"Why I don't regret my abortion"

Your assertion that treatment can simply be made more aggressive until the patient dies does not hold up with regards to psychiatry. There's a range of different treatments that can be tried, and most of the aggressive ones have their own side effects (sometimes those which can endanger other people).

And it's a truism that mental illness can be a distressing experience that can drive people to the extremes of emotion. But it's absurd to say that we cannot take such requests at face value on the basis that if they were mentally healthy and everything in their life was wonderful and fulfilling, that they wouldn't be wanting to die. That's just a catch-22 wherein they are disqualified from dying because there is something that is causing them to want to die.

Yes, I think that objectively non-existence is the best bet (no harm and no feeling of deprivation from missing out on joy), but this is not something that I would impose on a living person. Everyone should be allowed to have their own philosophy and preferences validated, as long as it doesn't directly endanger others.



Most terminally ill people are perfectly capable of committing suicide and if suicide is 'trivial' for anyone else, then it is trivial for most terminally ill individuals. More trivial, when considering the fact that if the suicide attempt was unsuccessful, they would only have a brief period of time in which they would have to endure the consequences. Therefore, there is no logical reason why it would be worth the trouble to win the right to die for those with terminal illnesses. By stating that there should be the right to die for the terminally ill, you are tacitly admitting that there is a humanitarian case to be made for the right to die. That being the case, there is no excuse why only the terminally ill should be morally deserving of such assistance.




"They have a mental illness" is not a sufficient warrant to deny an individual any right to make decisions for themselves. Many mentally ill people are full participants in society and are capable of making reasoned decisions which affect their own wellbeing and that of others. Unless your goal is tyrannical oppression (perhaps a state of affairs wherein the government can freely diagnose people as mentally ill in order to suppress certain ideas), then you have to show where a person's logic is faulty, and demonstrate why their mental illness is likely to be the cause of this. If the patient were to simply state that their illness was causing them severe and prolonged distress; that they'd tried numerous different treatments and nothing had helped, and that they didn't think that the possibility of getting better was worth the continuing harm, then there would be nothing illogical about that line of reasoning. "They wouldn't want to die if they didn't have a mental illness and they loved life" is not a rebuttal to that logic; you would have to show that they don't understand the consequences of their choice, or at least that their pessimism with respect to significant improvements upon their present circumstances was unwarranted.



There are many practical risks, because every accessible method of suicide has a margin of error. For example, you couldn't say that the only people who survived a jump off the Golden Gate Bridge were those who weren't mentally competent to make the decision, because jumping off the Golden Gate bridge is a method with a low margin of error, as well as being something that you can't really get wrong. And even those who do not have the wherewithal or skill to execute suicide by hanging, wrist-cutting, etc, deserve protection from the risks that would be entailed, as well as deserving of the right to have their wishes fulfilled without the need to inflict more physical harm upon themselves than necessary.






What suicidal people have you spoken to who have advised you that it is so? Whence did you derive the expertise on this subject to be able to make such pronouncements?




But you've as much as admitted that we would be doing wrong by the terminally ill by not offering them such assistance; even though they are the group least in need of such assistance. And taking an unnecessary risk on someone's behalf, without their consent, is a breach of consent, even if not commonly perceived as such.




So under what scenario could people be kept alive, but with the guarantee of not experiencing any of the symptoms of their illness?




The study that I have posted shows that some people do have an inherent capability for suicide, and that they can be driven to suicide by overarousal. It shows that there are some who do not possess this capability for suicide who can not be driven to the act through overarousal. "As overarousal increased, suicidal symptoms increased among high capability individuals and decreased among low capability individuals." Thereby disputing (with actual evidence) your assertion that committing suicide is as easy as pulling on a pair of socks.

You've stated multiple times that the solution for "edge cases" is "increasingly aggressive treatment", then later on in the thread, you added on the part about the fact that this might ultimately bring about the patient's death.

And if my belief in non-existence being preferable is "pathological", please explain why it is "pathological" to wish to reject the risks even if it means rejecting the possibility of the benefits that will not be needed if not for the existence of the risk.



