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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.
Wait, why is this (particularly) bad?
First, under normal conditions, I don’t know who would have a better claim to knowing if her life was worth living. Of course, wanting to die is not normal, and the fact she expressed that at all is decent license to distrust her evaluation.
Assume she was wrong, and that she was due for a miraculous recovery in June, followed by a life of bliss. What level of responsibility do we owe to get her there? A positive good which can only be achieved through outside intervention strikes me not as obligatory, but supererogatory.
The balance is only further towards allowing euthanasia if we grant that she might have been right or not recovered. So long as she wasn’t pressured into it, I don’t see how this is worse than a more traditional suicide.
Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.
You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.
The median human life for most of history probably included at least, in total, the equivalent of a week of awful torture, tbh. And they, in turn, would describe the life of a wild animal, not dissimilar to a far ancestor, as torture.
I should hope that the median human life does not involve begging for death! Intensity and locality of suffering has its own quality.
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