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Notes -
Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:
Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.
There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:
The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.
Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.
Something I feel has been under-discussed so far:
Estate planning, and assisted suicide as a tax avoidance tool.
Estate tax rates have been a classic political football for decades, with policy shifting radically between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want higher exemptions, so that the tax starts at a bigger estate, and lower rates; Democrats want lower exemptions and higher rates. Republicans cry crocodile tears about family farms forced to sell; Democrats whinge about billionaire feudal dynasties. Each administration has made moves towards eliminating, or raising, the estate tax; often unsuccessfully but always attempted. It's reasonable for any wealthy American to be concerned about major changes in the estate tax system, they come around every decade or so, following party politics.
I've often joked that a particularly wealthy family I know would Weekend at Bernie's their patriarch if he died during a bad (Democrat) period for the estate tax, as one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years and expect a better (Republican) estate tax law to pass. They could drive him around to various places where he could be "seen" in the window of the family Escalade with heavily tinted windows, and just keep it in the family until it was time to "declare" his death publicly and pay the taxes.
But with assisted suicide, new options open up.
It's November 2032. JD Vance has lost in a landslide to AOC, the Republican party having been crippled by a "True MAGA" independent run by Donald Trump Jr who claimed that Vance's administration had betrayed his father's legacy. AOC and her fillibuster-proof Democratic majority plan to increase the estate tax to a punitive 95% on all estates over $50mm. Does a 95 year old multi-billionaire decide to take a one-way vacation to Switzerland to avoid the tax? Do his children pressure him to take the trip? It's Succession supercharged. When death is a taxable event, you choose death at a convenient time for taxes.
But, for that matter, if suicide vacations become routine, then that makes for quite an opportunity for fraud, right? Ok, I don't want to get hit with the AOC taxes when I die, but I'm only 80 I've got years left to live, what to do? Well, Switzerland might be out, but Columbia allows MAID. ((I'll note I'm probably engaging in gross American racist stereotyping here)) I travel to Columbia, pay to obtain a death certificate from a MAID clinic to send back to the USA with the kids, and then I start a new life in Costa Rica, where my kids will send me cash to support my Jimmy Buffet lifestyle.
Columbia -> Colombia
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I’m no doctor but you’re going to need a really oblivious mortician to present an eight year old corpse as fresh :P
Bonus question: if a man dies at 40 and gets WfB’d for another 3 years, is he:
Genuinely not sure.
Wherefore do you need a corpse to present publicly at all? You presumably have been telling everyone for years that he suffered from a disfiguring illness which lead to his reclusiveness, he sure as hell wouldn't want an open-casket. Unfortunately in his disfiguring illness he turned to a lot of weird woo-woo spirit healing, and there are no medical records for several years because he refused to see a doctor. We're talking about billionaire local feudal lords here, the death certificate comes from the [Family Name] Building at the local hospital, paying off a mortician is the least of the concerns.
Keep in mind that the only cheated party is the government. All members of the family are presumably on-side, the hospital suffers no harm (in fact, under the new will, they're getting a new surgery wing!), the mortician suffers no harm. Even the local government suffers no harm. Only the Federal Government is concerned, and there's not actually much nexus for them to check if someone is alive.
Bonus Question: A 3 year old corpse of a 40 year old man. This is obvious if you think about the corpse of a young woman from the perspective of a necrophiliac.
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I don't see the need to complicate things. Assisted suicide is objectively bad, and restricting a persons freedom to commit suicide is objectively bad if and only if said person is having an episode (a temporary state of mind of lowered lucidity).
Making it into a business incentivizes death (by incentivizing profits, which is a trivial result of the death of unproductive members of society). Do I need more arguments? Did I even need this one? Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious. Obviously trivial. But in case there's some psychological defense mechanism which blind people to obvious, painless methods of suicide, I'm not going to write the method for now. If anyone reading this is suicidal, it's a good thing that they think they need to travel to an entire other country just to stop being alive. Being unable to think of a fast, easy and painless way out is great.
An able-bodied person has a million ways to kill themselves. It looks very different when you are paralyzed from the neck down and lying in a hospital bed with a heart rate monitor connected and a reanimation team on standby.
Reading between the lines of your post, you are saying that a person of sound mind should have the right to kill themselves. But for most rights people have, there is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.
Now, society can impose reasonable restrictions on what agents I am allowed to contract -- I can not send a 10yo to sign a contract in my name, and I certainly can not hire them as a prostitute.
Garden variety suicides are unregulated. You can't imprison a dead person, so there is little society can do to deter them. This leads to a lot of messes. Bystanders become traumatized, or get killed. People who survive but at large costs to their health. People who die on an impulse action they would have regretted five minutes later.
With homicides, there is a wide understanding that there are different categories, that some are vile crimes while others are tragedies or even completely justified. With suicides, there is little distinction that way. The lovesick 16yo and the 60yo cancer patient who jump of a bridge are lumped together in one category.
Rather than leave it up to chance who gets to die, I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides. Let the people who are of sound mind and have a stable commitment to end their lives do so with a minimum of harm to themselves and others, and delegitimize unilateral suicides. "If you want to exit the building, we ask that you walk out through the corridor and the front door and not try to jump through the closed window."
Except I've seen plenty of people argue that these are completely mutually exclusive — a "commitment to end one's own life" being itself proof positive of an unsound mind. I once had a therapist argue, in all seriousness, that the 47 Rōnin must have been clinically depressed — along with every other samurai who ever committed seppuku — because suicidal intent always means depression, without exception.
This can be used to turn your proposal to a clear Catch-22: you can kill yourself via "legalized but regulated" suicide so long as you're of sound mind… but the fact you're seeking to do so proves you aren't — the only people allowed to kill themselves, then, are those who don't want to.
I find this view fascinating, like flat-eartherism or young age creationism. Like learning about the biotopes around hydrothermal vents which work without any sunlight and are utterly alien to any life forms I regularly interact with.
9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong. These jerks were fully expecting to respawn in heaven and be rewarded for their great deeds. Their final moments were the best moments of their lives.
Even a pure suicide without any intended side effects can be very rational. The caught spy biting on his poison pill is a well-established trope. He is not depressed because he is anticipating getting tortured and betraying his secrets.
