Forum: Author Hangout

If medics are not allowed to kill, not allowed to allow death, the medical expenses of your society will snowball into impossibility because technically we are already able to maintain nearly any corpse "alive" almost indefinitely. At some point someone will have to make the decision to turn the machines off. Or allow a crisis to go it's course unattended, killing the patient through inaction.

You do realize that there is a huge moral difference between what I highlighted and what you're suggesting, right?

If you can't tell the difference between my argument and yours, then you're part of the problem. You seem to be one of those that have no problem with expanding the terrible need to let somebody die and the institutionalization of killing people just because.

Do you really imagine a country of 36 million people having over 15,000 people in such painful situation of suffering and pain to require doctors to actively administer poison? MAiD is the active killing of people. Not through inaction, but through the very active administration of chemicals that kills them, and in the future in many cases fully healthy people.

I do agree that unsolicited offer to assist in suicide is, well at least somewhat obscene.

No, it's right up there with Child of Horror's Dark Times and Irish Writer's Classy Conversions as far as being societally obscene.

There is a HUGE medical ethics difference between someone who is a DNR - Do Not Resuscitate - and hey, your life sucks, so why not kill yourself. My wife is a nurse that deals with elder care - she's made me well aware that she's a DNR, as she does not wish to be in that kind of situation. But she was appalled at the offer by Canada to help the veteran kill herself when all she wanted was assistance in getting a wheelchair lift - because that violates the very first precept of medical care.

First, do no harm!

Now, are you terminal stage 4 cancer, but still of sound mind? Yeah, you can choose to self-terminate. Are you brain dead due to an accident? Yeah, your loved ones could choose to terminate life-extending care. It's YOUR choice, though - not that of some nameless bureaucrat.

I admit I haven't done my research on them

Then how about do some research on reality instead of the theoretical best case situation you've created. There is a hell of a lot of difference between the two.

I can't afford a suicide

Yeah, you can. Go take a whole bottle of Benadryl. That's under $10. Or go find a highway bridge and jump off when you see that semi coming. Run a hose from the exhaust into the back window of a car. Lay down on a train track. The double barrel shotgun in the mouth works, too. Those are all cheap methods of killing yourself - and one's I've seen in real life. (Working with a police department for a few months will get you more experience in this department than you'll ever consider.)

Lay down on a train track.

Covering a train track with downy feathers would make it more comfortable should you choose to lie down on one ;-)

AJ

Covering a train track with downy feathers would make it more comfortable should you choose to lie down on one

But make sure -if in the UK - that no errant feathers (or leaves for that matter) are on the length of tracks proceeding you in the approach, otherwise the train will just stop and not run over the top of you.....

But make sure -if in the UK - that no errant feathers (or leaves for that matter) are on the length of tracks proceeding you in the approach, otherwise the train will just stop and not run over the top of you.....

Which is ironic because leaves mean the train skids rather than stopping so the train stops because it can't stop ;-)

AJ

because leaves mean the train skids rather than stopping

It also means they can't get traction to accelerate and get moving (and also losing traction and slowing down when moving), so sit there spinning and going no-where. A bit like the Houses of Parliament- saying lots and going no-where...

The UK has more MPs and Lords so we're less efficient at doing nothing than the US ;-)

AJ

Actually, in the US, the suicide rate for teen boys is significantly higher than for teen girls.

How many of those teen boys had unwanted pregnancies?

AJ

That makes it exceedingly likely that unwanted pregnancy is the leading cause of teen suicide.

Note that DS ignored the condition:

where abortion restrictions are strict or total

Somewhere like Northern Ireland might give more corroborative statistics, and there are probably plenty of third-world religiously zealotic, misogynistic countries with even stricter anti-abortion laws.

AJ

There have been newspaper reports of teen girl suicides in Northern Ireland because of the draconian anti-abortion laws, but they don't give an indication of the total number. Besides which, the situation has been somewhat alleviated by women's charities organising trips to the UK mainland for abortions.

AJ

It's usually a problem of unclear language.

You can report a percentage change or a percentage point change. If I say something increased by 5%, I mean it went from, say, 60 to 63. If I say 5 percentage points, I mean from 60 to 65.

