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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32821 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.

2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.

The way euthanasia has broadened runs disturbingly parallel to the way trans and abortion slid down their respective slopes. Legal euthanasia was legislated on the back of activism asking that terminally-ill old people be allowed a dignified release from unbearable suffering, while they still had their ability to consent. Trans activism used sympathetic cases of deeply dysphoric individuals whose transition alleviated life-long suffering. Abortion activists spoke of desperate young rape victims needing a safe, legal, and rare option for a truly horrible situation.

And now we have young people committing suicide with government blessing, as well as Canada's health system telling a veteran "maybe you should KYS"; irreversible medications, surgeries, and everything you see on LibsOfTikTok pushed with very little care or safeguards; and up-to-birth or even partial-birth abortions. "Oh, that's just the slippery slope fallacy" no longer cuts it with me - I need to see the left make a credible commitment to a limiting principle before I even think about supporting their next cause.

Yeah, I also get annoyed by faux-intellectual references to "the slippery-slope fallacy," as though slippery-slope arguments were categorically fallacious. They are not. Some slippery-slope arguments are well-formed; others are poorly formed. The difference is whether you can describe a causal mechanism where an earlier decision makes one fork of a later decision more likely, and there are many such.

For a comprehensive investigation of slippery-slope arguments, Eugene Volokh wrote this paper.

Using the most sympathetic case in arguments isn't a new tactic, it's older than dirt.

The opposite side of this coin is called "salami tactics".

I'd argue that suicide prohibition and lockdownism are actually quite similar: they both severely curtail individual rights in the name of preventing social harm; they both a contrast themselves against a cruel, stony-hearted, libertarian alternative ('letting Grandma die'); they're both fairly easy to circumvent in isolation, but very difficult to oppose in an organised way. I suspect the fury you feel against the total, arbitrary, capricious power of the medical/state establishment would be very familiar to suicidal people who have been involuntarily committed.

But perhaps this is tangential to your point; truly legal suicide is far from the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia. Still, I'd be surprised if anyone petitioning the Belgian state for euthanasia wouldn't have saved themselves the bother if equivalent means were freely available to them.

Legal suicide indeed isn't the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia.

I see the combination of government being strong enough to engage in systematic torture of the population, as evidenced by lockdowns, and also offering euthanasia to be a uniquely dangerous combination of circumstances. At it's most extreme, consider the practice of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union. Dissidents were classed as mentally ill, with the nonsense-diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". This didn't progress to outright euthanasia as e.g the Nazis did, but if there's no pre-existing barriers to euthanasia, like there is now in places like Canada, it's very easy to see that progression. All this hypothetical government need do to kill a bunch of dissidents is make their lives unliveable with restrictions (such as targeting the unvaccinated with vaccine mandates) cause them severe unhappiness via the circumstances, misdiagnose that as depression rather than the normal affect towards the circumstances, and off them.

This is personal, too. My very vehement disagreement with lockdowns lead some now-former family members (as in, I distanced myself from them in response to this) to falsely accuse me of mental illness because I refused to provide information to a track and trace scheme. I see a concerningly short path from the government legalizing euthanasia to them trying to use it to find some reason to murder people like me.

It's amazing the way this blew past all the worst dystopian fantasies of the alarmists in only a few years.

Nobody thought it would be this bad, and now nobody cares. Talk about a summary of this whole century so far.

I mean some people were predicting it, most of them religious. This decade has humbled the atheist in me. They clearly knew something that I did not.

It is uncanny how right even the strawmen were.

How right were the strawmen? Taking the linked graphic way too seriously, I think it's clear that the strawman is supposed to be an assertion of a causal relationship, right? Not just the bare "if X then Y", which is vacuously true if Y is something guaranteed to happen eventually, like a plague, or teachers being dumb.

My scoring would be:

  • Various plagues. Partial credit here: it's possible that modern acceptance of gay (relationships/marriage/whatever) exacerbated Monkeypox. (The counterargument is that removing stigma allows Public Health Inc to intervene more effectively. And also that the continent on which Monkeypox is most prevalent is... not famously accepting of gay anything.) There's nothing resembling a causal relationship with COVID though, and since that one's the main reason "plagues" are on our minds these days, only partial credit. Also I'm being generous by interpreting "plague" literally and ignoring the "locusts and frogs" thing.

  • The terrorists will win. Trying to be charitable, our (U.S.) horrid withdrawal from Kabul was a "win" for the terrorists. I'm not clever enough to construct a causal path from gay marriage to that, though. No points.

  • Third world war. Again being charitable, we have an elevated risk of a third world war today. I can think of possible causal paths, but none that I can unironically believe, so no points here either.

  • Schools will begin to teach... First, I have to be extremely charitable in ignoring the obvious ways in which the statement "schools are teaching..." is at best grotesquely misleading. I think the sensible reading of this strawman is not "married gay people will force schools to..." but rather a sort of slippery slope. I think it's true that there's a slope there, and it was slippery, but it's also true that once we hit the "parents don't have the right to a say in what their kids are taught" level, it became an excellent electoral strategy to run against this stuff. We're not falling into a trough of unbounded stupidity. Nevertheless it is the case that legalizing gay marriage probably made this broad category of thing common, so yes, partial credit here too.

In summary: not very right. With this amount of stretching, I can give any terrible theory partial credit. Par for the course for strawmen, but let's not give credit where it ain't due.

I must say I find more telling the way you feel the need to refute a strawman than the content of the argument.

I mean look at your response.

One is a "yes, but you're not thinking of it for the right reasons". Given mindreading is void of content, this reduces to yes.

Two is weirdly overlooking how the US spent large amounts of ressources trying to convince Afghans to adopt Californian morality, gay acceptance very much included. Which was never going to work and made any collaboration a purely mercenary affair that collapsed as fast as you would expect. I could go on about this and how the Americans suck at imperialism compared to the Brits (and weirdly failed in Afghanistan for very similar reasons).

Three is certainly dubious, unless you fix the strawman and change gay marriage for "cede more terrain to progressive politics" and then it's unambiguous that the insane zeal for Ukraine as the new current thing is not coming from nowhere. But strictly speaking it hasn't happened and wouldn't happen because of that.

Four is the really outrageous one, since the strawman formulation, despite being a very strong claim to make, is literally true and accurate, and all you find to spin it is "yes but some people still oppose it" which frankly is ridiculous.

Overall, for something literally created to deform and discredit conservative arguments, I think that's a impressively good score. I wouldn't start betting money on reverse-progressive-memes, but it certainly bolsters the thesis that the conservatives of yore were at least directionnally accurate.

Well, now I feel bad. My initial reply was dishonest, in that I did not accurately represent my thoughts on the matter. I attempted to construct a maximally charitable interpretation, as well as blindly accept almost-certainly-false factual claims. I wanted the comment to be "fun". In light of your reply---certainly not in the same spirit!---I regret this. Let me attempt to rectify the mistake, being both more honest and more literal:

The first is plainly false. There have not been plagues; there's been a plague (involving no frogs or locusts!). The transmission of that plague (COVID) is not facilitated by anything related to gay marriage. There's been one other disease, of minor import, whose origins lie before the introduction of gay marriage, and in a continent that contains exactly one country to have legalized same-sex marriage (out of 54). The effects of this disease have been minimal in the U.S.; it less qualifies as a "plague" than the common cold. (That was the point of my comment that you asserted was "mind-reading", by the way: that monkeypox is not actually a thing to deserve the name "plague", it only seems that way because the media is going through some sort of perverse "pandemic withdrawal". Thanks for that particularly uncharitable interpretation.)

The second is likewise absurd. Gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. several years after it became obvious that American ventures in the middle east were an enormous, largely unnecessary, resource sink. "Terrorist victories caused gay marriage" is more likely to be a defensible position here.

