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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.
I actually agree with your hypothetical, but choosing to kill yourself or choosing not to stop a fellow prisoner from killing himself is very different from society validating your choice and killing you itself.
If this girl had slit her own wrists in the bathtub or whatever, I think many of us would view it as a tragedy but none of us would view it as an outrage. The fact that the state did it is a necessary component of the fact pattern.
Also -- being tortured in a Russian prison is much worse than being mentally ill. Being under the physical control of another intelligent adversary intent on maximizing your suffering is an exotic state, morally, and I think your analogy trades on that exoticism in order to reach the conclusion that you want. If someone broke a bone and had to go through a week of painful recovery -- equally painful to the Russian torture -- but was expected to be fine after that, then I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances, even if we would sympathize with the suicidal tortured prisoner.
I'm not sure if I do. Though of course, if this is the only option on offer, we-as-society should figure out a way to do better.
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