Sorry, I've learned you do not calculate percents of a percentage.

Calculating a percentage of a percentage is standard math. Rate of change is the first derivative. Rate of change change (i.e. calculating a percent of a percent) is the second derivative. Both are perfectly valid. The problem lies when they are confused.

If medics are not allowed to kill, not allowed to allow death, the medical expenses of your society will snowball into impossibility because technically we are already able to maintain nearly any corpse "alive" almost indefinitely.

But medics routinely murder people, at least in the UK. There's the abhorrent Liverpool Care Pathway and its many rebrandings, where hospital doctors deprive patients, some capable of recovery, of water and nutrition to free-up hospital beds.

And there's also manslaughter, where the kindly family doctor administers an overdose of morphine. Harold Shipman was regarded as an angel by many of his patients for the way he
cared for the elderly.

We seem to have reached the surreal situation where medics, whether malevolent or not, have more rights over our lives and bodies than we ourselves have.

AJ

The patient and/or the patient's family.

"Let's off the old bastard and get our inheritance before he spends it all"?

Perhaps if the patient has nominated a family member to make the decision if the patient is incapacitated, but not otherwise.

There seems to be a trend towards recognition of Living Wills, in which the patient themselves makes the decision to cover the circumstances of future incapacitation.

AJ

I guess nobody read my blog entry and followed the links.

I demonstrated the slippery slope. The slippery slope has been the expansion of pain and suffering and the reasons for this MAD service, I mean this MAiD service.

As of March 2023, this pain and suffering will include depression. We don't need to counsel you, let's just kill you.

And nobody commented on how veteran's affair offered MAiD services in response to a request for a chair lift. Does that sound like 'ease pain and suffering'? Or does it sound like the government would rather kill you than give you a chair lift.

We are down the slippery slope far enough that the government is using it to avoid expenses.

I never argued that nobody should be allowed to die. It still as easy as one taking a bottle of Tylenol and going to sleep. Even at Canada's exhorbitant prices is still a $10 affair. We don't need to make it a service that killed over 10,000 in 2021 alone.

When death becomes a service, those working in that service have a huge interest in expanding that service as much as possible to make money as much as possible. When there are 'clinics' (in other words human butcher shops) whose sole raison d'être is killing people (yes who choose to die) then those clinics' best interest is lobbying the government for more business opportunities hence expanding the definition of 'pain and suffering'.

Nobody even commented on why would the government create pamphlets targeted at kids, presenting suicide and the act of dying in a clinic in a way to make it palatable to children. Why would they put out ads making suicide a beautiful thing?

Everybody took my post as completely against anybody dying or allowed to die. Read the blog, follow the links.

No, not everybody.

OK, not everybody true, but the pro-suicide as a service so far outnumbered the 'oh my god they're encouraging people to kill themselves' by 2 to 1 at least.

You should read some of the comments I received as direct message in response. Some were completely bonkers.

I demonstrated the slippery slope. The slippery slope has been the expansion of pain and suffering and the reasons for this MAD service, I mean this MAiD service.

Which is irrelevant to my response. Trying again to avoid politics, the existence of a slippery slope in one case does not mean that it's inevitable or that one can do nothing.

Go back to the Niemöller quote. There was absolutely a slippery slope in Nazi Germany. That does not mean that we can never 'come for anyone' again for any reason whatsoever.

Step back, fix the problems, do it better. My response was philosophical and intentionally not tied to any one implementation failing.

I can completely agree that everything in your blog post is a real problem and there are major mistakes and negative consequences without agreeing that the entire idea of assisted suicide is terrible.

I can completely agree that everything in your blog post is a real problem and there are major mistakes and negative consequences without agreeing that the entire idea of assisted suicide is terrible.

Maybe it's the title that I used that's making things difficult to relate. Maybe I should have used 'Medically Assisted Suicide as a business or service'. (Lazeez can you make the change?)