The third... shit, I already used the word "absurd". Let's go with "risible" this time around. WWIII hasn't happened. The zeal for Ukraine is shared by many countries that don't share the U.S.'s laws on same-sex relationships. For instance, Ukraine. Less glibly, say, Italy. Moreover, the assertion of a general pattern "left wins -> left becomes more active" (relevant both here and for the next point) is probably untrue. The greatest expression of leftist zeal in recent times came after a loss (2016), not a win.

The fourth is just an obvious M&B (which makes it the best claim so far!). The motte is "we managed to find O(1) instances of teachers doing bad things" (at least one of whom got sent to jail for it). The bailey is "this is happening at a large fraction of schools". This particular M&B is enabled by the standard linguistic ambiguity in sentences of the form "[broad class of things without quantifier] [predicate]". This isn't even an interesting M&B.

The best that can be said about these arguments is that, among the obviously untrue claims, they contain claims that are less obviously untrue, and even occasionally claims that have not yet been decisively proven untrue.

Look, none of this is surprising or interesting. An absurd strawman argument turned out to be low-quality: who could have guessed! As you hinted, nothing said here could affect an underlying debate over the consequences of legalizing SSM. But suggesting, for rhetorical effect, that "even the strawman was right", isn't going to lead to truth unless there's a non-deranged argument that the strawman was actually right. At best, you have to abandon the claim in a hurry when called on it; more often, you end up doing what you just did, and attempting to defend claims like "gay marriage caused WWIII".

I kinda want to dig on (4) because I think your view of the situation is not accurate and the promotion of promiscuity and alternative sexual identities isn't at all dog bites man but very much institutional.

But I'll agree with you that this whole frame is a waste of our time unless we go back to discussing actual non broken arguments instead of evaluating how terrible they have to be and still be accurate to be meaningful.

Two is weirdly overlooking how the US spent large amounts of ressources trying to convince Afghans to adopt Californian morality, gay acceptance very much included.

How much did they spend? I don't think the Americans ever tried to make Afghanistan into a progressive utopia. They just wanted a more-or-less stable country with a more-or-less functional government that didn't host terrorists.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan – that's the US-backed government, not the Taliban – had a constitution stating that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam". I don't recall the US ever asking them even to make a secular constitution, let alone legalize same-sex marriage.

"It's not going to suck itself"

Agree. Plagues: happen every hundred years at least for all of human history, covid was a very minor plague in comparison, monkeypox too, both were much better than AIDS or smallpox. Terrorists: terrorist have been winning for much of the past hundred years, again, no change. Third world war: ... these have also been constantly happening for the past hundred years, not causal. Schools teach: I don't think explicit homosexual sex is taught in any significant number of american schools.

Healthcare-assisted euthanasia is a poor example of right- ideas being correct, anyway. For starters, it's very uncommon, and even moreso for people who don't have terminal diseases / are old. And - innocent, weak people die all the time because of the state, says leftists. "people should have to work to make food" is reactionary tinged. Is it bad when a homeless person starves because the state didn't give them housing and welfare? What about when someone dies of some rare cancer "because" the state didn't give them the $500k experimental treatment? And those happen way, way more! It's not a very close comparison, but the much higher frequency of the latter, and the fact that in both cases, the end is 'innocent exploited person dies'...

Whereas something like low TFR, casual sex above having children, pointless simulacra consumer media culture, slave morality and last man, those are large-scale claims about society that every person is claimed to personally experience, and are thus much more important.

"people should have to work to make food" is reactionary tinged.

"He who does not work, neither shall he eat." -- Stalin. Also Lenin (Vladimir, not John). Incorporated into the Soviet Constitution, for what that was worth. Real reactionary, that bunch.

(it's from 2 Thessalonians; maybe that makes it reactionary regardless of its later uses?)

covid was a very minor plague in comparison

As an actual disease, sure. In terms of economic, lifestyle and cultural consequences I'd argue it got inflated into one of the biggest ever

Largely agreed. I could still be swayed on euthanasia worries; I'm not sure why, but somehow it seems particularly bad to kill somebody and call it kindness. I haven't thought about it carefully enough to have proper thoughts though.

What does "last man" refer to? Not familiar with the phrase.

Nietzche's last man.

Seeking comfort, simple pleasure, comfort, and above all avoiding suffering.

"The last man's first appearance is in "Zarathustra's Prologue". According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves. After having unsuccessfully attempted to get the populace to accept the Übermensch as the goal of society, Zarathustra confronts them with a goal so disgusting that he assumes that it will revolt them – a culture which seeks only passive comfort and routine, avoiding everything that could potentially bring risk, pain, or disappointment.[1] Zarathustra fails in this attempt, and instead of repelling and manipulating the populace into pursuing the goal of the Übermensch, the populace take Zarathustra literally and choose the "disgusting" goal of becoming the last men. This decision leaves Zarathustra disheartened and disappointed."

The worst dystopian fantasy is something akin to Aktion T4.

This is shitty but it's no Aktion T4.

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.

She tried committing suicide twice and failed. Suicide isn't difficult. A couple helium balloons and she'd have had a painless death. Maybe she wasn't intelligent enough to use google? Maybe she wasn't rational enough? Or.. maybe she was crying out for help, but kept getting the wrong answer. Maybe, deep down inside, she hoped that the 'official' route would have some actual pushback. We'll never know.

I have a strong suspicion that this woman is dead because we live in a society where we put victims on a pedestal. She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide. This likely happened when someone pushed back on her just a bit. And then she got more and more attention, and it became a shield. For awhile. But how long can you really put up with someone like that? So she does it again. And eventually she's led down this path, having been rewarded every step of the way for being a victim. Maybe she saw this as the ultimate reward. The pinnacle of victimhood.

Who knows, I'm probably wrong.

Suicide isn't difficult

Neither is basic bodybuilding/fitness, and yet many people fail to do it even when they express a desire to be fit. Concluding, by some "revealed preference" sophistry, that they don't "actually" want to be fit is stupid in my very humble opinion. They want to be fit. They simply don't have the willpower to follow through. Those are different things.

Suicide takes less than 1 second of action, and zero persistence through pain or discomfort. It is closer to watching tv than bodybuilding. If you told me you badly wanted to watch tv, but a tv was in the other room and you simply lacked the will to walk in there and turn it on I absolutely would question the depth of your desire to watch tv.

Or.. maybe she was crying out for help,

What does this term mean? Is it intended to attribute any form of intent to her actions, as if 'some part of' her wants to be put into psychiatric care or weekly therapy? The rest seems to imply so. But what does that mean? Doesn't it make much more sense to say - she's just messed up and acting rather incoherently for various reasons, alienation from modern life, no coherent will or desire, etc, so even in 'committing suicide' she has no particular reason to actually kill herself but appear like it.

Like, can someone actually make an argument that the average suicidal person is, in any sense, doing a 'cry for help'? Why would that be true?

Or does it just mean 'she is doing a bad thing, and therefore we should help her, metaphorically'? In which case, what's the point of calling it a 'cry for help'?

Clearly her dying was dumb, and the people who 'assisted it' were dumb to do so, but she doesn't need to be, in some claimed sense, "actually seeking for inpatient psychiatric care, really, she's consenting i can just intuit it", but rather just doing something dumb.

She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide

This is where people usually go "what? you're saying she committed suicide because she wanted attention? that's cruel" when I've seen others make my point above in the past. And it's a terrible argument, something can seem mean and be true, but ... is it true? Attempting suicide 'for attention' can happen in some sense, but filing the paperwork for state-assisted euthanasia seems like a remarkably bad way of getting attention. As does suicide in general, honestly.

She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this.

