagers to kill themselves.

Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.

I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn, I'm saying there's two different arguments here. And for that matter, this argument still implies the line - presumably you would not say something like "people wil use any exception to argue for allowing decrepit Alzheimers patients to kill themselves." So your line is still there; you cannot construct a principled argument by saying "otherwise, the unprincipled line would be violated."

Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.

Please do. It would a lot more honest conversation than assuring people this totally isn't a slippery slope, and that the exception should be allowed out of compassion.

I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn

"Haggling over the price" implies that the principle is invalid. I reject that view

So your line is already implied

No, it just implies one case is worse than the other, but both are over the line.

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Which just goes to show that all slopes are slippery, the center cannot hold, etc, etc.

Barbers can cut your hair but we don't let them chop off your limbs, it's legal to eat pork but not legal to eat human flesh, etc. Not all slopes are slippery.

Give it a few years...

Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.

I have to assume the chosen method included all 3 of these. It has the additional burden on another pair of hands, true, but it would satisfy those criteria.

You’re missing the entire point. If she simply killed herself, we wouldn’t be discussing it here. Instead, she said that she want to be killed, the system ground its gears, approved her killing, and as a result someone killed her. This is fundamentally different, because it affirms her choice and, in fact, means that people are complicit in the tragedy. That’s the opposite of virtuous.

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