I personally don't think doctors/medical personnel should ever be involved in suicide. Considering how easy it is for anybody to kill themselves painlessly (a bottle of Advil with a box of NyQuil will do the job painlessly), it's a perversion of the medical profession to have them kill people, regardless of the motive. If somebody needs help committing suicide, for example the completely incapacitated, the only people that should maybe assist them are people who care for them (children or siblings).

My biggest issue is with the suicide-as-a-business or suicide-as-a-service thing. Any time anybody has a financial incentive to do anything, to make more money, they will seek more business. How do you seek more business in the suicide business? Do you think a suicide clinic will ever decide 'we're killing too many people'? Do you think any business would turn away anybody that seeks their services, including suicide clinics? If a depressed person walks into a suicide clinic and fills in the application, does the clinic have any incentive to look that person in the face and tell them 'you don't need our services, go see a shrink'? You bet your ass they would never do it.

We should not make suicide a business. We should not give any government any say in this especially a government that has control over the medical system, a government that may want to cut cost and the easiest way is to kill the ones who create the cost.

I personally don't think doctors/medical personnel should ever be involved in suicide.

Not even psychiatrists, to ensure the patient is fully cognisant?

Many suicide attempts are half-hearted, being a plea for help rather than actually wanting to die.

AJ

This kind of 'suicide attempt' has nothing to do with the medically assisted suicide that is the subject in this discussion.

Actually it does. There have been several cases of medically assisted suicides, some in the Netherlands, for reasons that some of might find less than compelling - severe depression, phantom pain after losing a limb, body dysmorphia, myalgic encephalomyelitis etc. Once patients have approached a clinic about medically assisted suicide, there's a danger they might get railroaded if they have doubts at a late stage in proceedings.

However, those would be a minority of cases compared to eg terminal cancer etc.

AJ

Yes, the title hurts, but it's not the only problem, or even the primary one. The title is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is that the entire question is artificially narrow in ways that warp the discussion.

That's because you keep insisting on arguing the points you want to argue instead of the point that I'm trying to make.

I'm saying that there should be no business or service whose sole purpose is to kill people.

You keep trying to argue that it's ok to kill people and ignoring my point.

You obviously want to kill people and you keep dragging the discussion way away from my point.

Let's hear your opinion on the point: Do you believe that suicide should be institutionalized and made into a business? Yes, or No.

If you TLDR this, look for two questions at the bottom.

That's because you keep insisting on arguing the points you want to argue instead of the point that I'm trying to make.

That's because you keep arguing the point you want to make instead of the point you said you were making. I'm much more interested in the point you actually stated at first than the one you've shifted to.

ETA: I'll apologize here. You're right: if you add 'as a business or service', the discussion is very different. But Old Dave's post has nothing at all to do with businesses and services, and your blog post goes a long ways before bringing up businesses and services, and keeps veering back and forth.

I also think there's a difference between 'business' and 'service' if one takes 'service' broadly. The answer is very different comparing 'non-paid or non-profit volunteer service' to 'business', but even there one can run into trouble.

However, I'm much more on your side when discussing businesses where there's a profit margin. It's just that, in my opinion, that's extremely far afield from the moral issues of assisted suicide.

The rest of this (except my answer for your 'business' question) should be read in the light of actually discussing the thread title, Old Dave's post, and more than half of your blog, but I agree that it's afield from what you apparently wanted to discuss. Unfortunately, that wasn't clear.

I honestly believe that there's room for compromise, if there's room for compromise on your side.

You obviously want to kill people and you keep dragging the discussion way away from my point.

Wrong. At no point have I argued for 'killing people,' as the term is commonly used, and using it that way is pejorative and dismissive. How can one express a position in favor of assisted suicide without some form of causing death? Phrasing it that way is equivalent to someone telling a vet 'You keep trying to argue that it's ok to kill pets.' Vets do not 'kill pets' except in a highly technical form of the work 'kill' and most would be appalled and angry at that description.

If your position is that any form of assisted suicide is morally 'killing people', that's fine. We could have an actual discussion. about that. Everything about business, government, and coercion is irrelevant if assisted suicide is 'killing people', and if it's not 'killing people', don't dismiss people by calling it that.

Let's hear your opinion on the point: Do you believe that suicide should be institutionalized and made into a business? Yes, or No.