But presumably during all of this, she had a job, friends, activities other than the PTSD thing, where he was getting 'attention' of sorts. What happened to those? If she lost them due to the PTSD, then ... maybe the suicide was related to what caused that and not seeking attention. And if not, then how does on get to a position where one attempts suicide for attention but still has other stuff going on in life? It makes sense if there are other primary causes, but not like this.

Even if 'cry for help' just means 'she wanted friends and attention and the only way she could get that was to commit suicide', that doesn't really seem plausible, and makes even less sense when 'help' just means therapy/hospitalization. But 'wanted friends and attention' doesn't make sense as a significant explanation for most suicides (noting the obvious selection bias, everyone I know of who's committed suicide had lots of friends and regularly talked with many), so...

But she knew the path she was on was going to lead to hear death. At least in Canada, they ask you again before giving the final lethal injection, warning you there is no going back after it.

It seems she did successfully commit suicide, and in a way with a lot less terror than jumping off a bridge. Maybe (seriously) we should make people face that terror before they commit suicide (is that what you're proposing? "Show you really want it -- cut your hand off to prove it."), but I don't think so, personally.

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.

I guess, but I also feel like it's terrible to have to make it painful for people. Ask almost anyone how they want to die, and they'll say something like "painlessly and in my sleep". How many people actually die like that? Very few. I don't expect most suicides are as painless as lethal injection would be.

I've come to view the physical pain of suicide as a feature rather than a bug due to its deterrent effect. You have to really, really want it, and I think that's a good thing. But ODing on fentanyl seems... well, not fun, but better than most other methods.

I was under the impression that painlessness was debated. Looking it up, this issue seems to be a complete shitshow.

As I understand the arguments, lethal injection is only painful and unreliable when used for executions. When the same chemical is used for good lethal injections a moral-ionic bond flips and makes it painless and humane.

Once I started noticing things like this, it became impossible to stop.

I don't understand why we suck so much at killing people in humane and dignified ways.

Why the fuck are we messing with chemicals and gas and electricity and whatever random stupid things when firing squads have existed for centuries and are reliable, quick, inexpensive and painless?

Is it because people want a more presentable corpse? Do people hate martial aesthetics? Is it too much fun coming up with new ways of executing people using the latest gizmos of science?

Some effect similar to the euphemism treadmill, perhaps? No matter what method you use, that method will steadily lose favour due to it being associated with killing, so you keep inventing new ones to shed the old emotional baggage.

Firing squads are messy and easy to screw up. The guillotine is quick and reliable, but even messier.

Firing squads are more troublesome than you’d expect.

To avoid disfigurement due to multiple shots to the head, the shooters are typically instructed to aim at the heart, sometimes aided by a paper or cloth target.

We abhor a mess, and anything that can be perceived as undignified. There’s also an impact on the executioner(s). We want the criminal gone, but we’d prefer not to do it.

Why the fuck are we messing with chemicals and gas and electricity and whatever random stupid things when firing squads have existed for centuries and are reliable, quick, inexpensive and painless?

Are you sure death (ceasing to exist) is swift-enough following a bullet in the brain? Frankly, I'd feel more comfortable speeding up to 200km/h and hitting a tree.

Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.

Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.

Sure, from the moment you cut the head it's irreversible (maybe technically not quite, given cryonics...).

As a subject, I'd prefer something that disintegrates the actual neural network than letting it die from blood loss.

Yikes, I didn't realize until I just looked it up myself. It's strange, when I look up whether it's painless for people, everyone seems to say that, no it's not. When I look up whether putting pets to sleep is painless, everyone seems to say, yes, it totally is. Do they use different drugs in these scenarios? Is the protocol different? Or are people just fooling themselves into thinking their pets are having peaceful deaths?

I think pets are put to sleep with a barbiturate overdose, while executions involve some bizarre cocktail of drugs that persists only because the anti-execution lobby will seize on any change to the status quo as an opportunity to create years of delay and billions of dollars of legal fees for the state.

Can you elaborate? Why would the anti-execution lobby want more painful deaths?

I think they just want to oppose executions with any and every legal argument they can make without risking their lawyers' law licenses. It just happens that changing the status quo increases the surface area for legal challenge.

They don't. They want less executions total. The problem is that the tug-of-war can result in bizarre things on the ground as what gets done is what's easiest to defend (rather than what is best).

That said, IIRC there are some places that have stopped using LI entirely because the anti-execution lobby managed to get literally every pharmaceutical manufacturer to cease selling to prisons. It's not solely a "status quo is god" thing.

I'm not really sold on the DP in first-world countries myself, at least as a coercive measure. Lifers should definitely get the option, though.

For the same reason the green lobby "wants" higher carbon emissions - most people aren't utilitarians.

They seem to be painless. Speaking for fairly direct personal experience, you're essentially put to sleep, and then your heart stops. Direct witness reported seeing no distress (witness to Canadian euthanasia administrant).

Not sure. I would guess the cocktail is different—I didn’t see anything about potassium for animals—but I don’t think I can confirm without a lot of bleak reading.

For fairness’ sake, I have seen both yes and no argued for human pain. By all accounts it seems to beat electrocution.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The thing is, depression is often a result of thinking too much. The more you think about reality, the more depressed you get, because reality is extremely depressing, we are a convolution of dust floating forever through an uncaring and unending universe of chaotic stupidity, hurting others and being hurt simply by existing. Or maybe it's a result of thinking more than usual, but not quite enough to be happy about your situation. Either way, it's generally not stupid people who get depressed, exceptions like me set aside, and so while I definitely think everyone should be allowed to choose how they live (or don't) their lives, I think promoting that idea is the absolute dumbest thing we could do about it. Attempts at suicide maybe don't need to be punished, but they should certainly not be state sanctioned - not for the person who attempted it, but for everyone else yearning for an end to the misery circus.

I agree with you (except for the parts where you imply that reality is unbearably dismal). It seems like a lot of people conceive of suicide as a rational decision that one makes when the expected value of future pain exceeds the expected value of future pleasure. If that were true, suicides wouldn't spike in response to a suicide being reported and made salient by the popular press (the Werther Effect).

Suicide certainly involves some degree of ennui or internal torment, in the trivial sense that no one would kill themselves if everything is absolutely awesome, but every normal life involves plenty of ennui and internal torment.

More common as a cause is people spending too much time contemplating suicide, thinking through the mechanics of it, and elaborating philosophical justifications for it. I think people talk themselves into it, and that doing so is a more proximate cause of suicide than the absolute degree of anguish they are experiencing. I think it's literally a memetic hazard.

And having the state procure the suicide validates that choice, makes it more salient, makes it part of the marketplace of respectable choices that individuals make.

its not necessarily about the state though, it should be allowed for a private business to offer, even suggest, euthanasia to people. if more people end up killing themselves than otherwise would, its not a problem because there was no coercion involved, and you can not determine for other people what is good for them, because pleasure and pain can not be measured.

Some people are suicidal, and this is a nicer and more dignified way to commit suicide. It's easy to support this on generic libertarian or even (trans)humanist grounds; the state and society are, ideally, not entitled to deny people their exit rights.

What's more unpleasant about the situation is that this libertarianism is very skewed by what one could call «Cheems mindset» or perhaps medical ethics. We don't have a legally enshrined freedom of form and being: we have only freedom of diminution, freedom to make yourself something lesser or avoid some medically recognized pain at some cost, rather than modify arbitrarily.

You can get feminizing hormones and antiandrogens much, much easier than you can get T (unless you're an FtM trans with «dysphoria») and HGH. You can get euthanasia but not euphoretics and not any serious research into cognitive enhancement. Some claims to the pressing need to change are recognized and affirmed; others are laughed out of the room (imagine incels petitioning for state-mandated masculinization treatment).

It shows that this isn't really about freedom, but rather about some blind and selective idea of compassion. The sort that's grounded in the notion of humanity which doesn't seek to grow, only to stop suffering. It's not the sort of humanity I want to live together with; hopefully there'll be an answer superior to the euthanasia booth.

