With the discussion of whether assisted dying should be allowed in Scotland befing brought up again, I was wondering what other people thought of the topic.
Do you think people should be allowed to choose when to end their own life?
What laws need to be put into place to prevent abuses in the system?
How do we account for people changing their mind or mental decline causing people to no longer be able to consent to a procedure they previously requested?
This would seem like the kind of question that sounds at first like a single question but causes a number of others to be unpacked. For example, would someone see a difference between simply pulling a plug, ceasing to feed someone, and administering a drug, or would this being politicized be too much of a fear…
A few things come to mind here as certainties for me. To start out, if a society for whatever reason greenlights the concept, definitely don’t institutionalize/politicize it. The moment it even becomes a debate in the public sphere, pull the heck out, the concept is lost. I might not have the greatest relationship with life, but the same thoughtpath makes it hard to comprehend being all willy-nilly about it. In such a society, if anything, I’d say it should be by an individual’s own breath that the candle is blown out, so to speak. Going by the same literary device, if the individual cannot produce the exhale to do that, shrug your shoulders. I would not put a dog down for this reason. By the same token, everyone should recognize the gravity of all this, which in most cases nobody does.
Pulling the plug is like assisted suicide, but with a ton of suffering as the body fails slowly. Stopping a feeding tube is killing through starvation.
Assisted suicide would reduce the pain and suffering in both cases by allowing for pain reduction and shortening the time span.
It’s difficult to explain sometimes, but it’s not the pain that throws me off concept-wise, it’s the personhood aspect of it, in the sense that if you’re deemed a proxy and your obliged act in question is to be so absolute as to remove them from the world, then you must ask yourself, how absolute are you?