I'll give you a 'no', but you may not be happy with why, I suspect. I also find that 100% irrelevant to Old Dave's post, at best tangential to moral issues (which was your starting point in your original post), and irrelevant to much of your blog post, which is why I haven't mentioned it before.

Here are a few base conditions for me - you may not agree (all of these take for granted that we are discussing people with serious life-ending conditions for which we have no reasonable hope of a treatment breakthrough and for which their death will be highly unpleasant):

I don't believe it makes any moral difference if someone is capable of killing themself or not as to whether they should be able to choose suicide as an option.

I believe that denying respite to people on situational grounds is immoral.

I don't believe it makes any difference whether we're talking about governments, businesses, health care professionals, family members, volunteers, or whatever in terms of the morality of actually assisting someone who wants to commit suicide in doing so.

Here are some things I suspect you will agree with:

I believe it's morally wrong for anyone in a care-giving relationship (government in single-payer, health care business, family member, etc) to push someone to kill themselves.

I believe that under many circumstances doing so may equate to criminal behavior and abuse and should carry penalties.

I believe that whatever system should not consider suicide as a cost-containment option.

HOWEVER, I also believe that someone who is in a position where their options are a painful death or suicide should have that option whether or not they are capable of carrying it out, and that it is immoral to deny it. Therefore, in the absence of physical capacity or some family/friend/whatever, it should be at minimum legal, and ideally mandatory, for there to be some trusted non-coercive non-manipulative non-abusive person to perform such a service. Lack of physical capacity or being alone in the world should not sentence one to a painful death.

So, that's not 'institutionalized and made into a business' (hence the no), but nor is it 'can't do it at all; slippery slope'. It's an in-between. Old Dave is happy, and on the point you seem to actually want to argue you're happy, theoretically.

Two questions back:

Is all assisted suicide 'killing people'? Yes or no. (ETA: your blog seems to indicate that you believe it is - unless I'm misreading - whether or not 'as a business or service', which makes focusing on 'business or service' curious)

Do you believe that someone who is terminally ill and facing a painful death should have the option to terminate their life, whether or not they are physically capable of such an action and whether or not they already have someone capable and willing of performing that service, assuming the entire time that this is a free, uncoerced, unencouraged, etc choice of the terminally ill person? Yes or No.

To me, THOSE are far more at the crux of 'medically assisted suicide' and of Old Dave's point, not arguments about governments or businesses.

So much verbal diarrhea. Geez.

Let's hear your opinion on the point: Do you believe that suicide should be institutionalized and made into a business? Yes, or No.

I'll give you a 'no', but you may not be happy with why,

If you qualify it, it's not a no. I'll take that as a yes.

Two questions back:

Is all assisted suicide 'killing people'? Yes or no.

Yes. Unequivocally.

Human life is human life. Any active action to end it is killing. It can be called mercy killing, but it's still killing somebody. With their consent doesn't change that fact. It's killing.

In the case of terminally ill and in pain it will be mercy killing. But it's still killing. Again, You cannot change that.

Do you believe that someone who is terminally ill and facing a painful death should have the option to terminate their life, whether or not they are physically capable of such an action and whether or not they already have someone capable and willing of performing that service, assuming the entire time that this is a free, uncoerced, unencouraged, etc choice of the terminally ill person? Yes or No.

As a believer, I can comfortably say No.

By asking somebody to kill you, you are asking them to condemn their soul. The reason for your suffering can only be known to God. By killing yourself, you're condemning your soul and by asking somebody else to kill you because you're too much of a coward to do it yourself, you're asking somebody else to condemn their soul for you. Especially if you're not too physically handicapped to do it yourself.

If it is about facing painful death, one can easily administer enough morphine for pain to go away and let the illness take its course without actively administering poisons into somebody's body. It seems most people arguing aren't even considering this. My father died that way; cancer metastasized through his abdomen from bladder cancer.

If the person facing the painful death really wants to die, it's their option, and they can easily request the removal of life support from their body. How long would a terminally ill cancer patient survive without any intravenous nutrition? A person can ask for the needle to be taken out of their veins. That is their option and it doesn't require anybody actively injecting any additional substances to kill them.