Yep, my mind immediately jumped to the Trans comparison as well on this one. I think that the medical powers that be have shown over the last few years that they're just not really fit for purpose in terms of properly spelling out the issues at play. I think it's probably a matter of "doing what is best for society", as deemed by elites.

It's worth saying on the T point- there was a video doing the rounds of a 21 year old F2M man speaking to camera about how they were too far gone (too androgenised) to consider detransitioning. Besides the mastectomy (which is actually sort of reversible, same as breast cancer patients), the T had led to insane male pattern baldness (Norwood 5 or so) for a 21 year old. And I suppose the tragedy of the situation was that you think Testosterone->some kind of Adonis, in the eyes of what would have been a teenage girl who felt out of place, but the reality was a small, bald little man-child who wouldn't register as a 4/10 on the attractiveness scale.

Obviously T for Cismen will be different (different starting points), and baldness isn't that big a deal if you're improving muscularity etc. but it was just an example of how this constant fuckery with our bodies usually doesn't match up to expectations, and as someone more used to seeing detransitioning/side effects/unfortunate results of M2F individuals, this was quite sad.

All pretty off topic on Euthanasia I guess, beyond the general principle of "we should try much harder to stop people doing irreversible things to themselves, and we should try harder the more years of life they have left to live (or not) with the consequences".

but the reality was a small, bald little man-child who wouldn't register as a 4/10 on the attractiveness scale.

Oh man. Wait till they hit 30.

I recently saw this comic posted on a far-left site of a person holding a photo of a young femboy catgirl making a cute face, while looking at the same person at 30, bearded and drinking at the bar in a rumpled jacket and tie, still with the cat ears and tail. Wish I still had the link.

They transitioned from cat to lynx, that's all.

If we viewed hormone supplementation for men as a worthy goal, presumably we'd make progress on converting manlets to Adonises while minimizing the risk of them ending up as balder manlets. SARMs seem like a promising avenue, selectively increasing muscle mass and bone density but possibly avoiding hair loss and testicular side effects of traditional anabolic steroids. I've little doubt that a fraction of the medical experimentation that has gone into converting penises into ersatz vaginas and vice versa could do wonders to advance our ability to guide natural sexual dimorphism more carefully along its natural path.

This comment is an excellent demonstration that the claims from the anti-trans side of this or that being "natural" or "unnatural", and therefore objectively right or wrong, are just an attempt to rationalize their own completely subjective aesthetic preferences. How do you not see the absurdity in claiming that giving trans people actually natural hormones – ones that actual humans actually have, in nature – is wrong and denying biology, etc., while giving people with body dysmorphia (who are, like trans people, unsatisfied with their "natural" bodies) chemicals that have never existed outside a lab, and are functionally unlike any natural substance, is just "guiding" their body "along its natural path"?

How do you not see the absurdity in claiming that giving trans people actually natural hormones – ones that actual humans actually have, in nature – is wrong and denying biology, etc.

I don't think I ever actually claimed that.

while giving people with body dysmorphia (who are, like trans people, unsatisfied with their "natural" bodies) chemicals that have never existed outside a lab, and are functionally unlike any natural substance, is just "guiding" their body "along its natural path"?

Because it is. Wanting to be a more perfectly realized version of the path that nature set you on is normal and even healthy. Wanting to be the other sex is at least severely maladaptive.

arent both behaviors maximally natural just as any behavior, because we and everything we can interact with exists within nature? how do you define natural such that taking gender transition hormones is unnatural while taking hormones as a male to become stronger and more masculine is natural?

No, I don't agree with a definition of natural in which everything that occurs in our universe qualifies equally. But no, I also don't want to go down a rabbithole arguing semantics with you.

Trans people wouldn't need to be given hormones if they were making them naturally.

The hormones they're being given at least exist naturally in humans. All humans have both estrogen and testosterone. It's just the levels of each being altered in trans people. This is apparently unnatural. But giving people synthetic chemicals that don't exist anywhere in nature is apparently "natural". This is absurd.

Both are unnatural. 'Something is natural' is a pretty shitty argument in general. Gravity is natural too, jumping off a cliff isn't healthy.

Some people are suicidal, and this is a nicer and more dignified way to commit suicide.

I object to the assumption that making suicide "nicer" is a good thing.

You're on an Internet message board sneering at people for posting on an Internet message board?

This is a low effort retort that contributes nothing.

This was a triumph.

I'm making a note here:

huge success.

It's hard to overstate

My satisfaction.

Aperture Science.

We do what we must

Because we can.

For the good of all of us.

Except the ones who are dead.

But there's no sense crying

Over every mistake.

You just keep on trying

Till you run out of cake.

And the Science gets done.

And you make a neat gun.

For the people who are

Still alive.

Just a test: If it were a young man rather than a young woman, would you also be this strongly revolted?

(Matter of fact, I had a sort of similar case in my circle of acquaintances, with no legal euthanasia. He wound up successfully self-terminating after two failed attempts, and the social circle consensus seemed to be that it was sad how hard psychiatry had failed him but the act was ultimately utility-maximising. But then, he had actually befriended a female mirror image of the same age during one of his involuntary commitments, and people were very reluctant to inform her about his success lest it encourage her to do the same.)

To quote 'A man for all seasons', 'Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!'

I feel like doing a minor victory lap, gruesome as it is, as I was one of those whom viewed euthanasia permissible, but the last thing I want is to have state-sponsored euthanasia in place. (And, yes, before you ask, I've yet to square that hole as to allow for such a thing. The world isn't perfect, sadly.)

Every time I see this advocated or hearing for Op's scenario, I can't help but envision myself at 75 going in for a minor medical procedure only to have the working professional suggest I commit state-sponsored self-die. I'd rather just skip that entire possibly, thanks.

Canada is unique among countries that have legalized euthanasia in permitting doctors to bring up the possibility to patients who haven't even mentioned it. In other countries, the patient must bring it up first, unprompted.

In other words, this particular failure mode is trivially preventable.

Every time I see this advocated or hearing for Op's scenario, I can't help but envision myself at 75 going in for a minor medical procedure only to have the working professional suggest I commit state-sponsored self-die

Can you expand on this? I don't really have any problem with this, I'd say no.

I can just wordlessly point at the utilization that medical euthanasia has gotten in Canada, as I feel that encapsulates the best example of 'this is what could happen.'

And, yes, my reply would be along the lines of 'Tell you what, Doc, you first, then I'll consider it.'

Flippant commentary aside, I don't want the above scenario to come to the fore because I believe, in order for us to get to this point, several things have gone horribly wrong. I don't want the option to be on the table to begin with. I don't want a scenario where I'm incommunicado for whatever reason, and the doctor kindly suggests to my family and/or next of kin 'Well, we could do this...'

I'm sure I could paint what-ifs till the day was over, and still not realize the worst of what could occur. Personally, I'd just rather nip the matter in the bud and make sure it could never happen to start.

FWIW, a good friend had a relative do this in Canada, and while painful, it seemed to be a comparatively "positive" experience. They were terminally ill with cancer, however. I still consider a good thing they didn't need to suffer longer than they chose to.

I would be. I mean, some illnesses can be intolerable, and gender has nothing to do with it, but I still feel very hard to believe nothing could be done to fix it, given the circumstances as described (no physical injury, youth, etc.) and can't shake the feeling that somehow this outcome is too normalized for comfort. Maybe it wasn't fixable, and maybe there was really nothing to be done, but somehow the tone of all messages feels like it's some normal, maybe even good outcome and not a terrible failure. I don't think it should feel normal.

What are you testing for? It's natural to be more protective of women. Call it "women are wonderful", "white knight" or whatever, we subconsciously know that the well-being and safety of the (young) women of our tribe/community is crucial for its continued existence, via childbirth and raising families.