Most terminally ill people are physically capable of committing suicide; certainly up to a point. And when they are no longer capable of suicide, they are almost at the end in any case. We can understand the rationality of the terminally ill patient wishing to escape the inevitable suffering that would otherwise be ahead of them; but if it's someone with a mental illness, you judge the very same reasoning to be irrational simply because they've been diagnosed with a mental illness. Please explain what the flaw is in this reasoning, assuming that the patient is someone who has been mentally ill for maybe 10 years and has tried many different treatments:

The patient reports that they are suffering grievously due to the mental illness and has been for years. The patient has tried many different treatments and the therapists are running out of ideas for what to try next. This does not fill the patient with optimism for the prospect of treating the illness to the extent where a satisfactory quality of life is realistic within the foreseeable future. The patient understands the finality of death and does not expect to experience a sensation of relief after death; and realises that they would forfeit any remaining possibility of living a life which brings joy. 

Explain what is illogical about the above line of reasoning without simply saying "they're mentally ill, so obviously anything that they say must be irrational".

To reiterate on the antinatalism point: procreation is a risk taken with the wellbeing of someone who cannot consent to the risk being taken, and is something done for the benefit of those who are conferring life. 



There's no reason it should be 'deleterious' for the patient, if this was their request and they will not experience regret or any negative repercussions for their decision. I understand "deleterious...for society"; but that is an apologia for slavery, when the people who would be applying for this service are already the collateral damage of a society which encourages procreation. And there's no reason they shouldn't have help, even if the outcome is something that they could have achieved on their own, providing that nobody is being conscripted into assisting against their will. If I want a tattoo, then I am capable of doing it myself. But I would rather hire a trained professional so that I get a better quality of tattoo whilst also minimising the risks.



Except for all of the people who fail to complete suicide using the highest reliability methods (such as leaping from a great height, such as the Golden Gate Bridge). There's no way of differentiating between those who died and those who survived, based on 'mental competency'. It's simply chance that dictates who survives...there's not really much of a 'mentally competent strategy' for jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, as long as you are determined enough.



So you're an authority on the subject of what it takes to commit suicide, without ever having spoken to a suicidal individual, or having read any studies on the matter, or had any training in dealing with the issue?



Why do the terminally ill need such assistance? Most of them are still physically capable of suspending the requirements of continued life; and even those who aren't are going to die shortly in any case. And it is your opinion that life "needs" to be preserved, but this does not correspond with any objective need on the part of the patient, when it is their stated and unwavering desire that their life be peacefully terminated.



Both options should be available, and the patient should ultimately be able to determine whether the potential benefits of continued treatment, after a certain point, are worth the continued experience of harm. They're the ones who are experiencing harm, and it should not be anyone else's place to determine whether the harm is "worth" the vanishingly small prospects of recovery.



It also shows that those who don't possess the capability can become less likely to commit suicide in overaroused states. And the decision is complicated by risk factors, as well as the physical pain/discomfort that will be experienced in the prospect; it is not a straightforward assessment of whether or not life is likely to be enjoyable in the future. If life is only worth continuing with compared to the prospect of becoming permanently disabled, then that is not an affirmative decision in favour of the value of continued life, that's merely a decision made from fear.

Stating that there is no need to create new human life is not the same as arguing that "all humanity should be dead", although that would be the eventual outcome. I'll put the concept a different way; let's imagine that there is known to be another planet on the universe which has conditions which would support the existence of human life, but it is not practical for humans to actually visit and colonise that planet due to the distance that would need to be traversed. Do you think of it as a tragedy that human life does not already exist on this planet? Is there some kind of necessary and indispensable function that we carry out in the universe, which would cause deprivation if we were no longer here to carry it out? Do you spend nights lying awake ruminating on the tragedy of the barrenness of other parts of the universe? There is no intrinsic need for human life (or any life) to exist in the universe. It only even becomes desirable once sentient life exists in order to harbour the desire. Explain what you see as the pathology behind the preceding stream of logic. Is it that, because I am a human myself, that means that it would be deranged not to be so anthropocentric as to think that humans perform a necessary and indispensable function in the universe?