If some comic book super-villain captures a person and her loved ones and tells her that she can either kill herself and save her loved ones or she will spend the next month first watching her loved ones being slowly tortured to death and then being tortured to death herself, suicide is an entirely rational response.
A toy model of endogenic depression would be that it just imposes some mood penalty, which adds to situational modifiers. So a person who had just been dumped by their girlfriend (-30), buried a parent (-40) and got caught in the rain (-1) might not attempt suicide, but a person who was also melancholic (-20) might.
Or one might describe depression as an epistemic attractor state -- a strong belief that one's life is shitty which is self-reinforcing through confirmation bias.
I generally support interventions to prevent suicides if it seems likely that the mood penalties can be fixed or that the patient can be moved away from that attractor state. Turning a depressed person into a non-depressed person is much preferential to turning them into a corpse.
But at the end of the day, people's emotional baselines differ, and it is not up to outside society to tell them if their permanent modifiers make their life worth living or not. And I would fire any therapist who could not agree to that on the spot as fast as if they had suggested that I should just let Jesus into my heart.
The 9/11 Attack Considered as a Self-Help Group for Depression.
Osama Bin Laden was the organizer of the therapy session.
The north tower got off to a bad start.
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I agree with this first claim, but I imagine that the "suicidal and paralyzed from the neck down" crowd is pretty small. My arguments so far have not accounted for that one situation, but I think a good rule is "Follow their instructions, even if they request something which will kill them". You cannot really implement this legally, so this should be one of those things which are technically illegal but which everyone pretends that they don't see when they happen.
This is basically the right to give away some of your agency, which could lead to consequences which harm your rights. Tricky situation, but I don't think it's bad from this direction. Having the right to ask somebody to end your life isn't the issue - the issue is that, if we make institutions which can legally end your life, then your environment could systemically pressure you to make this decision.
To give an example, you're not forced to marry anyone. Being able to marry is a freedom you have. But there may be economic benefits to marriage, and this is where the problem starts. Do you know why I'm not an organ donor? It's because it seem that some doctors don't really do their best to save you if you're an organ donor and they're short on whatever organs you have. I haven't looked into it much, but it's not hard to imagine how this incentive might come into being.
This is how it should be. For instance, I could grab a hammer right now, run out of my apartment, and start bashing random people with it. I won't make this choice, but you cannot deprive me of the ability to make it without depriving me of my fundamental human freedom (the ability to use tools, the ability to open my front door, the ability to move my body, and the ability to interact with other people). My neighbour has the same freedom. This is exactly how it should be, every alternative is worse.
I'm alright with temporarily putting suicidal people under watch, since they might be acting on impulse. But if they continue being suicidal for longer periods of time, it becomes apparent that it's their genuine will.
Here's what will happen: Millions of old people will be considered a drain on society and made to kill themselves. There's a million paths leading to this, and number 13215 is "Accidentally give older people medicine which has the side-effect of increased risk of suicide". An AI will A/B test medicine, and then look at the results. Would you look at that, medicine X leads to greener numbers: Lower costs, and less complaints about pains. The reason you don't see: The lower costs are due to less old people remaining alive, and the lowered complaints are because those who suffered the most have died. Another possibility is that they're given medicine which is stronger but accelerates their death, this also leads to less pain, and thus less complains, and it also makes other numbers on the spreadsheet look green in that more deaths mean lower costs. Did you know that "we don't know" how most modern algorithms actually work? It's just a blackbox with an input and output. Well, that's why we won't see that we're just killing old people faster, all our metrics will show "improvements".
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Can you, uh, rely on the most miserable, desperate portion of the population to make optimal decisions? Optimal for the rest of us, that is. It’s not like they’re going to be around to clean up.
In the best case, that’s first responders removing a body. I think most cases are messier, more personal, or otherwise worse. They’re externalities to the suicide. Mitigating those is worth something.
Okay, but that’s a fully general argument against doing stuff. Plenty of companies are naturally incentivized towards collateral damage. We generally handle this by regulating them instead of banning their industry outright.
Well, you can't, but I still think this is the only correct answer. If somebody wants to kill themselves for say, a year non stop, then at that point, it's not just a hasty decision they've made because they sank into a bad mindset for some time. Depriving them of freedom for extended periods of time in order to 'keep them safe' wouldn't be right.
Assisted suicide is a terrible idea. You cannot possibly regulate this, it's simply a lost cause. It will be used to mass-murder the elder population for economic reasons. I can see many many ways to abuse this and zero ways to make it even slightly unlikely to happen. Suicide should remain one of these things which is illegal, but which nobody can stop you from doing if you really, really want to.
I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to. In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas. And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking". I'm too lazy to think of more, but the years to come will provide us with plenty more examples
Tech is making it more feasible, but keep in mind that these ideas have not been promoted to the extent that they've become feasible. There's forces pushing back against them. What are these forces if not competent people?
Second point makes social norms and systematic censorship into the same thing. The second one can be automated, and it only requires following strict rules. The problem with this is that one can follow rules for so long that they stop considering the reasons behind them, and also that rules are rigid - they lack the flexibility that people have, they cannot take context into account. In short, "Seeing like a State" is a great book.
You cannot really outsource trust. Here's my reasoning: If you're more intelligent than the person you're outsourcing your trust to, then you don't need them to judge for you. If you're less intelligent than them, then you cannot reliably assess whether or not you can trust them. They could just be lying to you.
So, how did you decide that Trump was actually lying? You likely updated your belief over time based on things you couldn't verify. Don't get me wrong, Trump does lie a lot, but if they compared Trump's inauguration crowd to somebody elses, they'd take pictures of his at the time of the day where the least people arrive, and then find pictures of the other crowd which makes it look at flattering as possible. People who support Trump experienced the opposite, they saw the flattering image of Trumps crowd, and the unflattering images of the other. And who told you that Haitians don't eat cats? I don't read the news, this is one of the reasons I'm so clear sighted.
The "fact-checkers" are the same people as the liars. Every original fact-checking website is propaganda. The term might have caught on, leading to independent people having "fact checking" blogs online or whatever, but the concept is still ridiculous. Plus, no meaningful conversation can be had about any modern events, it's just people throwing sources at eachother that the other party already considers completely untrustworthy. If you ask me, nothing but raw evidence is worth anything, and people should use just that (and if they can't, then they're not competent enough for truth-seeking in the first place)
Again, people have been lying for 1000s of years, it's an ancient problem, so why have there been no "fact checkers" until now? It's simply because the modern world is retarded.