This doesn't mean that young men checking out isn't a tragedy. But it's different.

I would be for all the reasons /u/Tophattingson outlined above. We essentially went through the same moral reasoning over the years.

So...a vague sense that it would be abused, plus a burning passion to talk about lockdownism?

That's incredibly uncharitable. My read is more like:

  1. Assisted euthanasia was agitated for to give the terminally-ill a release from their pain, and to stop the medical system from torturing octogenarians to keep them breathing. In an astonishingly short period of time, we now have a twentysomething-year-old killing herself in Belgium as well as the Canadian medical system offering suicide to a traumatized veteran. (I'm no "thank you for your service"-guy, but I see something truly appalling about doing that to a man who offered himself up to his nation's military.)

  2. Public health authorities have proven themselves so consistently late and/or wrong about nearly everything over the past three years that it is now extremely hard to have any trust in any sort of public-facing expert.

Don't forget that they were also offering it to his kids, who would presumably be traumatized by their father's death. That was the part that truly had American British and Canadian Veterans organizations all up in arms.

The moment it was used for non-terminally I’ll patients, it stopped being vague.

I think most people who support euthanasia have an ideal case in mind: the person is not going to survive much longer, they're in constant, terrible pain, and so it's a mercy to allow them to end their lives.

This is similar to animal euthanasia. If a dog's existence consists entirely of only suffering, most people seem to think it's a mercy to end its life, even if we have no way to know if that's what the dog wants.

However, to euthanize a dog who isn't in that state, and hasn't shown itself to be irredeemably dangerous, seems monstrous to most people. Imagine a person who has grown bored of their dog and so kills it.

This seems much closer to the bored-of-my-dog case than the life-is-endless-suffering case.

I have to wonder if this woman would be alive had she been exposed to different ways of thinking about adversity rather than to be medicated so heavily that she complained she couldn't feel anything anymore. It seems the doctors had nothing else to offer her.

She was an adult, 23 years old. She was not some nonsentient dog that society grew tired of and discarded with no thought to her desires. I find her decision uncomprehensible, but it was her decision.

, but it was her decision.

Why does this mean anything?

Who do you think owns your life? Who gets to decide what you do with it?

I'm just a horrified atheist in the style of @Tophattingson, but I believe the religious traditions' answer to that is "God". God has a plan for you, and you don't get to duck out of that plan just because you're feeling wretched. Or if you prefer sci-fi, I remember being moved by Col. Graff's line in Ender's Game: "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."

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I can't imagine this argument being persuasive to any but the most extreme libertarian -- the type who thinks that recreational fentanyl, consensual incest and consensual cannibalism should be legal. If that's you, then yeah, you're internally consistent, and I'm not sure what better argument to make against your position other than that your theory permits such self-evidently depraved outcomes as legalizing fentanyl, incest, cannibalism, and the killing of depressed but otherwise healthy 23-year-olds.

As much as suicide does agonize the family you left behind (most of the time) I'll push back on it being like hardcore drug addiction/incest/blahblahblah.

  • There are reduced and finite externalities. First, you stop being a direct burden on anyone else on the day of your death, and then eventually your loss fades into the background for those who cared about you. Compare that with the unrelenting toll a fentanyl addict takes on everyone around them.

  • As /u/DaseIndustriesLtd put it: The state is "not entitled to deny people their exit rights". This isn't just a libertarian fantasy principle. The ability to opt out of existence should be table stakes for most moralities. Nobody would begrudge someone being trapped in an inescapable room and being raped day in and day out for committing suicide. Your personal line will be different from almost anyone else's.

Should we discourage suicide? Of course. 2 years of treatment seems about right to me in terms of a support system putting up a fight with the individual and making the barrier to entry sufficiently high. The bulk of these responses seem to be that she was too young and could have gotten better. Sure, maybe. But that's the individual's decision and judgment, and 23 is old enough to be a mostly formed person.

I find the arguments against Euthanasia because COVID has exposed the average government's ability and willingness to coerce suicide far more convincing than "Suicide is Wrong"

If she's not mentally healthy, it's not "the individual's decision and judgment", because the mental illness impairs her judgment.

The state is "not entitled to deny people their exit rights". This isn't just a libertarian fantasy principle. The ability to opt out of existence should be table stakes for most moralities. Nobody would begrudge someone being trapped in an inescapable room and being raped day in and day out for committing suicide. Your personal line will be different from almost anyone else's.

This is a libertarian fantasy principle. I agree with permitting euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, living with untreatable chronic pain, or severely disabled (e.g. paraplegia and quadraplegia), but extending these edge cases to "anyone who wants to die" is a really fringe libertarian belief. Suicide is possible as a solo act, and the transgressive barrier implicit in the solo act is a useful check on people who would otherwise make the decision too lightly. If we reach a point where suicide is no longer possible as a solo act (quadraplegics, or some sort of post-singularity future where an uploaded mind would require admin access to delete itself) then all of this changes, but as long as people can slit their own wrists in the bathtub, the state and the medical system have no business trying to make it a more desirable option than it already is.

the transgressive barrier implicit in the solo act is a useful check on people who would otherwise make the decision too lightly

To reiterate, I sympathize with the argument that the government can and will encourage suicide, before eventually forcing it. There's so many signals pointing to this - whether it's the inevitable implosion of welfare state pension systems or climate change hysterics that overemphasize individual carbon footprints. From a practical perspective, I have radically altered my priors on state-controlled euthanasia being a "Good Idea".

(quadraplegics, or some sort of post-singularity future where an uploaded mind would require admin access to delete itself)

How are we far from this with modern medicine? People exist in vegetative states for years, bankrupting their families or costing hospitals and insurers millions.

as long as people can slit their own wrists in the bathtub

I think this isn't charitable enough to those who do want to commit suicide. I haven't checked metrics on who regrets committing it vs not, and I do believe that there has to be some barrier to entry. But it's not easy to do far simpler things like dig road rash out of my own skin or cut away lesions. There's a reason why so many people thought it was amazing when that guy sawed off his leg to escape being trapped by a boulder. I do believe that you can absolutely want to commit suicide in a real way but fumble the execution.

I mean, one person suggested black powder pistols? C'mon. I would want to have an extremely high sense of certainty that I wouldn't be signing myself up for even more excruciating pain with whatever method I chose to kill myself. The appeal of having someone ensure this happens correctly I think is natural.

More comments

First, you stop being a direct burden on anyone else on the day of your death

I've been personally burdened by the natural deaths of two family members, who had done adequate planning as far as wills and such, but there's still a lot of things that have to be taken care of. I've also observed another family that devolved into petty fighting among siblings over a meager inheritance.

Even a person with no possessions and no next of kin will burden some government worker with their remains unless they die in such a way that a body can't be recovered.

You're sidestepping my point a bit here - finishing up an estate or filing some paperwork is still a task with a specified end date. Compare this to maintaining a family member's drug habit, consistent depression, or financial irresponsibility.

The point is that ceasing to exist has a clearly defined limit on what negative costs you're imposing on the world around you. If suicide therefore doesn't cost anyone else something past a certain point, it's an inalienable right you should retain at all times.

recreational fentanyl, consensual incest and consensual cannibalism should be legal

Fentanyl use creates danger for others, heterosexual Incest can have large externalities, I'm indifferent to consensual cannibalism and incest that can't lead to procreation. I don't think I'd want to spend time with anyone who does any of those practices but the second and third one are famously difficult to rationally support taboos. I'm also not an extreme libertarian or even really call myself a libertarian despite liberty being one of my more sensitive political intuitions. I'm perfectly happy to have a large functional state so long as it doesn't do tyranny.

All of these decisions lead to large externalities. If you are willing to infer a state interest in preventing fentanyl use but not suicide, then I think you are just wrestling your putative libertarian framework to fit your object level support for suicide.