If it is about facing painful death, one can easily administer enough morphine for pain to go away and let the illness take its course without actively administering poisons into somebody's body

That's not actually true. Some people suffer more pain than can be controlled by non-lethal doses of morphine.

AJ

That's not actually true. Some people suffer more pain than can be controlled by non-lethal doses of morphine.

I've heard of that. But having worked in the medical field for over 10 years in my youth, I've never personally seen somebody in that kind of pain.

I've heard of that. But having worked in the medical field for over 10 years in my youth, I've never personally seen somebody in that kind of pain.

A friend of mine (represented in AWLL by Stephie Grant) who had ovarian cancer that spread to other organs. In the end, even morphine couldn't stop the pain (back ni the 90s).

But would you have approved of eg a morphine overdose to put her out of her misery? Did she express any feelings on the issue?

AJ

But would you have approved of eg a morphine overdose to put her out of her misery? Did she express any feelings on the issue?

She accepted the maximum dose that wouldn't require her to be on a ventilator. The last few weeks of her life were literally a living hell. She refused 'extraordinary measures' but she also would never have accepted an intentionally lethal dose of drugs.

Which brings us around to assisted suicide, of course. If a patient is terminal, there is no addiction risk. But the problem with fentanyl is that it's extremely easy to overdose. If physician X has a patient with extreme pain, prescribes fentanyl knowing it may cause an overdose, and the patient dies, is that morally okay? Wrong? What if they know an overdose is likely? What if they believe an overdose is unlikely, but it happens anyway? What if the overdose is intentional?

If the physician is free to prescribe fentanyl even at risk of overdose to terminal patients, problem (mostly) solved. If not, fentanyl really is not an option, because any doctor using it could be accused of illegal assisted suicide even if they had no such intention.

That's why fentanyl was developed. It's much, much more effective than morphine. The trouble is that a lot of MDs are afraid to prescribe it for fear of the illegal/addiction scrutiny it can put them under.

I had fentanyl (along with versed and propofol) when I had my recent foot surgery. They prescribed Tramadol for pain (I don't take acetaminophen/paracetamol, so no norco) but I didn't take it, relying instead on 600mg ibuprofen because I detest opiates (but would use them if there were no working alternative).

How long would a terminally ill cancer patient survive without any intravenous nutrition?

They're more likely to die from lack of hydration, and that's a cruel death - one of the reasons advocates of the Liverpool Care Pathway had to change the name to disguise the abhorrence of what they were doing.

AJ

They're more likely to die from lack of hydration,

Probably, yes.

and that's a cruel death

Maybe.

Death is death. It's the ultimate step in life. It's the end of everything for a person on this earth.

If you're a believer, suffering may be a way to cleans your soul. Maybe God has a reason for you to suffer.

If you're not a believer and you believe that when we die we simply perish, then it doesn't matter. The brain will not retain the suffering after the person dies.

Therefore, you are not against assisted suicide, it's just that the only method of assisted suicide you approve is by negligence.

So to you it's either active killing with a poison or it's negligence? No middle ground? You're reaching very far to invalidate my position simply because I declared that I'm a believer?

Negligence is considered negligence when we don't give care to those who need it and want it. If a patient asks you to stop care, then compliance with their wishes is not negligence.

It's interesting that you consider compliance with a patient's wishes to actively kill them with a poison a good thing and you consider compliance with their wishes to do nothing 'negligence'.

You are logically incoherent.

Well, then. You have every right to your opinion (as I said, it's the belief of the church in which I was raised), and I wholeheartedly support that.

Since your actual issue obviously isn't 'MAiD', or the Canadian health care system, or 'business or service', but rather anyone (including the patient) ending their life, the entire thread was duplicitous from the start.

I also find your repeated intentional mischaracterizations of my positions problematic.

In any case, while I (obviously) find this an interesting topic, I have no further interest in responding to someone who mischaracterizes my responses and opens what pretends to be a discussion when any actual discussion turns out to be immaterial to them. I would never have replied to an honest thread such as 'Old Dave said this, but my religion disagrees, so he's wrong', which would have covered the whole thing.