You make a good point about the family traditionally being one unit, but being judged by your family is still way different than being held responsible for how people (edit: ones who are complete strangers) use the things that you've sold them.
The problem is not immigration itself, but the mass import of people who are incompetent, culturally incompatible, 10 times more likely to commit crime, or otherwise a net drain for the destination. Again, only the modern world is too stupid to realize this.
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Given that somebody has waited a whole year longing, nonstop, for death, he should be allowed to die. If he must die, it should minimize the harm done to those who survive him. Therefore, he should be allowed to seek assistance.
I understand the perverse incentives for his caretakers, his beneficiaries, his insurer, and the welfare state. A random nonprofit in a foreign country does not have these same incentives.
Naturally.
This is certainly not true. It’s not even true for your examples. Some of them didn’t make any sense before modern technology. Others are playing games with definitions—how much immigration is “mass” immigration, exactly? And the others are laughable. Do you seriously think censorship laws were held at bay by “traditional arguments”?
I think assisted suicide also harms those close to you, so being found in your apartment is not that much worse. Except maybe for the cleaning. Anyway, I'd agree if not for the pervsese incentives. You can have two entities A and B which are structurally safe from exploitation, but which can be exploited if you connect them as (A + B). An easy example is that countries cannot lagally spy on their own citizens, so they spy on each others citizens and share the information (FVEY). In my intuition, corruption is the inability to keep things separated, but "optimization" pushes us in the direction of centralization and higher connectivity between everything, which is why I expect these issues to get worse.
IoT is kind of new, but you still have this line from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". 46 years later, and idiots go "What if my fridge could order new milk by itself!? I'm a genius!"
"mass" is quite subjective, but the numbers have gone up a lot and there's many clear reasons for that. One of them is that we used to filter migration so that people who seemed skilled/competent and at least somewhat aligned with the culture of the destination made it through. That filter is now gone, immigration is purely altruism, it's not an economic investment.
And yes, censorship was held at bay by clear principles. Almost everything wrong with the internet is because we've ignored these insights:
1: You're innocent until proven guilty.
2: Guns are not to blame for murderers, knives are not to blame for stabbings, supermarkets are not to blame for theft, an online service is not to blame for criminal behaviour by users, car manufacturers are not to blame for my reckless driving, Google is not to blame for torrent websites, and torrent websites are not to blame for pirated content, and I'm not a criminal if a friend of mine commits a crime. Sentences like "You're either with us or against us" are mere propaganda. These are basically all the same thing, but I'm not sure there's a word for this concept, so I cannot describe it well.
3: Open communication is the best path to truth. Silencing anyone is objectively worse. An arbiter of truth is a ridiculus concept (which is why the 1949 book 1984 ridiculed the idea). Blind faith to science, too, goes against the principles of science.
4: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
5: Ownership. You don't really own anything like you use to. This has a lot of negative consequences as well.
I'm fairly sure even John Stuart Mill understood all these principles, why there can be no exceptions, and why there can be no hybrid solution which is better. I'm not too knowledgable about politics, or even history, but I do know some very important principles, and most issues which appears "new" to regular people is something that I consider solved more than 100 years ago. My heuristic is "if it breaches any of these principles, it's bad", and no matter what issues I throw at my principles, they gracefully solve them
If those principles were enough to gracefully preempt censorship, we’d never have had the original Comstock Act. Puritanical book-bannings. Witch hunts for communists and anarchists. Acting as if our elders had it all figured out is the laziest sort of rose-tinted glasses.
I find myself curious. Are there any cases where your principles haven’t guided you to agree with whatever Fox News has most recently said?
That's likely due to the influence of Christianity being stronger than the influence of classic liberalism. But isn't this also explained by most people being stupid? I think most dumb ideas are prevented by a low ratio of the population (perhaps 10%) knowing that they're dumb ideas. When the ratio of knowledgeable people falls too low, bad things happen. This is especially true today, since the dumb average person has more decision power than ever, and since there's a lot of money in promoting dumb ideas (smarthomes, cars with internet access, useless LLMs in every product, etc). It's memetic warfare. Since most people are too dumb to think ahead, they will need to experience negative consequences first hand in order to learn. And these learned lessons are quickly forgotten. Online IDs are being now implimented in the UK, but this was actually tried before in the past, around year 2020. The idea was already shut down once before, and the arguments that people wrote against it online were a sort of vaccine, but like I said, insights disappear, and then people retry terrible ideas.
I can't answer your second question as I've never watched Fox News. I basically reject everything modern. How could anything I say be downstream of recent propaganda when I came to these conclusions more than 15 years ago?
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Also incredibly unfair to subject innocent bystanders to. Jumping in front of a train is horrific for the train driver, plus the massive inconvenience to thousands of people as train schedules get disrupted.
Jumping off a high structure runs the risk of hitting someone at the bottom, and guarantees some flavor of first responder has to scrape you off the pavement/fish out your bloated corpse. Let alone the trauma to whoever finds you first if it's just a random who gets to watch you splat.
Basically every flavor of at home suicide also involves at minimum a first responder having to deal with your aftermath, and again runs a very high risk of traumatizing a friend or family member who discovers your corpse.
Also people are fucking stupid, so failed suicides are guaranteed. That means you also eat up finite medical resources AND probably have a lower quality of life.
Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.
That depends on the alternatives. If you want to argue that jumping of a tall building after we have reasonable legislation for assisted suicides, I agree with you.
But as long as such legislation is not in place, my attitude is fuck society. I would still prefer methods which are unlikely to endanger or traumatize others, but if society does not provide a non-messy way out, they can hardly expect me to stay alive just to avoid making a mess.
Look at it this way. I believe in my autonomy to decide if I live or die (within the obvious biological limits, until we can get around them). I would happily blow the brains out of someone who is attempting to murder me. If some 6yo sees this they will likely be traumatized, and that is bad, but at the end of the day I value my autonomy over my life more than the kid's lack of trauma. I do not think that this is unreasonable, and few would suggest that I am not justified here.
