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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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