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A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
My condolences to you and your friend. I'd like to chime in as a secular person who is against assisted suicide for young, physically healthy people but is fine with euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, elderly, or extremely physically disabled.
Some other people have put this more eloquently, but I believe by okaying euthanasia for the first group we will get a lot of people opting to end their lives who would have stuck it out and become happy, productive adults. If a healthy person wants to take their life, I'm not going to cast moral judgement on them. But they should do it on their own terms — by bringing in the state we legitimize it and widen the net of people who will be lost. Suicide may be an option, be it should remain culturally taboo.
In the case of someone with no future due to terminal illness, or for someone physically incapable of ending themselves (the example I'm thinking of is someone who is paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident), the suffering is both clear and incurable at our current level of medicine. It's a lot easier of a call and has clear limits that won't (shouldn't?) lead to healthy people being killed by the state.
I suppose my guiding principle would be: what societal guidelines/guardrails will lead the average person to happiness and produce a functional, healthy society?
I think there's something to be said for assisted suicide for healthy people if a mandatory waiting/counseling period is long enough. Suicidal impulses are very often brief and very often regretted by survivors after just time to think; giving suicidal people an incentive to take time and get help, even if that incentive is "this way it'll be reliable and painless if you still want to go through with it", might save a lot of them.
Or I could be completely wrong. This is the sort of thing I'd want to see as a years-long pilot program in a small country or two, not immediate larger-scale adoption.
By offering a legitimate, state-sponsored path we run the risk of turning euthanasia into a goal to be worked toward as described by this recent quality contribution by @VelveteenAmbush. He is talking about gender transitioning but uses this topic as a directly analogous example, and makes a good argument that providing a legitimate path will wind up doing more harm than good.
With women this could be a big problem, as they are more likely to attempt suicide but tend to do so with less lethal methods. If there was an accepted path to suicide that had a 100% success rate once approved, we'd probably see more deaths overall.
I agree that whatever changes we make to a system like this should be carefully tested in a small region. Then again, after seeing how easily studies are manipulated and misrepresented, part of me wants to just put a big "do not cross" line over this particular policy. Once it becomes accepted policy and people are used to it, it's a lot harder to turn back the clock than it is to just keep it taboo.
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