Since your actual issue obviously isn't 'MAiD', or the Canadian health care system, or 'business or service', but rather anyone (including the patient) ending their life, the entire thread was duplicitous from the start.

I also find your repeated intentional mischaracterizations of my positions problematic.

And by insisting that my actual issue is not MAiD and dragging it repeatedly back to assisted suicide as a whole you're not mischaracterizing my position?

Yes, I've always been against actively assisted suicide. But I always held that everybody has their beliefs and they are free to hold them whether I thought they were wrong or not.

However, that doesn't mean that when the issue reaches the current situation with MAiD where they're actively encouraging people who aren't really suffering to kill themselves that I shouldn't speak.

As long as a belief is held by the people doesn't affect others, then they're free to hold it. But when I see it being enforced on others, I speak up and oppose it, and if there is action to be taken, then I take it.

Just like I leave satanist be because they're free in their beliefs. But if they kidnap children for their sacrifices, then I have a huge issue with it and have no problem fighting them back.

MAiD is an abhorrent service. Its proponents are continuously expanding its 'business'. I have a problem with that. Yes, I do have a problem with institutionalized killings of humans. I especially have an issue with them targeting children like that pamphlet that I linked to. How evil is that? Is making death palatable to kids part of 'easing pain and suffering'?

You refuse to believe that I hold both positions.

Yes, I believe that you're free to kill yourself if you're in too much pain. That's between you and God if you're a believer. If you're not a believer, then you're absolutely free to end your existence at your whim. As long as it's you who does it.

Yes, I believe that nobody should hold a job where their job it is to kill you whenever you're ready to do it.

Yes, I believe that a service like MAiD should not exist.

Yes, I can hold all those beliefs at the same time and be coherent in my beliefs.

ETA:

And yes, the whole thing that started this whole discussion is still the slippery slope.

We started with 'yes we should help those who want to kill them and can't do it themselves' and we got to 'we need to encourage more people to want us to kill them'.

In which case, I'll reply:

Slippery slope arguments are prone to logical fallacies. Yours definitely is.

'It failed once, therefore it will always fail and we cannot try to do it right' is a logical fallacy.

Rephrasing slightly: the problem you seem to have is not the abuses of 'MAiD', but rather its existence. You refuse to credit the possibility of a non-abusive service. You also refuse to consider the lack of such a service a potential moral lacking.

In my opinion (not yours, I know) the following:

Yes, I believe that you're free to kill yourself if you're in too much pain. That's between you and God if you're a believer. If you're not a believer, then you're absolutely free to end your existence at your whim. As long as it's you who does it.

is immoral. You are telling those who wish to terminate their life, and believe God is okay with it, that they must suffer a lingering painful death simply because they are physically incapable of lifting a pill bottle. Under what other circumstances would you consider torture an acceptable sentence for someone whose crime is inability to life a pill bottle?

There IS a middle ground, though you may pretend not to see it, or may believe it, too, is forbidden: volunteers or other not-for-profit 'pill bottle lifters'. If that's acceptable, we have a compromise.

I agree with you that profit and cost-containment motives should not be part of the discussion and that it's dangerous for the same agencies to be involved, but I do not believe the slippery slope is inevitable even if they are. However, best not to.

I'm not sure what you would say to a physician who belives that they have a moral obligation to assist a patient in ending their life because there is no other viable means of relieving their patient's suffering and the patient has expressed a wish to die. Whose morals take precedence in that situation?

Slippery slope arguments are prone to logical fallacies. Yours definitely is.

No fallacy here. No silly hypothesis. I'm no arguing against the potential of something happening.

It already happened.

They're marketing suicide like they market a nice vacation spot.

We are so far down the slippery slope that they're marketing suicide to kids.

If that's not the ridiculous level far down the slippery slope, I don't know what is.

We have only one more step down the slippery slope: Mandatory killing if you become inconvenient for some reason.

And yet you keep insisting that something is wrong with my thinking.

Clearly you are one of those people who at least don't mind people dying and maybe you'd go as far as wanting people to die. You keep arguing for it.