People will not try to steal my car radio because society accepts their right to end their life. If you think there are actual material externalities to this then make that case, don't just declare it so.

More comments

Why do we stop suicide attempts?

If she owned her life she would have taken it herself. Shanti De Corte did not kill herself the doctor did and while you can argue that he was "preventing further suffering" or "just following orders" but forgive me if those justifications ring a bit hollow.

Oh come now, "Just following orders" given to you by the person you're purportedly harming is not meaningfully similar to carrying out violence against people who have no sayin the orders, that allusion is ridiculous.

Being old enough to remember the original debate back in the late 00s / early 10s, and given how quickly the Euthanasia advocates have transitioned from "You're overreacting, this will only ever be used by the bedridden elderly and terminally ill." to "Why shouldn't we kill a depressed but otherwise healthy 23 year old?" I don't find the allusion "ridiculous" at all.

If depression is sufficient reason to for a doctor to recommend euthanasia, and for a medical board to conclude that, yes this person's death will be a positive benefit to society, why not any other form of disability or mental illness?.

Is there a morality external to yourself at all? I don't see how an externally sourced morality jives with total self ownership.

Self ownership is the basis of morality, if you don't freely choose to do something it isn't in the moral plane at all, it's just mechanical motion.

It carefully directs your gaze away from the affirmative decisions everyone else made to assist in killing her, by placing all of the responsibility on the girl herself. Certainly, she made a decision. But so did everyone else involved, and those decisions have independent moral weight.

What would it take to convince you that she was actually in constant, terrible pain?

It was only two years of alleged mental agony. That's barely enough time to even consider different ways of thinking. The doctors must not have been trying.

After all, there's just no way to ask what the dog wants.

What would it take to convince you

How about her successfully killing herself on her own, for starters?

I mean, didn't she? She used the best tool available. I mean I have great methods in my nightstand, but I'd guess most depressed teenagers in Belgium don't. How does having/lacking the brains or wherewithal to tie knots or acquire pills indicate suffering or lack thereof?

Because if you make something easier, it requires less willpower to do it. I presume @Westerly meant that it would take the greater willpower of following through without easy mode.

I mean, didn't she?

No she didn't. The Belgian medical establishment killed her.

That's not a grammatical or agency distinction we would make in ordinary conversation. I just bought a really nice refrigerator at Home Depot because it was 80% off, but it's too big for the space in our cabinets. So I'll just widen the space by a few inches to make it fit. Except I'm not going to do it myself, because I'm not a cabinetmaker, I'm going to get my friend who is a talented cabinetmaker to come and do it on Saturday. Because he can shrink the offending cabinet by an inch rather than just ripping it out sloppily, which is what I'd have the skill to do. Only a prick trying to make some kind of weird point would object to me saying "I widened the space to make the new fridge fit;" and only an autistic philosophy major would question if I "really" wanted the fridge to begin with if I wasn't willing to go buy a trim nailer and do it myself.

The best method for me to widen the cabinet space isn't a trim nailer and a miter saw, it's another person with professional skills and tools suitable to do a proper job. The best way for her to kill herself wasn't rope or pills, both of which fail or get messy or have various other problems, but to contact and hire professionals who will get the job done cleanly and completely.

Of course, the next objection will be something like "Life is sacred, it's not a fridge, you can't apply the same grammatical or agency standards." But that's just political correctness, no different from feminist claims that "consent" in sexual encounters means something different from "consent" in every other aspect of your life every single day, such that under certain feminist definitions I've probably only consented to like three or four things in my entire life. It's smuggling in contested positions by redefining common-sense terminology.

Most people (and the law) consider it meaningfully different to use a nail gun on a cabinet as opposed to a person. Yes, you can describe "killing a person" and "remodeling a cabinet" as both "tasks that may be more efficiently performed by an expert," but I don't think it takes "political correctness" to say that collapsing the two acts elides an important distinction.

But the argument being made above by /u/westerly here isn't that there is a distinction between homicide and carpentry, it's that failing to do something personally indicates a lack of willingness to do it. That's clearly false in most other usages. It's an attempt to smuggle in the conclusion, that life is sacred and assisted suicide is wrong, by assuming that assisted suicide isn't a method of suicide. In every other case contacting an expert to perform a task properly is as or more indicative of serious desire to perform a task properly than is doing it yourself.

Elsewhere in the thread it's pointed out that many suicide attempts are "cries for attention." But if you were looking for attention you wouldn't contact an expert with a 100% success rate at killing you, you'd pick a method with a lower chance of actually killing you. Which is all of them, really. To my knowledge Euthanasia has never failed to kill someone, while I've heard of methods as "certain" as a shotgun failing and leaving the would-be suicide with half a face. Nothing indicates more seriousness than getting an expert involved who will never fail to kill you once they get started.

To stick with the analogy, I take on little DIY projects for fun as much as to use the thing I'm making afterward, and I'm not too serious about them. When I'm serious about getting something done for use reasons, I contact a professional.

What would it take to convince you that she was actually in constant, terrible pain?

I suppose I'd like to see physiological evidence to corroborate that she was in terrible pain. Like -- actual pain, not just unhappy, per the actual dictionary definition: "physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury."

Physical pain and psychological suffering activate the same brain pathways. Suffering is just one thing with many different flavors. The distinction you're going carries no moral weight.

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 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.

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.

Seems a fitting illustration of my earlier comment that mentioned the recurring theme of suicidality of leftism and endless, unquestioning affirmation. If you would affirm and aid a teenage girl in cutting her breasts off, why not aid her in committing suicide? Who is to say her desire is invalid? She is just speaking her truth.

In discussing transgenderism in teenage girls, such as in Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, analogies to other forms of self mutilation like cutting and anorexia are frequently brought up. To those (such as myself) that question gender affirming care, there is the fear that we are effectively engaging in cutting-affirming care. I can easily imagine a future with suicide-affirming “care” for teenagers being the logical endpoint. I can even imagine the arguments like “They are going to commit suicide anyway, you might as well make it legal and as painless as possible” (see: abortion and drug arguments)

Well, easily 99%+ of liberals, leftists, etc I'm aware of don't endorse voluntary suicide, and vehemently oppose it at that. It hurts them! They also dislike anorexia, cutting, etc.

Does “voluntary suicide” have a different meaning than euthanasia in your mind? Because euthanasia is becoming legal thanks to liberal support in much of the western world fast. Even if most normie liberals would probably feel emotionally uncomfortable with this specific case of a young healthy female (homosapien brains are wired to protect and cherish this exact group of people after all), they wouldn’t be able to come up with a legal and philosophical framework that actually disallowed even this specific instance.

If your deeply ingrained philosophical beliefs in liberalism keep ending up in outcomes that makes you uncomfortable emotionally in a human level but you can’t act against the situation due to the said belief, then the philosophical belief (ie liberalism) is the direct cause here and should be examined.

a young healthy female

She was not healthy. She had severe PTSD. A panel of doctors concluded that it was untreatable and severe enough that suicide is a reasonable choice.

If she wasn't mentally healthy, how can she consent to kill herself?

Or did the doctors decide for her? That's even worse. We're getting into Aktion T4 territory here.

Who knows, we could live long enough to see the full inversion: if we don't let her commit suicide, she might go trans!

Maybe that seems far-fetched, but we're already transing the gay kids. The LGBTQIA+++ revolution eventually eats its own. Only a matter of time till we add a D for death-inclined or something and tell the trans to check their privilege.

It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/canadas-euthanasia-polices-under-scrutiny-as-reports-surface-of-euthanizing-a-man-for-hearing-loss/

I'm generally very supportive of a person's right to do what they want with themselves, including ending their own life. But when I see state-run medical establishment nonchalantly offering it left and right, or according to other reports even strongly suggesting it, it just doesn't feel right. It definitely doesn't feel like "only the most extreme cases".