It is rational to wish to avoid future suffering, full stop, and suffering is not limited to physical ailments. Moreover, if someone does have a mental illness, then the definition "mental illness" must refer to some kind of physical dysfunction within the brain (a mere state of mind created by a healthy brain cannot be a mental illness). And if you recognise that there is some kind of humanitarian argument to be made for facilitating death for the terminally ill who have only a short period of suffering ahead of them; then we should do so for those who may otherwise be condemned to an indefinite period of suffering. Even if we are helping out people who do not have the mental competency or wherewithal to complete suicide on their own; we can recognise the validity of their desire to die and provide them with the assistance that they need to realise their desire.

Moreover, if we are limiting assistance to terminally ill patients only; then that would leave many people who will be forced to live indefinitely with severe physical disabilities which result in a very poor quality of life and the lack of any option for opting out of the suffering.



And if the prospects of being released from the "fog of derangements" through therapeutic interventions is very remote (as in cases of people who are sufferers of long-term, treatment resistant mental illnesses), then that is a factor which should be taken into consideration and should be supportive of the patients right to receive assistance to die.



If it's OK not to seek someone's consent because they cannot refuse consent, then it's OK to rape a woman who is passed out drunk and who cannot be revived to request permission. The non-aggression principle dictates that if it is impossible to request consent, then non-consent should be assumed before we take an unnecessary gamble on someone's behalf. That is why "she didn't refuse consent" would not hold up in court in the case of a rapist who was charged with raping an unconscious woman. And whilst there are those who are "having a blast", that comes at the expense of others who are decidedly not having a blast. You cannot only produce the good lives and not the bad ones; the bad lives are an inescapable cost of the good lives. It's a bit like if I had to pay for your trip round the world and you assure me that your trip was "worth every penny" when I'm deep in debt to the notoriously brutal local loan sharks as a result.



If an individual requests death and is given a peaceful death and has no second thoughts about it, then at no stage is their thought process telling them "this is deleterious", and they do not reach that conclusion after they die according to what I assume is our shared understanding of physical reality. Deleterious for society? It could be argued that this is the case, because support for the "sanctity of life" is a very important social bond that most humans share. If we started to be a bit more honest about the futility of the suffering that exists, this would have a resulting impact on the comforting delusion that "human life is meaningful and worthwhile". However, to keep an individual forcibly alive to benefit society is nothing more than slavery, just as it is slavery for me to be required to pay for your trip round the world merely because my hardship would produce a subjective benefit for you.



Both are examples of an act which can be self-administered, but which can (and should) be made safer and less painful with professional assistance.



What makes leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge uniquely 'unreasonable'? It's one of the most reliable ways to commit suicide (and for now, is accessible to anyone who can travel to the Golden Gate Bridge and has functioning limbs), but is done in public. Hanging is a more risky prospect and is very uncomfortable. Moreover, some people are tall and have low ceilings, or don't have any kind of support beam which would bear their weight. Carbon monoxide poisoning (probably the best method of suicide that used to be accessible to most people) is no longer as accessible an option as it was in the past, now that modern cars all have catalytic converters and their tail pipes are designed to make them suicide-proof, and many people do not have garages. Anti-freeze now comes with bittering agents added to prevent suicide, and even if you can successfully get it down, it is a very painful and drawn out process that could be survived if you are discovered in time (not everyone lives alone and will have the time alone necessary to carry out a suicide that will take many hours). Slitting of the wrists is a rather terrible, gruesome and painful way to die, and not very effective either. So what are these guaranteed-successful 'rational' methods of suicide that everyone has access to? And if it's such a trivial act, then why shouldn't the able-bodied terminally ill just be expected to use those methods instead of receiving state assistance.



Even someone who is rationally suicidal will experience these "lizard reflexes", because the innate desire to live does not derive from and is not amenable to reasoning. There are examples of exit bag + Helium users (and as a point of fact, many Helium canister manufacturers now add Oxygen to their canisters in order to prevent them from being used for suicide) who have torn their bag off their head whilst they were unconscious because of these innate reflexes.