Just like you argued in support of Woke crap all the while denying you're woke.

Dude, you're looking silly.

Do I need to call you the C-word again? (Communist)

No fallacy here. No silly hypothesis. I'm no arguing against the potential of something happening.

That's not the fallacy. Proof of existence is not proof of necessary recurrence. The fallacy is that because something happens once that it must necessarily happen every time in the same manner.

As I said: figure out what went wrong, fix the problem, do it right.

Your argument is of the exact same form people made several years ago: "No one has ever landed an orbital class rocket. They always crash and blow up. They will always crash and blow up. Stop trying!"

What I am arguing for is not for 'people dying', but for the right of people to make their own moral choices about their own lives without the government denying them that right. You are advocating that the government should override others' moral choices in favor of your own. I imagine you would feel differently were it their choices that were winning out over yours.

You are welcome to use the word Communist completely inappropriately, as I know you love to do. Call me a communist. Call me a reptilian from Arcturus. Both are equally accurate. I really don't care what someone who blatantly and admittedly misuses words calls me. I am a communist in the same way that Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, or even Joe McCarthy were - but, then, you would call them all communists, too, should it suit your purposes.

I am definitely woke, by your definition, since your definition works out to 'Anyone who advocates not being horrible to anyone I don't like'.

the idea that politicians will figure out what went wrong, fix the problem, and do it right seems bizarrely unrealistic.

That's because the politicians are the ones who created the problem in the first place, and help contribute to making the problem worse.

Nevertheless, 'it failed once, therefore it will always fail' is a logical fallacy. Perhaps the right fix is to remove the politicians from the equation.

That's not the fallacy. Proof of existence is not proof of necessary recurrence. The fallacy is that because something happens once that it must necessarily happen every time in the same manner.

As I said: figure out what went wrong, fix the problem, do it right.

Yes, just like communist do with communism. Fix what's wrong, do it right. And always end up with people dying.

See, you are a communist.

I am definitely woke, by your definition, since your definition works out to 'Anyone who advocates not being horrible to anyone I don't like'.

Yes, you are woke. By rational people's definition you are. Just because you deny it, doesn't mean you aren't. Walks like a duck...

The phrase 'First do no harm' is, to me, not a barrier.

Much as we'd like to think that applies to the medical profession, it went the way of the Hippocratic Oath.

A doctor sworn to literally do no harm couldn't risk giving vaccinations because they cause illness and occasionally death.

AJ

My feeling is that 'harm' is restricted to things which the practitioner knows or should have reasonably known will cause more damage in the average case than the alternative.

There are hundreds of things that cause, or can cause, harm which are routine. Vaccinations are one, of course, but chemotherapy is essentially always 'harm'. Lasik eye surgery will fail in a given percentage of cases and harm the recipient, leaving their vision worse. Any surgery can potentially lead to a variety of poor outcomes.

And so on, and so forth.

The injunction remains: a doctor can ethically use chemotherapy drug X knowing that the good exceeds the bad in the average case, but if patient Y has a poor reaction to X the situation reverses.

Which is where I am with assisted suicide. Failing to assist in suicide may result in net harm to the patient compared to assisting in the case where the patient will inevitably die and will die an agonizing death, in my opinion.

There will always be a tension between services provided and cost containment for any model of health care. Government is irrelevant to this discussion. If private health insurance had the option of assisted suicide, private health insurance would push it as a cost-containment method.

Right now, both single-payer and private-payer systems have 'just let them die a horrible death' as a cost-containment method, too. There are innumerable cases where people who obviously should have been covered were repeatedly denied.

But, of course, without cost containment we absolutely wind up with cases where someone's life is prolonged by a month at the cost of millions of dollars AND additional suffering with almost no quality of life for that extra month, which reduces resources to care for anyone else. There are documented cases of things like that happening.

The problem is intractable. There's always more need for resources than there are resources, and excepting 'The Singularity' or other hypotheticals, there always will be.

Which is a wordy (but, in my opinion, important) way of getting to the conclusion 'Just because someone has screwed it up doesn't mean that it will inevitably be screwed up.'