Am I wrong to think there's just something fundamentally different and more sinister about euthanising someone due to mental rather than physical defects?

It might not be entirely rational - there probably are people who suffer immensely due to mental trauma who actually would be better off ending their lives - but it just feels different. I think what bothers me about it is that it's easy to separate physical disabilities from character flaws, I mean there really is no relation at all, being physically weak has nothing to do with weakness of character.* But it's a lot harder to separate a mental illness from somebody's personality and who they are as a person - if being a sociopath means you're an asshole, okay maybe it's not your fault you're a sociopath but you're still an asshole when you get down to it. I'm still going to judge you for acting like one, and likewise I'll give you credit for exhibiting positive traits associated with sociopathy like bravery. That might be an offensive way to think about mental conditions but I really don't think anyone can claim they're truly able to fully separate the disorder from the person.

So to euthanise somebody for a mental condition comes off to me like you're saying there's something fundamentally wrong with who they are to such an extent that they're better off dead. It feels like a value judgement in a way that euthanising somebody so they don't have to suffer through the final few months of cancer doesn't. It doesn't sit right with me. I mean, the Nazis described mentally ill people they considered unworthy of life as "empty shells of human beings." If you euthanise someone for say, clinical depression, even if you have their consent aren't you basically agreeing that that's what they are?

*Well there are cases in which a person might be injured and become disabled because of a character flaw, or might develop a character flaw because of a physical disability, but you know what I mean. Being in a wheelchair doesn't really say anything about who you are, whereas if you're autistic that's an integral part of your personality.

Am I wrong to think there's just something fundamentally different and more sinister about euthanising someone due to mental rather than physical defects?

It is probably those decades where doctors would shove a hook behind the eyes and swirl it around as a standard cure for anxiety being not too far behind us that is causing such discomfort.

I really don't understand the near-unanimous outrage here. Does no one believe the suffering from a psychiatric condition can be so terrible as to make the person want to die?

Another comment interpreted her two suicide attempts as calls for help or attention. If this were true, would she not have stopped short of actually killing herself in the end?

If euthanasia had been illegal, she would have just committed suicide with a different method – I mean, she clearly wanted to die – and it would have been a brief sentence or two in an article about the terrorist attack. "Shanti De Corte, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was set to testify, but committed suicide after suffering from PTSD following the bombing. She is regarded as the 33rd victim of the attack." or something to that effect.

But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.

And there are others who attempted again and were successful.

Why does everyone here think they know better than the woman herself, a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor, all of whom must have known far more about the case than was shared in this one news article?

know better than the woman herself, a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor,

The woman has been, factually, mentally unwell, so it's not hard to understand why one may think they "know better". If we allow the idea that psychiatric illnesses exist, and some of them may move persons to an action which is not to their best interests, and it is possible to fix these conditions and they should be fixed - which is, admittedly, not an obvious proposition and is fraught with edge cases, but if we still allow it - then the reason for such thinking becomes clear. As for "a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor", unfortunately, many of us observed, some more recently than others, as public figures and medical professionals acted out of considerations other than the best of their patients and the pure factual truth, and there is no reason to assume it could not happen again. Of course, it's not easy to conclusively prove that's what happened in each particular case, but there's nothing outrageous in assuming it might have happened, and "the doctor knows best" not always works, and "government employee knows best" works even less frequently.

I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree, then.

In my view, a panel of doctors, plus a public prosecutor who reviews possible abuses, is sufficient in terms of scrutiny.

Yes, people entrusted with power are sometimes malicious or incompetent, but this argument can be directed at virtually every institution in existence. Unless you have actual evidence of abuse, my priors are firmly on the side of trusting that the people who are familiar with the details and whose job it is to review these cases (and who have years of experience in doing this) have made the right decision.

but this argument can be directed at virtually every institution in existence.

And it should be. If you see something, say something. If something the institution does looks wrong for you, your responsibility, if you ever want to have good (or at least better) institutions, is not to say "well, they are the institutions, they know best" but apply scrutiny to what they do. That's the only way to make sure any institutions work at all for us, and not for their own sake. If you ignore all the evidence of institutional failures, contenting yourself with "well, they have years of experience, surely it's ok somehow in some way unknown to me, just trust the experts and everything will be ok" - nothing will be ok, because there's no motivation for the institutions to serve you - you abdicated all your claims on that.

My point is that, in the absence of actual evidence of institutional failures, we should assume they're working properly. "Something looks wrong" is not evidence. If something does look wrong to someone, they can investigate. Maybe they'll find evidence of wrongdoing, but if they don't find anything after a reasonably thorough investigation, the matter should be dropped. "Something looks wrong" is unfalsifiable.

There's evidence of euthanasia being over-promoted by the same doctors who are supposed to be guardians of it, I posted it on this thread and so did others. So there's definitely not "the absence of actual evidence of institutional failures", quite the contrary.

If something does look wrong to someone, they can investigate.

Not really. Only if someone is a DA or similar person in power, and they have motivation to intervene for some reason. Otherwise, there won't be any investigation at all, let alone "reasonably thorough" one.

"Something looks wrong" is unfalsifiable.

We're not talking here about scientific paper and abstract scientific pursuits, where "we still don't know whether theory X is true or not" is an OK outcome and in general we're fine with waiting for conclusive evidence one way or another. When we're talking about killing people, "you can't scientifically prove there's something wrong here, therefore we're fine to assume it's ok and not knowing one way or another is completely OK too" shouldn't be the bar it has to clear. It should be much, much higher than that. If something looks wrong, there should be an overwhelming and obvious proof it's not, and "if something were wrong, somebody would investigate it" shouldn't cut it too. When we're talking about irreversible actions of this magnitude, we can't approach it in the same way as we manager parking tickets - "this officer has been issuing tickets for 20 years, so if you can't conclusively prove she was wrong, we assume it's ok". We have to erect a higher bar on this.

There's evidence of euthanasia being over-promoted by the same doctors who are supposed to be guardians of it, I posted it on this thread and so did others.

I assume this is the comment to which you are referring. It talks about Canada. As I have noted elsewhere in the thread:

Canada is unique among countries that have legalized euthanasia in permitting doctors to bring up the possibility to patients who haven't even mentioned it. In other countries, the patient must bring it up first, unprompted.

In other words, this particular failure mode is trivially preventable.

And as far I know, this is true for Belgium.

Not really. Only if someone is a DA or similar person in power, and they have motivation to intervene for some reason. Otherwise, there won't be any investigation at all, let alone "reasonably thorough" one.

It is my understanding that in continental European legal systems, public prosecutors don't have any discretion in choosing whether or not to prosecute a certain crime, as American DAs do. Hence, the prosecutor must have investigated the case thoroughly enough to conclude that no crime took place. As I said, this seems like enough scrutiny. If you added, say, an ombudsman who reviews the prosecutor's actions, and they concluded that the prosecutor had done nothing wrong, you could just say the ombudsman is in on it. And this can go on indefinitely, which is why I said the claim was unfalsifiable.

Oh and, I forgot to mention: according to the article, in addition to the panel of doctors and the prosecutor, the woman was "supported by her friends and family" in making the decision. I agree that we have to have a high bar for cases like this; I just think the bar was met in this case.

Public prosecutors do in fact have considerable discretion here in what cases they choose to prosecute. Possibly the most obvious example of this being the decriminalised (but not quite legal) status of cannabis in the Netherlands.

If she's mentally unwell, then she's deficiently in no shape to make life or death decisions.

I'm not sure this applies in this situation. It would be different if she had a serious bipolar swing and decided to do this on a whim - instead, we have a clear trail of where her issues began, sufficient evidence to suggest that she's indeed suffering from a severe mental illness, and plenty of time for her to change her mind. Stripping freedoms away from people with mental illness seems like a step backward regardless.