But this autonomy is a double-edged sword. Wanting to die is just as valid a choice as wanting to continue to live. I would not blow my brains out in front of a group of kindergardeners if I have a better choice, of course. But at the end of the day, my autonomy comes first.
I agree with everything you said and that's why I'm very much in favor of MAID
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By that measure, every kind of death is. Someone always ends up having to deal with the corpse.
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It's pretty much a given that somebody is going to have to deal with each and every one of our corpses at one point, unless (maybe) we get buried in an avalanche and churned into a glacier while on some sort of
Hocksubmarine rideexpedition; even then, you can't really say whether somebody might come across your mummified corpse 30,000 years from now.It doesn't strike me as obvious that paying a Swiss person to murder you and deal with your corpse afterwards is less harmful than a paramedic finding you poisoned in the tub or something -- in fact the sterility of it all is a big part of the problem for me.
I mean one big difference is the Swiss person is consenting to dealing with your body and is paid explicitly to do so.
You might argue the paramedic consents by virtue of their job, which is true, but their time is also finite and could be better spent on a QALY-basis helping alive people.
Also the person who finds you might be a family member, friend, or random innocent, none of whom contented to this or are paid to deal with it, which is just pure negative utility.
And the Swiss presumably have better things to do than killing people?
Perhaps this encourages the suicidal people to rethink their course of action?
In an case, life and death are both messy -- and I'm not a utilitarian.
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One of the methods I have in mind can be done at home, and if they fail, I don't think they do lasting damage (though I'm not sure). Of course, somebody will find your corpse, which might traumatize them. Suicide can at best be painless for the person who dies - it's painful to everyone connected with them.
I think many suicidal people won't go through with it as long as they know that somebody actually cares about their well-being (even if only superficially). One of the things which leads to suicide is the fear that the world doesn't care about you. Of course, there's multiple kinds, and some of them are rather selfish. Suffering generally leads to selfishness as it turns your perception inwards.
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If we respect basic autonomy, why should an adult’s adult children have to sign off on whether they are allowed to end their life? As @self_made_human says, Switzerland has had legal euthanasia since the 1940s, and major clinics offering the service since the 1980s.
This is in possibly the most civilized country in the world, certainly in the top 3. People live better, longer, healthier lives in Switzerland than almost anywhere else. Things in Switzerland just work. Even from other wealthy countries like the US, going to Switzerland often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium. Along almost any scale it would be good for any other country to become more like Switzerland, and bad for Switzerland to become more like any other country.
The functional outcome of articles like this is for other Western countries to try to start banning their terminally ill citizens from going to Switzerland. This would be laughable, since you can just cross the border, but the effect would be to harass innocent people for no reason.
Because it's the adult kids end up with "hi, here's your mother's ashes in a parcel, oh you say nobody notified you? not our problem anymore!"
And they're likely the ones who'll end up walking into a house to find the body unexpectedly if they do just commit suicide.
Thats a problem with suicide generally, not the Swiss system specifically. The Swiss system at least means some kids will be informed in advance who wouldn't otherwise be.
You have to compare it with "standard" suicide and in almost all of those relatives are going to have to unexpectedly deal with remains. Excepting those where the suicidal person tries to disappear themselves. But that of course leaves family members with other issues instead.
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To a certain degree this is the case though the gap's closed a lot between the absolute nicest parts of Malaysia and Singapore. Also Singaporeans radiate a certain energy of chipper productivity which is Flanders-like and annoying.
That is because the nicest parts of Malaysia are essentially outposts of Singapore, demographically speaking.
Yes and no.
I live in a 'demographic outpost of Singapore' suburb in the Klang Valley which is nice for that reason. Kuala Lumpur City Center is an outpost of oil money and is also pretty nice without being a demographic outpost of Singapore perse. Malaysia's rich enough and construction's cheap enough that the better areas are on par with what's available down South. The gap's closed in a lot of ways
KLCC and the wealthier suburbs, like the gated communities around Putrajaya, are pretty unique. I think we discussed them before. Clearly the oil money is going to someone, but much of Malaysia is still pretty poor, and comparable with other parts of ASEAN that aren’t Singapore.
Also, even in KLCC there are pockets of low quality. Car-focused, walking very difficult, those meth / crack addicts on the pedestrian foot bridges just behind the big mall itself, still quite noticeable garbage on the street even sometimes. It’s just very clear it’s still a developing country, and of course plenty of developing countries have rich elites who like Chanel and Lamborghinis.
I agree that Malaysia walkability is generally awful, but I've been to about 60% of the country's major cities and have only seen pockets of what I'd consider proper Poverty. Even places like Sabah and Sarawak tend to have a floor of 'okay' housing, for a given value of okay. I've lived in Darwin and spent time in Broome & a few other parts of Northern Australia and I've seen a lot worse than the typical Malaysian dwellings in a similar climate.
Personally I'd consider KLCC a bit of a confusing dump. Petaling Jaya is where most of the best areas for livability are, partly due to demographic reasons and there's islands of gated communities practically everywhere in the greater Klang Valley. Also the vibes in Putrajaya where it's the government swinging around large amounts of oil money and still a bit of a ghost town are quite different to the affluent suburbs of PJ.
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There are things that work in a high trust society that don't in a low trust society. Switzerland, notably, almost singularly in Western Europe, is still super homogeneous, and hasn't thrown open it's welfare state to 3rd worlders. Good for them that they haven't manage to slide down some slippery slope when it comes to assisted suicide. But they've made profoundly different choices about the type of nation they want to be than just about all their peers. I doubt we can pick and choose how we wish to emulate them without there being significant unintended consequences.
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I fear the steps to solve such issues involve impossible tasks. If the first step on your master plan involves 'First, you must become Swiss', we have quite the road ahead of us.
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Is there any other country in Europe that has as many official languages (4, not including English as a common lingua franca)? Granted, Singapore has that many too, but I'd hesitate on calling either "homogeneous" across the board.
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Switzerland is less homogenous than much of Western Europe and has relatively large amounts of non-European immigration. In any case, given that legal euthanasia is nonexistent in the Islamic world (for largely the same religious reasons Christians oppose it) I find it hard to believe mass immigration from there will lead to greater permissiveness.
