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I'm yet to see anyone try to reconcile "it is ghoulish to euthanise grandma" and "it is ghoulish to keep grandma on abysmal QALY life support that costs $100,000s for 2 more decades". Perhaps we should reintroduce death by exposure. If it's hunger and the elements killing grandma, then no one is staining their hands with sin, right?
I believe that both are very ghoulish. I am basically an atheist (with some agnostic longing to believe in my weakest moments) and maybe it's a remnant of my Christian childhood but I believe euthanizing grandma as an economic consideration is the most evil option of all. It's just hideous. If I were religious I would just insist that if God wanted to take the person out they'd take the person out otherwise society or the family or the infirm must foot the bill as it's God's will for them not to be dead. And why are no religious people on this board making this exact argument? It makes me question everyone's faith as I believe it's a perfectly good argument (though I don't think it would be very convincing of most irreligious rationalists and the like.) As I don't have the religious idea to lean on the best I can defend my position from is that it is arrogant for humans to make the decision to end the elderly's life for the convenience of the group and that we should only do this when utterly necessary and even then ought to be very careful about consequences and the philosophical implications (which people time and time again prove themselves incapable of doing.)
On the other hand I do suspect that throughout history in tribal or early societies that the elderly when they became a burden were killed or left to die by close relatives, which while I think is disturbing and should be only done when necessary for the group, is defendable if it is in a situation where it's necessary. I don't think a rich country like Canada needs to euthanize people so the poor can eat, no one is suffering there to that degree today.
More broadly I am maximally repulsed at euthanatia by the state or even by the medical system. If you don't have the motivation to end it without a bureaucratic process to assist you then you probably don't want to die badly enough. It has been over a decade since I was truly suicidal but the act of dying was always a last ditch grasping for agency and the thought of even giving up the agency for ultimate control on your life is baffling and disturbing to me. I just can't relate
Usually the religious argument I encounter is that grandma's body failing is God's will and expending copious effort to keep her alive through all the heart attacks, bedriddenness and dementia is going against it.
Again, is it just the active act of killing that irks you? Would leaving grandma in the hospital bed without the ventilator and IVs (other than painkiller) be fine?
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The "ghoulish proposal" is in this case is doing away with the Dead Donor Rule and expanding MAID explicitly as a means of increasing access to donor organs.
I thought the post was talking about people stuck in comas on indefinite life support, or simply put "vegetables". Everything I'd heard on this forum before would suggest that people were mostly against spending doctor-hours and money on such hopeless and fruitless cases.
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It's hard to reconcile on purity grounds, which 'ghoulish' evokes. But it's not hard on more practical grounds, like "It's bad to euthanise terminally ill grandma, because that sets us on a slippery slope where we're euthanizing Mom because she's got killer migraines and Sis because feeling depressed"
(all the MAID horror stories I've seen are women, but that may just be reporting bias; almost no one cares if a mostly healthy guy offs himself, with help or without)
Thinking about that slippery slope and the hard cases that introduce it, maybe the structure we want is that mercy killing should be illegal and prosecuted by the legal system, but it always remains a possibility for individual action. Someone knows their parent is in incredible pain and wants to die: it's then their prerogative to perform the killing themselves, taking the moral weight of the act onto themselves. It's a decision that's incredibly weighty and a lot to ask of someone, but that's exactly what we want anyway instead of offloading it onto society and the bureaucratic apparatuses to make it routine. And if the killing is discovered with lots of evidence pointing to the person who did it, it's prosecutable.
It's then up to a jury to decide legal guilt, and they can judge the "cancer patient in extreme pain somehow receives an OD of a painkiller" and the "20 year old TikToker with a terminal case of POTS is killed" differently.
This sort of thing is a cry for tyranny. Legal things should be legal, not illegal but overlooked if the right people find it convenient to do so.
You misread me: I said that mercy killing should be illegal and prosecuted. But, if sometimes illegal things are still the moral thing, someone can choose to do the illegal thing and bear the potential consequences if they're certain it's still right. I don't think the person is expected or required to make it easy for the government to prosecute them for the crime, but the government should earnestly do so with the tools at its disposal.
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If the option of euthanizing Mom for killer migraines wasn't available, would actual migraine treatment be more available?
Personally I'm in favor of actually fighting against encroachment on the cases which you think are too far, rather than relying on outraged Christian pro-life gesticulating and "slippery slope" blanket denial then acting like Surprised Pikachu when that wasn't enough.
Well friend, as soon as people step up to fight for better medical care, then we outraged Christians won't be carrying it all on our own and the particular level of moral purity you want for the cause will be better calibrated to your needs and preferences.
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The point of "slippery slope" is this doesn't work. Once the principle has been yielded, you can fight all you want but you're going to slip down the slope.
Yes, that's what those advocating that some particular change is a slippery slope say.
"We've already established that you're a whore, now we're just haggling over the price".
Give in on "well okay some lives are not worth living" and you have no defence when the inch becomes a foot, then a yard, then a mile, each time the argument for extension is "but you already agreed we could do this, we just need a teeny little bit more".
The defense is "I am not giving more than an inch because I prefer it that way". It doesn't have to be based on principles. In fact principled arguments are the brittle ones as we can see here in the first place - they hold until they don't, and then suddenly the conservative, lacking a branch to grab on and having no practice in digging his heels in in any arbitrary spot, "has no defense".
Instead of staking everything on being or not being a whore, perhaps some people should learn to haggle.
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A terminally ill grandma being euthanised is a tragedy, a healthy young man offing himself is a statistic—just like if he got forced off to war and blown up, perished in a workplace accident, or got bustled to death by random street crime.
Perhaps the way to square the circle is to frame it as an accessibility question for war volunteers, not euthanasia. Why should the terminally ill grandma or the depressed TikToker be denied their opportunity to die to defend Democracy in Ukraine, if they want to? If need be, we can roll their wheelchair straight into the flight path of a Russian drone, and (at $300 surcharge) even let them hold a rifle in their last moments for the aesthetics. Maybe the Russians can be persuaded to play along and provide a preagreed time and place in return for partial sanctions relief.
(I don't know what percentage of pro-lifers also has a categorical revulsion towards making women fight in a war, but surely it is much less than 100?)
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