Post by Deleted on Apr 1, 2018 5:54:49 GMT
Mar 31, 2018 18:26:58 GMT @miccee said:
My view is that nobody consented to life, and therefore everybody should have the full and absolute right to opt out of it. Many more people fail in suicide attempts than succeed (there's about a 25 attempts to 1 completion ratio, and that's from the US, where guns are available), and there's no reason why people shouldn't be given the means to end their life swiftly, painlessly and safely. It's diabolical that people think that the suicidal ought to have to risk maiming themselves horribly and surviving, or even having to endure a lot of pain and discomfort, just in order to appease some kind of delusion about the sanctity of human life. Staying alive is the default position and human bodies are pretty resilient and won't usually die without a lot of suffering happening first.
Having the right to clinically assisted suicide would weed out the attention seekers, because clinically assisted suicide would be guaranteed to work. Destigmatising suicide and making it a human right would also give people the ability to seek psychiatric help for their issues without the fear of being imprisoned against their wishes, and therefore it would help a great number of those who can be helped. A waiting period to obtain the assistance would also help to safeguard against this.
Ultimately though, it can never be irrational to want to end suffering and escape harm, so the idea that they could be wrong about suicide being a good option is a non-starter. At least for those who don't believe that some kind of ethereal 'soul' escapes from the body upon death, and laws should certainly never be based on an article of faith such as that in any case.
I am not as certain as you perhaps are that failed attempts at suicide must have been genuine. I would guess that in some cases they might have actually believed on some level they wanted to die, when on another level they did not. I suspect some of them knew very well they didn't really want to die, but did what they did anyway just for attention.
Considering that some of the people at least who attempt suicide have for the most part convinced themselves on some level they truly want to die, I would hope there is a better way to "weed out the attention seekers" than forcing the issue.
My refusing to help people commit suicide does not "stigmatize" them. It only means my generosity has limits. Many people already guessed that.
I'm all in for ending suffering and escaping harm, but it is not always clear what the best way to do that is.
The attention seekers will not go through with the assistance in dying. Not forcing someone to endure an existence that is painful to them is not 'generosity', it's mercy. Why should it be your business in any case whether someone else chooses to die, and how is it 'generous' to simply refrain from interfering in their personal choices? Nobody would be asking you to do it personally, if you didn't choose. Only to not politically obstruct people from being able to obtain assistance from someone who is willing to help.
It's plainly obvious that the only guaranteed way of escaping harm is to escape to where harm can never find you.