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So I had a cousin commit suicide this year. I don't know the exact means and methods he used, seemed garish to ask at his funeral, and frankly it doesn't change anything to me how he did it. He suffered into his 50's with mental health issues, and I can only assume the ruins of the life he was still inhabiting overwhelmed him. I wish he hadn't done it. I wish I could see him again, have a cigar, and shoot the shit for another evening. I wish it wasn't so hard for him to exist. But I can't change it.
The pain it caused in his mother, who he saw all the time, and his sister, who he saw less often being states away, was beyond words. That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief. There were no accomplices who gave him advice, walked him through the act, supplied him with means and methods, or even just did it for him. When all was said and done, he took all the guilt for the act to the grave with him, and saved his family the further grief of having anyone else to be angry with, anyone else's actions to judge.
I can accept that some people just want out. I can accept that though it may be painful for their families, their decisions about what to do with their life is theirs to make. I don't think I can accept third parties being involved, making it easier, "normalizing" it, and complicating the grief of an already unimaginable difficult thing to cope with.
Before I was born, a culture war was fought over ending life, and the defenders of it ran on the slogan of "Safe, Legal and Rare". 63 million abortions in the United States later, it's clear this was just a slogan. I don't know why I would trust these same people a second time.
Well, not me personally, I wasn't alive for "Safe, Legal and Rare", but you know what I mean.
I actually think the method in which he committed suicide does matter somewhat.
It's hard to make up a counter factual when we don't know the "factual". Would his mom's pain have been better or worse if the two options were:
he goes to a clinic and gets euthanized painlessly
she discovered his headless corpse after he takes it off with a 12 gauge?
I don't have a child, but I think stumbling into the horrific aftermath of a DIY suicide would be infinitely worse than receiving the worst phone call of my lifetime.
For 2), I can think of many many more colorful horrible scenarios. Including but not limited to walked into a failed suicide, where instead he's writhing around on the floor blind, as he shot out his optic nerves but didn't die (never shoot temple to temple kids, in your mouth, up and back).
I guess the counter-counter factual is how would they feel if they discover him in bed peacefully lying there after ODing, or slumped in his car after flooding the garage. I guess that's probably roughly equivalent to receiving the "we just euthanized him, sorry" call.
But the call will always "work", DIY guaranteed 100% will result in all the hypotheticals I'm making up, and more.
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It’s worth noting how total the failure of safe, legal, and rare was- this ain’t even a ‘in practice, Dutch hospices give power of attorney to people who don’t agree with their patients on end of life issues’. Abortion advocates literally don’t advocate for it being rare.
Abortion advocates advocate for widespread education about and research on alternative contraceptive methods like the iud / coil, condoms, the pill and so on, which with regular and responsible use significantly lower the likelihood of someone needing an abortion.
And they don’t consider ‘there will be fewer abortions’ a reason for pushing IUD’s the way they did in the 90s. Fewer babies yes, but not the ‘rare’ part of abortion.
I think that for a typical liberal woman not looking to conceive, the preference order is:
So birth control is absolutely preventing abortions. It is also preventing some babies being born.
Of course, the pro-life crowd has largely not embraced birth control as a method to prevent abortions, which is telling. While I get that there are age-old Christian objections to abortions specifically, I think that a lot of the point of being pro-life is to want to punish women for a sinful lifestyle. "If you fuck around, you get punished by being a single mother."
You believe pro-life advocates see motherhood as a punishment?
I believe that the Christian right, which is the camp of most pro-lifers, see non-procreative sex as inherently sinful.
There are probably some people who really hate abortions but are fine with fucking around, and will get their daughter an IUD at age 12 so she is protected from pregnancy, while also being fine with her experimenting with her 14yo boyfriend.
But the modal pro-lifer would emphasize that abstinence until marriage is the only 100% effective birth control. (For perfect use. For hormone-laden teens who do not typically get married before 20, I think that the Pearl Index for abstinence would be rather abysmal.)
Take the official Catholic position (my emphasis):
So it is not that abortion is very bad and using a condom or getting a sterilization after your fourth kid is a little bad -- they are all similarly worthy of condemnation. At the end of the day, at least the pope cares little about unborn kids being killed and a whole lot about people having deliberately non-procreative sex.
I think from a Catholic theology point of view, abortion, sodomy, sex outside marriage, sex within marriage with contraceptives and masturbation are all mortal sins. If you commit any of them and are not cleansed by baptism or confession, you go to hell. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and all that.
In conclusion, I think that the CR does not see single motherhood as a punishment for fornicating women, but simply as a natural consequence of her act which should be her cross to bear. But the underlying idea seems to be that during the heydays of Christianity -- in the good old days -- the choices of a woman were (1) marriage, (2) chastity (e.g. becoming a nun) or (3) being a fornicator, which meant to be an outcast of polite society. (Sure, gays and lesbians could always fuck around without biological consequences, but at least for men there were severe legal consequences instead.) Birth control and abortion have changed that equilibrium in a way which leads to a lot more sexual immorality especially from women (as men were probably always going to whorehouses). If birth control is illegal, then a woman are much less likely to engage in PIV sex outside marriage and will have their hands full with their kids instead of dyeing their hair green and studying feminism, or something -- I do not claim that I would pass the CR ideological Turing test.
Clearly you wouldn’t pass a CR ideological Turing test- literally, having a kid is seen as a blessing. Do you hate children or something? Evangelicals and Catholics don’t either.
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Only in the uncharitable case; more charitably, the inevitability of motherhood as an inescapable consequence of sex forms exceptional leverage when arguing for the cultural aesthetic they want.
If they can (unnaturally) impose the former condition, the latter naturally follows- it's the same thing the abortionists are doing when they argue for their aesthetic.
"More sex, less baby death" is not a goal the anti-sex side or the pro-baby-death side can publicly profess, since the anti-sex side promises less baby death as a consequence of less sex[1], and the pro-baby-death side promises more baby death as a consequence of more sex[1].
[1] Well, I say 'sex' but it's more 'choice', as in, which faction gets to write the social rules about how women get to leverage sex as a meal ticket. The "celebrate my abortion" stance is consistent with this, as is the "life begins at conception" one (but requires a bunch of other social context to fully understand why, since this is more a piece of a larger system that adds up to leverage rather than bestows it by itself).
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Do they not?