The debate (in my mind, anyway - and partly because we are explicitly trying to be apolitical) is not whether someone screwed up assisted suicide, it's whether the idea of assisted suicide has validity. Any given poor implementation is a useful data point but, unless that example provides some reason to believe that every implementation must inevitably fail in the same way, it doesn't speak to the heart of the matter.

Which is why I lead with cost-containment. The inevitable part is the tension between cost and cost-containment. One can envision rules under which the government was forbidden to push people to choose death (perhaps particularly in the case of non-terminal conditions). The simple existence of a tension doesn't imply that such rules must inevitably fail.

And, again, there's the problem of terminal conditions. If physically incapacitated (and therefore incapable of suicide) person X has a terminal condition which will inevitably lead to a highly painful death in a short (but non-trivial - months, say) period of time, and the only medical interventions known will simply lead to an even more painful death in a slightly longer period of time, should person X just be abandoned to die a highly painful death with no option of ending their own suffering, simply because the process could be abused to the detriment of persons Y and Z? Or do we seek to do the best we can for X as well as Y and Z?

That, to me, is the real core of the question. Do we deny those who really and truly are going to die, and die a horrible agonizing death, any option to avoid doing so simply because the potential for abuse in other cases exists? Or do we do our best to fix the potential for abuse?

Should we assist you so you are silenced and we can continue on sooner rather than later, or should we offer no assistance so that your suffering is intensified and extended for longer?

You silence those who you disagree with when you have no argument?

Many Christian denominations simultaneously believe that:
1) Any failure to prolong one's life to the absolute limit, fighting every step of the way, is the moral equivalent of suicide;
2) Suicide is the one truly unforgivable sin, because one cannot ask God for forgiveness when one is dead;
3) Only human beings and no other creatures have souls.

If one has that set of beliefs, any form of suffering-avoidance suicide (personal or assisted) is a sin, while putting down dogs is not a sin.

I don't agree, but I grew up in such a church and I understand the source material and logical arguments used to arrive at the conclusions.

Some of it will always be the tension between those who cause excuse away any flaw in the world, no matter how horrible, as 'We cannot understand the mind of God, and all things have a purpose to God'. While that may be true - I'm not attacking the belief itself, nor saying those who hold it are wrong - I cannot myself believe it, because (to me!) it's inconsistent with many other attributes of God.

Also, the same people who follow that belief often (but not universally) also believe that the Devil and his minions cause ill effects in the world - even that the Devil is the master of the mortal world. If so, might unrelieved suffering instead be a tool of the Devil intended the break the will of the faithful so that they will reject God? Might ending it serve God and frustrate the Devil, in that case?

The problem with theology is that, unless two people start from a relatively close common ground, one can argue 'angels on the head of a pin' all day and all night forever and never make headway. One reason among many that basing the laws of a non-religious state on religion is a terrible idea.

The other side of suicide as an unforgivable sin goes to denominations that strongly believe in repentance as a prerequisite to forgiveness, and that goes with a belief that it's too late to repent after you are already dead.

Exactly - that's what I was trying to say, though you have to add that you can repent and be fine if you sin in between repenting/praying/etc and dying, as long as you don't reject God - but suicide is, as you say, a rejection of God. That's why it's different from an accidental or natural death.

The whole thing reminds me of Job, which is the ultimate 'suffering is a test' story. The thing about Job is that Job himself is faithful and rewarded, but it's incredibly hard on those around Job and many otherwise faithful people are harmed or killed during the whole mess.

I agree - I'm not saying that God causes the suffering (He doesn't in Job's story, either). My point is that perhaps God doesn't want them to suffer at all, but that the _whole_ thing is all about the Devil (mind you, this isn't what I believe, it's simply following the logic within religions who go down this path in the first place).

And, again, this is why we do not let religions set the rules in a secular society - there's no agreement, and many of the discussions rapidly become esoteric and almost beside the point to those who believe in anything else.

3) Only human beings and no other creatures have souls.

I'm doomed then. Being a white European, depending on your source I have somewhere between 1% and 8% Neanderthal DNA so I'm not completely human ;-)

AJ