It is a rational idea for those people, and it is a rational idea for anyone else who wants such a service. If an able bodied terminally ill patient can receive that treatment, then it is discriminatory to deny that same service to a mentally ill person if we cannot point out a flaw in his reasoning (which you have refused to even try to do with the example that I posted above). If we can discriminate in this example without being able to demonstrate exactly how the mentally ill patient's reasoning is faulty, then that's the same as saying that a mentally ill person's employer can just sack them upon learning of the mental illness without being able to give any evidence that the mental illness was negatively impacting their job performance.



The risk is there, almost irrespective of which method is chosen. Any time there is a highly reliable and highly accessible suicide method (such as carbon monoxide poisoning), you typically find that world governments or private corporations take action in order to severely restrict access to that method. 

Rest assured, I'm not trying to backtrack or "weasel" out of my stronger past statements on the affront of giving birth. I'm simply making the point that, in addition to being an affront and a violation of consent, it is also entirely unnecessary except for the satisfaction of the desires of those already alive. And if everyone who were ever to be born were guaranteed only a very small amount of suffering, then I wouldn't be such a trenchant antinatalist; in fact the philosophy probably never would have occurred to me in the first place. But the suffering that is doled out in this world tends to work a bit like the inverse of a progressive tax. So instead of the largest burden falling upon the broadest shoulders, as would happen with a progressive taxation system; in the case of life, the heaviest burden falls upon those least able to bear the burden. So it's as if the McDonald's burger flipper and the call centre peon were being taxed at 90% of their meagre incomes, whilst the CEO has only a 10% tax rate. The suffering that those people experience is the unavoidable consequence of the continued gamble of bringing more human lives into existence.

When your parents decided to conceive you, they were taking the risk that their child may be born with a terrible disability that would reduce them to a dreadful quality of life, full of pain and abject helplessness. And though the gamble paid off in the case of you and your parents, on the very same day that you were born, your disabled, helpless and miserable counterpart was also born; because their parents were playing the same lottery with their wellbeing.  And they won't have been any more deserving of their suffering, or less deserving of your life of luxury; it's simply a lottery that doesn't take moral desert into account when deciding the winners and losers. What would you say to your miserable, depressed, disabled counterpart? "It's all worth it, because although your existence is terrifying and painful, I'm having an absolute blast"?

You should have the right to gamble with your own wellbeing, but not with someone else's; because there is an absolute guarantee that your 'gift' will be someone else's imposition.



It should be up to each and every individual how much suffering they wish to endure, and whether the potential for future pleasure is worth it for the present or future suffering. The right to determine that (and I mean legal right, in which case they would have the freedom to seek assistance in pursuing their decision to its conclusion) should only belong to the person who has to live that life. The humanitarian response is to take on board what the patient has to say, and how they feel, and not go with a one-size-fits all approach that may be perceived as authoritarian and oppressive by those on the receiving end.



But you don't have any expertise to be able to determine that this is how psychiatry works, and you don't offer any solution for the patients who get neither treated nor killed by this approach. And their illness (if they even have one) is not an evil goblin living inside their head and working against them; it is part of who they are.



You aren't offering a creature life, that is the whole point. You're forcing it upon them, and even if they eventually do commit suicide, they will still have to endure a lot of suffering for which they did not consent, before that happens. And of course, if their parents have successfully indoctrinated them to believe that Hell awaits those who commit suicide, then it's clearly not going to make any sense at all to them to choose eternal suffering of an infinite magnitude over temporary (but still very long lasting) suffering of a finite magnitude.



I do emphasise trying to make things better, which is why I'm an advocate for things such as a robust welfare system, nationalised healthcare, gender equality, etc. But only a fool thinks that utopia is feasible. For one thing, our very brain chemistry kind of makes sure that our moods sort of average out. So even when our life improves materially, there is a hedonic treadmill effect whereby our improved circumstances become mundane and everyday, and our mood reverts to where it was before the material improvement.



It's a supremely rational argument. To take another example, let's say that one of my work colleagues has confided in me that she plans to quit her job in a fit of pique over a new management decision, but she doesn't have any job lined up. That being the case, I might reason with her about the risks of not finding another job very easily, given that good jobs are scarce in this part of the world and employers tend to favour those who are currently employed when making hiring decisions. I would empathise with what was motivating her to quit, but try and persuade her that the risks that she would face are not worth it. If she decides to quit anyway, then that is her choice and I have no right or ability to interfere or impede that in any way; and that is exactly how it should be.