The women who are getting IUDs obviously prefer them to abortions. Providers like Planned Parenthood seem happy to offer them. What more do you expect?
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I'm rather torn on this issue.
On the one hand, I do think that people have a fundamental right to commit suicide if they want to, and I think it would be healthy if we as a culture took some steps to demythologize suicide. Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires. If these outbursts were met with indifference instead of panic, maybe people wouldn't be so quick to go there. Alan Watts once mentioned that he would occasionally get people coming up to him and telling him that they were suicidal, and his response was always, "Ok! Well, you can do that if you want". And in the majority of cases, the person would immediately start feeling better upon hearing this; it simply "deflated" whatever problem they had become fixated on. What happens sometimes is that people get stuck in a powerful negative feedback loop where they feel suicidal, and then they realize that that desire is bad and wrong and they shouldn't want to do that, which makes them feel even worse, which makes them more suicidal, and so on and so forth. By demythologizing suicide, you make it a less attractive option in the first place and you cut off the feedback loop.
On the other hand, you are correct to point out that there are clear dangers associated with suicide becoming a "business" (or even worse, an "institution"), and this institutionalization is indicative of a fundamental underlying current of cultural nihilism.
Way ahead of you. If someone threaten to kill themselves to get something from me, I will happily call the cops and they will spend a night or two in an asylum. I have done it before. It is unlikely to restrict the patient's long-term autonomy, and will put an end to further blackmail attempts. (Not that I would stick around such a person, these days.)
OTOH, when someone were to tell me about suicide plans which are not conditional on my behavior, I would probably let them do it if I came to the conclusion that they had made up their mind.
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I think another comparable industry is trans-medicalism, which is clearly, and documentably associated with profit motivations, and led to an incredible rise of something that was once much much rarer.
much of self_made's response below is a predictable mix of techno-libertarian priors and false assurance against corruption (or simply runaway incentives to overexent) by profit-seeking via ideological purity.
Again, with the case of trans, we can se that was is laughably not the case. We saw the ideological core of trans distort and blind a lot of otherwise obvious ethical, and reputational issues. And we are seeing the backlash now.
Also much like the trans question, we are going to have two movies on one screen interpretation of any rapid rise: A need being met vs creeping pressure and social memeplex.
Self-made's objection is again the same tautology that is used to defend an ever growing number of trans individuals as self-justifying:
If powerful preference is the driving justification, then people with ideological motivations will push their hand on the social memeplex / overton window, even if just to make the existing number with these preferences or marginal preferences more free; it will cost lots of money to do this, and lots of money with be made. And then the number will grow inorganically.
This is exactly how it works.
I am very skeptical about profit motive in trans medicine being a notable cause of the rise, rather than both being a result of a social movement that involved true-believers creating or taking over trans medical institutions. As a matter of chronology I'm pretty sure the movement came first, I remember the ancestor of the present trans movement (and SJW stuff more generally) already existing back when a common complaint was that medical gatekeepers would require prospective (adult) trans people to live as the opposite gender for a year before prescribing them hormones. That wasn't a policy designed to maximize the number of trans people, and I believe it fell to the trans movement not them suddenly realizing it was reducing profits.
The rise of "non-binary gender identity", for instance, doesn't seem like something that would have happened if it was mostly driven by medical profit motive. Yes it is sometimes medicalized - a few days ago The New Yorker had a puff piece about a mother and her "non-binary"/"demi-girl" daughter who went on testosterone at 11 and got "top surgery" at 13 - but it seems much less common than with conventional binary trans identification. The trans movement has similar patterns to all sorts of SJW stuff with no profit motive. Nobody is going to doctor due to identifying as "demisexual", and indeed people who identify as "asexual/grey-asexual" are presumably less likely to seek treatment than those who identify as having "hypoactive sexual desire disorder".
While it isn't well know, there is an immense profit motive for trans medicine. Jennifer Pritzker came out as trans as an adult man in 2013, well before the social movement spun up in its modern incarnation. The market cap for gender transitioning is $200 billion. While I wouldn't say that the profit motive is the main reason for the increase in trans identification, it's at least a contributing factor, just because of the immensely powerful players identifying as trans, as well as the immense size of the market. The state of trans research is a mess, and recommendations are made based on faulty evidence; it is plausible that such reduced standards are pushed (or at least encouraged/ignored) by pharmaceutical/insurance companies that just want to make a quick buck.
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Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic, in that it is about pretending that a physical state of being is something other than that it is. It is biologically impossible to go from being a man to a woman or vice versa. Suicide has no such mythos, in fact legalized euthanasia is to some extent about the end of a particular mythology surrounding suicide in which the body belongs not to the man, but to God. It is about cold, hard, material reality.
I find the 'it's just aesthetics' argument to be an empty dodge in these spaces. I understand the intended usage, but it's almost a nonsequitor. Rather, your attempt to distinguish the aesthetics of suicide from trans, kind of makes my point; Because the trans-advocate doesn't see it in your terms.
The point I'm making does not rely on trans and suicide being ontologically similar; only that the nature of the social-legal issue will follow similar social-activitst/profitmaking paths.
You can regard the end result of those paths as of different moral worth based on the object level issue, but the libertarian objections which try to deny that social modulation and profit-making greatly influence these systems, is naiive or lying.
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Not if you have kids.. The consequences go far beyond "solely aesthetic".
I've got a 1 year old.
If a magical pill existed that instantly flipped my daughter's gender to male and then society proceed to see her as a male and she went from quite-likely to commit suicide with 'gender dysphoria' to absolutely cured of 'gender dysphoria' by the pill. I would probably be a little put-off by her taking the hypothetical magical pill when she's an adult, but largely fine.
Alternatively if we existed in an alternate universe where gender was solely defined by what color badge you wore, and everybody was happy to change their perspectives of an individual's gender if they swapped from the blue badge to the red badge. Bit weird, but nothing fundamentally wrong with it.
Unfortunately the current gender-transition thing is an insane death cult that overwhelmingly leads to suicide and invasive surgeries that create a very distant proxy of the target gender appearance.
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A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference. That preference is not just for death, but for a death conducted on their own terms, which in these cases explicitly involves secrecy from their family. They tell their loved ones they are going on holiday. They, allegedly in one case, forge letters and create fake email accounts to maintain the deception. This those not strike me as ideal, but I can't really condemn someone who is clearly this desperate to die.
