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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.
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.
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.
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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