Now, to compare that to the right to die, you're saying that people shouldn't have the right to die, but you're failing to articulate just what exactly it is about the state of death that you object to (because you agree that it's unlikely that consciousness continues after death). So you can't really tell the patient why you fear the outcome of his planned decision, but you think that there should be a legal impediment to that decision (that being that he would have to commit suicide himself). And your idea of "empathy" seems to be that you disregard the patients wishes altogether, put an immovable legal barrier between him and the realisation of his wishes, and impose a one size fits all treatment regime that is known not to work for all patients.

And also, regarding all those Belgian and Dutch doctors who assist mentally ill patients to die, all the politicians and lobbyists who assisted the law to pass, etc. Are all of those people moustache-twirling psychopaths with no empathy for the suffering of those patients, who just really like killing people or have a pathologically "morbid" mindset? Or is it more likely that they feel profound compassion for the suffering of the patient and decide that it's probably for the best that they respect the wishes of the patient, in some of the most severe cases?



People give themselves tattoos: globalnews.ca/news/1981094/the-dangers-of-do-it-yourself-stick-and-poke-tattoos/



Every easily accessible method of suicide is fraught with potential error; and you haven't given an example of what failure-proof , universally known method of suicide all the "sane" people choose. And if the person that I traumatised by jumping off the bridge shared your views, then I would be accomplishing something positive by bringing the raw nature of reality home to that person.



So the unconscious person who rips off their exit back is making a deliberate (yet unconscious) decision to thwart themselves and risk brain damage? And the person hanging themselves who has just kicked the stool over is thinking deliberately and rationally when his body spasms and thrashes around?



You've not been able to explain why death itself is so dreadful it should be avoided at all costs, and you've not explained why the long-term, treatment resistant mentally ill patients who would choose assisted death have an unrealistically pessimistic assessment of the chances of an enjoyable and fulfilling future life.



So in the entire history of human existence, there's never been even so much as one case of a rational person who has failed at a suicide attempt? Not even because of a 1 in 1000 fluke accident which thwarted their well laid out plans? That's basically as reasonable as saying "all atheists are just mad at God".

Most 'supervilllains' are indifferent to the harm/collateral damage caused to other people, and that is why they are supervillains (if such a thing actually exists). My entire argument hinges on the premise that it's not acceptable to enter someone else into a lottery when there are many dangerous penalties for not holding the right ticket, just because the person who has the ability to give life thinks that the risks are 'worth it'. Your justification for taking the risk basically amounts to 'it would make me happy and I'm worth it', given that you understand the fact that there is no ethereal soul begging to be incarnated into a body in order to experience 'life', therefore a world with no sentient beings would have no tragedy and no deprivation. Which is really as close to a utopia as it is possible to get, given that it seems to be impossible to have sentient life without some people benefitting at the expense of someone else's terrible suffering. The very nature of our existence is that we need to have cravings which can never be fully satisfied, and there is scientific evidence for the 'hedonic treadmill' effect. Suffering is necessary in order to make life feasible (if you don't experience the hunger, you aren't going to eat and cannot survive), and cannot be eliminated from the design.



I can just picture it now...you would assure the disabled man that you're really enjoying your life and therefore his lifetime prison sentence of immobility and the indignity of having people change his soiled nappy several times a day it are worth it because of the joys that you experience. When he started to feel a bit sorry for himself and shed a tear, you would admonish him that the tears ought to be saved for the barrenness of Mars and Venus and the unborn Martians and Venutians who will never experience the wonderful opportunity of being trapped in a wheelchair for 80 years, never being able to so much as use a toilet or scratch their nose. If the man said that he wanted to die, you would say that it cannot be allowed because you're afraid of death and want the issue kept swept under the rug, and he needs to be a soldier and sacrifice more decades of indignity and relentless suffering in order to provide you with peace of mind. Then you might remind him that scientists are currently working on ways to extend the human lifespan radically beyond what is currently possible...meaning that he might be conscious and alive in that self-same wheelchair even 500 years from now and you would relish the prospect of being around to see it.