From the patient’s perspective, the ideal outcome is one where their autonomy is maximally respected. For the clinic, this presents a dilemma. Who is their client? The patient who is paying for a service and demanding confidentiality, or the family who is not their client but has a profound emotional and moral stake in the outcome?
If they were merely a profit-maxxing company, the answer becomes clear. They could, with ease, tell the family to fuck off, or something a tad bit more polite than that. After all, they followed the letter of the law.
When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them? If Maureen Slough did indeed forge a letter from her daughter, the clinic was not simply "skimping on postage". It was being actively deceived by its own client in a way that pitted its promise to families against its duty to the patient. The failure to make a phone call seems like a clear error. But in a context of deliberate deception, we can see it not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a failure to be sufficiently paranoid in the face of a determined client. And the paranoia would have been pointless, the family has no legal right to stop the process. At most, everyone feels better if they're on board.
I run into similar issues every week. Hospitals are forbidden from divulging patient details, even if the voice over the phone claims that they're a brother/wife/best friend. Especially if the person has capacity to make decisions, and this lady seems to fit the bill.
Second, the characterization of Pegasos as "a business" may be both trivially true and misleading. Of course it is a business in that it charges fees for a service. But reducing its motivation solely to profit maximization seems to be a category error. It appears to be a mission driven organization, an ideological entity that must also be a business to survive. The people running it are almost certainly true believers in the cause of bodily autonomy and the right to die. They charge money, like many an NGO does, to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
Their own site says:
And I believe them. The regulatory paperwork alone must be an awful nightmare. If Charles Schwab is handing out big bucks to save on the expenses of more longterm pods and chicken feed, they're not getting a cut.
Finally, we must be wary of the availability heuristic. We are reading these stories in the newspaper precisely because they represent catastrophic failures. The family who has a peaceful, well-communicated experience with an assisted dying clinic does not generate headlines. At least not after the first dozen times.
We have no access to the base rates. How many clients does Pegasos serve in a year? For what percentage do these communication breakdowns occur? It is possible that these tragic cases represent a small number of "glitches" in a system that, for the most part, functions as intended by its clients. Or it is possible that they represent a systemic failure. The point is that from this handful of terrible anecdotes, we cannot know. You can come up with lurid anecdotes for just about anything, and in medicine?
I've already presented a quantitative analysis. The slope doesn't seem very slippery to me and it certainly hasn't reached the point where fair and open-minded advocates feel beholden to shut the whole thing down.
The Swiss have had legal assisted dying since 1941. If the "businessification" of death inevitably leads to this kind of procedural slippage, we should have seen decades of this. We should have a mountain of data on Swiss citizens being bundled off to industrial parks by greedy doctors against their families' wishes. Instead, we have a few tragic stories, mostly involving "suicide tourism," where the informational and logistical challenges are exponentially greater.
The complaint about tracking the ashes "like she was a parcel in the post" is emotionally powerful. But what's the alternative? A private courier hand-delivering the ashes internationally? Who is paying for that?
A tired and overly generalized critique. Do the police run Burglary 101 classes when the crime rates get too low? Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital? Do the hospital admins squeeze tubes of trans-fats into the sandwiches served at their cafeterias?
In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission. A scandal like this is terrible for Pegasos, both for its "business" and its "crusade." It invites negative press, legal scrutiny, and tarnishes the very cause they champion.
The tipoff that these people know that what they are doing is not quite right (or at least that they are running against thousands of years of ongoing overwhelming consensus, and run a strong risk of hanging from a tree themselves if the public at large were to start paying attention) is that they will never call a spade a spade -- "VAD", "MAID", whatever other cutesy acronyms they might generate, the fact is it's suicide (at best) -- why not call it that?
The thing is, there's a vast gulf between your first phrase and your parenthetical. If they knew what they were doing is "not quite right", that would be damning. If all they actually know is that they're running against overwhelming and violent consensus, it is not.
I mean I'm more sympathetic to the latter for sure -- but "thou shalt not kill" has a little more weight of history behind it than "two weeks to flatten the curve" or whatever.
In my heart-of-hearts it's probably that it smells like a sales-job, as much as anything -- and I hate those.
Moses brought back "thou shalt not kill" from Mount Sinai, it had more exceptions to it than any rule stated so fundamentally should possibly have. It did not apply to people from other tribes -- killing the kids of enemy tribes was fine. It did not apply to people found guilty of any of the numerous crimes which were punished by stoning. Or being willing to sacrifice your kid if God gaslighted you into thinking that this is what he wanted. And don't even think about non-human persons.
Is there such a thing? I mean, AIUI, unless you're talking about the legal construct that is the "legal personhood" of things like corporations (and I don't think you are), modern US law says humanity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for personhood; and, also AIUI, most countries aren't much different. (I've seen this discussed in the context of legal issues surrounding potential future contact with intelligent alien life, including the claim that the branch of the US Federal government with the proper legal authority over such contact would be the Fish and Wildlife Service.)
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Killing people just because they ask you to has always been kind of fraught though -- particularly doing it exchange for filthy lucre.
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Genius vertical integration, we should find some VCs
Look, Private Equity firms have a reputation for evil, but I haven't heard of them going that far.
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If it is not possible to do what they advertise, they shouldn't be advertising it. False advertising doesn't cease to be false because the thing you advertised was impossible, but you really wanted to do it.
And if truthfully advertising what they actually do leads to bad publicity, so be it.
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Even the KYC protocols for banks don't have a 100% success rate at stopping identity fraud or impersonation. Out of N Pegasos clients, it hardly strikes me as worthy of damnation that one of them went to such lengths to throw them off. What if she'd hired an actor to come along with her? What if she brought forged legal documents? How easy is that to check from Switzerland?
Your argument also included "What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted" which is a much easier case. They should have a policy of dealing with such requests, and they should be able to describe this policy in advance of it actually happening.
If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents. If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.
If she hires an actor, you're probably stuck, but then, she didn't.
I hate to break it to you, but most legal documents are basically uncheckable. Even a notarized document can likely be faked without too much trouble. Government-issued documents (id cards, passports, banknotes) are certainly harder to forge, but also require someone who is familiar with the safety features.
