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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.
It took some time for me to figure out what bothers me most about this. And it's the smell of cold dispassionate bureaucracy, lawyers, signatures, stamps, database entries. I imagine it was some nurse who administered the lethal injection, passed down the bureaucratic chain of command.
Euthanasia may be sometimes the less bad option, when someone cannot live a life of dignity any more. But it's still a tragedy and the person who puts someone out of their unbearable misery should still feel conflicted. Belgians managed to make this clinical and indirect, decision by committee, hiding behind each other. Instead, the chief bioethicist should have personally injected the poison.
Somehow our modern view of life is that it's merely a vessel for positive emotions and fun. If it doesn't deliver that, then it should be tossed aside. That one's life's purpose is one's own quality of life (and that on the short term, too). That's not the only way to view it. One can also see life as duty, towards a community, towards higher purposes. In this sense, she was wrong to ask for euthanasia as she had the potential ability to do good things in the future.
That life is good is an axiom, I can't argue for it rationally. Not a particular life, but life overall. It's not a statement that everyone's life is enjoyable, it's that life is valued. Other things are downstream from that. It may even be seen as the thing that breaks the symmetry of the antonym pair of good and evil, good is the one which is life affirming, which comes from life and points to life. It's deeper than rationality or religion. It's pre-numerate, it's not about perverse extremes of shutting up and multiplying. It is to be felt and then modulated by the intellect, to see how it works out for a particular situation.
The climate alarmists seem to still have an incling towards this when Greta complains that CO2 producers will ruin the lives of our children. But sooner or later the antinatalist strand will take primacy and the misanthropy will become clearer. "Climate anxiety" is already a thing. Apparently (as mentioned in a motte post) some young adults now even skip work based on their climate anxiety episodes. How long before we hear that euthanasia is a good way to deal with one's climate anxiety? It reduces the carbon footprint after all. If you're white, you also make more space for BIPOC.
Who actually killed this poor girl? The fact that her death was through euthanasia decouples her death from its actual cause, and I think it is important to re-link the two. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and killed instantly, I would say that ISIS killed her. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and bled out a week later, I would say that ISIS killed her. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and lived, but the shrapnel couldn't be removed and five years later, she dies from shrapnel migrating to her vital organs, would I say that ISIS killed her? Probably. What if she was not struck by shrapnel, suffered for five years and died by her government's hand? Did ISIS still kill her?
Or, you could push the responsibility back the other way, drawing on an idea I saw back on Reddit (posted by @KulakRevolt, maybe?) about the monopoly on violence: if the state claims the monopoly on violence, then it becomes responsible for all violence that it allows to happen within its borders, whether through neglect or incompetence. Under this view, the government killed her by allowing ISIS to perform terror attacks within its borders.
Now I think I've just set up one of those bell curve memes, and I don't know which segment I agree with.
In this case, it's not complicated: the person who killed her was the doctor or nurse who administered the lethal injection.
Now, that person could claim that he wasn't acting in his personal capacity, but as a representative of a larger system providing a service--"just following orders," you might say--and therefore responsibility ought to be shared more broadly, and I agree! Everyone else involved was a co-conspirator with some level of culpability, but this sharing of responsibility is not zero-sum--it communicates without dilution.
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