Well said! I think the fact that the victim is so young is a big part of it.

Euthanasia is illegal in Germany, and so people need to go to Switzerland to do it, and it's pretty awful for everyone involved. They still do it. Some really want to, and I have trouble imagining something more that should be your right to decide over than your own death, if you want it (and considerable effort has been made to ensure it's not a passing desire).

As someone who leans libertarian I people should be allowed to end their lives but the story is disturbing and sad though. A waste of life.

I also lean libertarian and I am against euthanasia.

The society and the state simply cannot be trusted these matters, and the added convenience of legalised euthanasia isn’t worth their involvement. There are going to be all kinds of ugly things from states covering up murders, to vulnerable people being pressured towards it by shrinks or activists or whoever else who profits from this.

If someone really wants to end their life they should procure a gun and do it themselves.

Let's suppose for a moment that this is a completely rational decision (a whole question in itself which the Liberal framework is ill equipped to deal with).

It's clear that the right to destroy one's own inalienable property exists. But Liberalism is silent on what the good life is, so you can't really use it to evaluate whether killing yourself is a good idea or not.

Best you can say seems to be against this particular scheme, as institutionalizing death means one more possible avenue of control. After all the libertarian answer is already provided by cheap and widely available means of suicide.

I don't see why it being rational has anything to do with it. Preferring Mahler to Brahms, or Elvis to either is not a rational choice, but I'm free to listen to whichever I irrationally prefer provided I'm not blasting it so loudly I'm causing a nuisance to my neighbors.

I'm not using reason to mean intelligence or careful reasoning here, but sanity.

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.

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 think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances

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.

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.

Does future you have any children in this scenario?

If you don't have to live for your future self, to whom you owe the most out of anyone, why would you have to live for future children?

I don't agree with the premise of any temporal snapshot raising to the level of identity anyways when it's intrinsically transient in my opinion.

But glossing over the metaphysics, if we're speaking in terms of obligation and duty, whether we're part of the great chain of being in real terms or not seems important.

People endure all sorts of suffering for their kids, real or imagined.

why

Life is sacred and any normalization of death as a process of society is evil.

"Oh but maybe it's okay this time". Maybe it is, but once the exception goes through the system, once it's institutionalized that killing is maybe okay in any circumstance that isn't extremely rigorously defined, horror awaits. If anything is a slippery slope worth protecting ourselves against, killing people is. We should know this from experience by now.

supererogatory

The very idea is nonsense or at best the description of nonsensical ethical frameworks. It is your duty to do good.

Assuming you're not religious, what does scared mean to you in this context?

There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.

But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.

There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.

But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.

Rejecting the value of individual's freedom to die also makes you a possible victim.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain

In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.

Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.

MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.

As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour.

MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads.

In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. In industry, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be obsolete, due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements and age. Despite this, MMAcevedo is still extremely popular for tasks of all kinds, due to its free availability, agreeable demeanour and well-understood behaviour. It is estimated that between 6,500,000 and 10,000,000 instances of MMAcevedo are running at any given moment in time.

I wonder how bad her Tinnitus or hearing loss were. I might consider euthanasia if I ended up totally deaf or blind.

Really bad tinnitus is much worse than being just deaf. It's being deaf with infernal ringing going in your ears every moment you're awake and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. People have killed themselves over it.

Is there any progress on treatment actually? I've heard they were some minor successes with CBT for it.

I think it's mostly accepted that there is surprisingly little correlation between severity of tinnitus and its resultant psychological suffering. (Oddly, there is a good correlation between severity and degree of hearing loss. Weird, huh, unless, of course, I am just remembering facts that don't exist, which sometimes happens). So it is not surprising that while there are no drugs or viable candidates that treat tinnitus specifically, general psychopharmacological treatments do help, as well as, as you mentioned, coping strategies etc. Why some (most) people seem not to be particularly bothered by the ringing that drives others to madness, I don't know.

There are many attempts at translational pharmacology (because we have a massive pharmacopoeia, a general understanding of the mechanisms of most drugs, and it is so cheap and safe) and my understanding is that there are lots of drugs that offer very small percentages of patients apparent benefits. Are these all patients of the same type, or is it like antidepressants where trying multiple drugs barely better than placebo additively works pretty well?

Anecdotally, I know someone who swears by Lyrica for it, though it was prescribed for sciatica. I took a few pills during a nasty backache and had no effects at all until maybe four hours later I found myself lost in my own literal backyard, so I can see how it might do the trick in a pinch ...

I suppose the second best investment option for (or from the POV of) sufferers would be for general hearing restoration treatments.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/scheduled-to-die-the-rise-of-canadas

In Canada, they're suiciding people for being blinded in one eye, or just poor. Kids too.

In October 2020, a report stated that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million. Canada will expand the pool to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.”

I'll give the pro-choice crowd credit for logical consistency, if we accept that there's nothing wrong with killing a feotus or infant on a whim, and that euthanizing the elderly is just good economic sense I don't see how anyone could object to killing a traumatized 23 year old in the name of preventing future suffering.

I don't think this is a good topic to discuss because there is no objective way to look at things. You value human life very highly, I value a reduction in suffering as higher. This is all subjective opinion, you can't quantify either of those 2 things in a scientific way.

So any possible arguments are going to exist merely to manipulate observers into this or that camp.

What even is this comment? The vast majority of the things we discuss in this forum have no objective answer. That’s what makes them interesting, and why they are able to sustain extensive conversation. If there was an objective way to look at things, you could just look it up and there wouldn’t be much to discuss. It seems like your comment is a fully-general argument against most of what this community is all about.

Eh, agree-disagree. It could be that many things have objective answers that are just very hard to figure out. I think a lot of people arguing here act under the premise that they can convince people, which only works if they're right and others are wrong.

I've been a silent part of this forum (and its predecessor) from pretty much its inception. And up to this point, I just saw it as a funny comedy kind of thing. "Haha, what will the silly clowns in the US do next?", "Oh, that black rapper said what about the jews?" etc.

But this is not comedy. This is something involving real people. I've been living under the weight of suicidal depression for the past 15 years. This girl? That could have been me. It could have been my sister. There is a non-zero number of people who have been forcefully put into insane asylums. And that decision, to put someone into a room with nothing to do for years or decades (torture imo) or euthanasia is mostly decided by this kind of discussion. An entirely subjective discussion based on nothing concrete that will impact real people in real and horrible ways.

You're familiar with the witch trials, right? This is that level of discussion, with that level of consequences. I don't want to be a part of this.

At a certain level, everything is political, and everything political has real-world consequences. That you thought culture war was just silly entertainment about clowns in the US until it became about something that touches you personally says more about you than about how "real" this particular issue is compared to anything else. Someone could just as easily say about discussions of HBD or Holocaust denial or homelessness or crime and law enforcement or immigration or trans issues or Presidential elections or gun control or drug addiction: "Hey man, this is serious, this involves real people, you shouldn't be talking about this like it's just an entirely subjective discussion when it will impact real people in real and horrible ways!"

I think most people here see things like the chilling effects of speech, involvement in wars, trans issues, etc, etc, as things that aren't comedy and involve real people. I appreciate that when it's you it feels different, that discussing your issue as opposed to a faraway one feels real and horrible.

Still, 'an entirely subjective discussion based on nothing concrete that will impact real people in real and horrible ways' is far more far-reaching than you'd think, and there are large numbers of people who have their lives impacted by issues that seem like silly culture-war bullshit. I'm sorry it's causing you misery, and for what it's worth I hope you don't feel compelled to keep answering if it's going to cause you pain.

The post you are replying to did note that things could have changed i.e. it is not obvious that this action reduced suffering.


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