That is not at all the point. The point is that verbal statements reported by third parties are notoriously unreliable. If Susan says: "Bob said I can sell his car", that is bound to create a he-said-she-said situation. Nobody will ever untangle if it was a honest misunderstanding or if one of them was lying.
This is why Susan needs a signed document to sell Bob's car. Can she easily forge Bob's signature? Sure. But that is now a serious criminal offense! If it is found that Bob never signed the paperwork, she is looking at jail time, and can not claim that she just misunderstood Bob's intention.
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
So I can totally understand that Swiss law does not require patients to provide a notarized genealogy with all the relevant death certificates to prove that whom they say is their next of kin is that.
That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.
The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.
The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".
Suppose that you are a Swiss marriage registrar, and that Switzerland does not want to facilitate marriages where one or both partners a coerced into marrying. There are approaches with very different costs to filter these out. You could just keep a lookout for people who look unhappy or nervous. You could have a separate private chats with both the groom and the bride and mention that there are ways out for people who are coerced. You could require both of them to separately talk to a psychologist for an hour. You could require both to undergo psychotherapy for a year. You could just declare defeat and refuse to marry anyone, because it is not possible to know what motivations people have for sure.
In reality, you will probably not do that last thing generally -- even if you are fine with not having marriages, the same argument would also extend to employment contracts, loans, purchases, sex, etc. Or few people would argue that as you are quite likely to be able to smuggle a few grams of cocaine in a truck without it getting detected by customs, we either should abolish customs or stop international trade.
The assisted suicide case here was not even a matter of consent. But I will be sure that sooner or later, a case where consent is violated will appear. The chance that the evil family of some rich guy will kidnap their beloved pet and threaten to torture it horribly unless they opt for MAID is low, but not zero.
There is a conversion factor for violating the autonomy of those who would really want to live to violating the autonomy of those who really want to die. We probably disagree about the magnitude. From a utilitarian standpoint, I think that we should not minimize the suffering of those denied MAID.
Suppose a djinn offered you to prolong your life by a decade. If you accept, they will flip a coin. Heads, you get to live in the 98th percentile of happiness. Tails, you get to live in the second percentile of happiness (for your age cohort), with no way out. They also reveal that you will be 70 at the time your extra decade starts.
Personally, my answer would be fuck no. Sure, that decade in the 98th percentile would be sweet -- travelling, having sex with a great partner, enjoying life without being trapped in the rat race, playing with your grandkids. But the horror of the 2nd percentile would be much greater. You body failing, your mind fogging -- but not to the point where you do not notice any more, without social contacts, getting bedsores in some retirement home, in constant pain, waiting for a death which will not come for a decade.
In reality, we are not subject to the veil of ignorance imposed by the djinn. We can just ask the 70yo's what their quality of life is and if they want to die or not, and we will mostly get accurate answers. Nobody suggests randomly murdering elderly in the hope that they might welcome death.
So the next djinn offers their deal, which is the same as before, only you have a way to die before the decade is over -- say by stating your wish to die on seven subsequent days. They warn you that it is possible that someone will pressure you into taking that option even if you are in the happy branch.
This seems like a great deal to me. Sure, I lose some utility in the happy branch, but I also reduce the suffering in the pain branch by a factor of 5000.
Luckily, this is not how liberal governments deal with foreigners whose governments are uncooperative. If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it, not just ship you back to Iran because without ID you can not stay legally.
The Swiss people (or their representatives) have decided that humans in Switzerland should have a right to assisted suicide. Why should they deny this to foreigners just because their backwards government is uncooperative?
This is the same problem as I have with open borders proponents: If you want to have open borders, then make your case for it and get laws passed which say that we have open borders. But don't have laws which say that we don't have open borders, but then work to make it easy as possible to not follow the laws.
If you really want there to be no conditions for assisted suicide, then have policies (and laws if necessary) saying "there are no conditions for assisted suicide". But if you can't or won't do that, don't have policies that say that there are conditions, but then set things up so that they are trivial to work around.
Arguments like "what if we compare various possibilities a djinn might give you and what if we ask the 70 year old", etc. are arguments that there shouldn't be conditions, or at least not the conditions we have now. They are not good arguments for "we should have conditions but since conditions are bad let's make sure they don't work".
If you are a refugee from Iran, and Iran won't let you have documents, the other country should try to determine that you actually are a refugee and from Iran, even if it is not as easy to determine this as it would be if you had an ID. If the other country says "Iran doesn't give out IDs, so we'll just accept everyone who claims to be an Iranian refugee", that's a bad policy which is forseeably going to be abused. (In fact, similar policies are abused in real life by "refugees" that aren't really refugees.)
Also, it's a lot easier to revoke a bad refugee status (or a marriage, or your other examples) than to revoke a suicide.
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A person who travels to another country to end their life has the agency that they can commit suicide the normal way.
I don’t advocate for putting cancer patients on a list of prohibited firearms possessors, even if I think them killing themselves is a bad thing.
Travelling to Switzerland to get MAID will impose much lower externalities on society than most other suicide methods.
Leaving aside obviously bad suicide methods like trains, you will in any case place your corpse in the way of people who did not sign up for this. EMTs. Loved ones. Police who break your front door after the neighbors complain about the smell. Random members of the public.
I have it on good authority that there are also other Swiss jobs than suicide assistant. They know what they signed up for, you pay them for handling your corpse and all the paperwork.
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There's a good deal of overlap between support for assisted suicide for everyone and support for nerfing the world so it's really difficult for anyone to kill themselves (e.g. bans on weapons, dangerous sports, etc)
Booooooo outgroup bad
Is it? Please explain.
He made a sweeping statement about people who's views he dislikes having other views he dislikes with 0 evidence or support
Is that not the definition of "booing the out-group"?
Well, fair enough. I suppose it didn't seem that way to me because
I actually suspect he's probably not wrong, but I'm unimpressed with the lack of rigour
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Have you ever seen someone advocate for sports restrictions on the grounds of preventing suicides? I don’t think I have.
Firearms are a different story. People certainly make the argument. But I suspect causation goes the other way, and they’re using the suicide statistics as a motte for policies they want anyway. Ex. Prevent Firearm Suicide.
No, nor am I claiming anyone has. I'm saying they'd nerf the world for other reasons as well.
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