For the record, as much as you like ad hominem attacks to distract from the weakness of your arguments, I have absolutely no reason to believe that I am clinically 'depressed'. My mood is probably just about as stable as anyone else's, hence the fact that I am able to endure at length your glibness and lack of empathy which would induce a hysterical breakdown (or even just engaging in petty insults the way that you habitually do) from those of a more volatile disposition. The truth about my situation is that I feel that I was imposed upon, and although my suffering is moderate compared to that of the most unfortunate, I feel a keen sense of injustice for my own situation and also for those who are less fortunate than myself. 




When a sentient being is brought to life, they are entered into an incalculable number of different lotteries. Some of those lotteries have rather nice prizes, and favourable odds to win those prizes. However there are many other lotteries wherein a grave misfortune greets those whose number comes up. All the different diseases that exist, disabilities, bad luck, etc. The unborn person misses out on all the booby trapped lotteries without feeling deprived of any of the prizes available for the winner of the more benign lotteries. Same, of course, for someone who has been euthanised due to mental illness.



The individual who makes the calculation that continued living is not worth the risks should not be imposed upon with the duty to take care of the gruesome matter himself, thereby attempting to clean up the mess that somebody else made for him. And statistically the number of unsuccessful suicide attempts outnumber the successful attempts by a factor of about 25 to 1. This number is from a US source (http://lostallhope.com/suicide-statistics), and therefore it is reasonable to believe that the ratio would be even higher in jurisdictions where individuals do not have access to guns.



I apparently have greater expertise than you, considering you refuse to acknowledge the existence of any cases of treatment resistant mental illness, and glibly advocate for "increasingly aggressive treatment" in all cases.



It isn't "offering" if you cannot reject the 'gift' before it is given; especially if the gift would be very troublesome to dispose of (reference the suicide statistics above, and also considering the fact that a 5 year old doesn't really have the presence of mind to commit suicide if he's having a rotten time). If I buy you an incontinent dog from the shelter for your birthday and leave it in your home and clear off, then I'm not giving you a gift, I'm burdening you with an imposition for which you didn't ask. You might end up enjoying taking care of the dog, but that doesn't justify the imposition of a 'gift' that would be troublesome for you to maintain and which you did not have the chance to refuse before receiving it. And you've failed to demonstrate why having concerns for the risks and lack of fairness is 'irrational'.



It is true that according to objective standards of living, the standard of living has improved. It is also true that this does not correlate strongly with increased feeling of wellbeing. Human life has a built in mechanism which causes our sense of contentment to sort of average out. Sometimes referred to as the hedonic treadmill effect. Hence the reason why you have wealthy people getting addicted to drugs and alcohol when even their pampered lifestyle of privilege fails to satisfy.



The counter argument is that human life is possessed of some kind of ineffable 'essence' that must be preserved at any cost to the wellbeing of the person who owns the life. That is called the sanctity of life and derives from the humanist (meaning the worship of mankind) tradition of the Abrahamic religions.



It shouldn't include the right to enlist someone who does not consent. However, if I can find someone who is happy to consent to assist, there should be absolutely no reason to stop the two of us from carrying out our agreement, providing that in doing so we are not directly endangering others. And the state of death is a neutral one. It is rational for anyone who is experiencing an enduring and profound negative state of being to wish to upgrade to the neutral state of non-being. You cannot demonstrate why this argument is irrational, and your assertion that it must be irrational if it comes from the mind of a depressed or schizophrenic individual is bigoted and prejudiced, and is endemic of the ingrained stigma against which the mentally ill must struggle.


The government allowed those laws to pass, as did the secular-minded citizens of those nations. And if the entire process is done with the express consent of the patient, then there is no objective basis from which to draw the conclusion that a mistake of any type has been made.



I refer again to the statistics above. 25 unsuccessful attempts to 1 successful attempt. In a population where there is free and almost unfettered access to guns.



So what is the sensible and freely accessible method for those who do not have the legal right to own a gun? You're eliminating all of the most effective methods as being irrational without providing one freely accessible and highly successful alternative. I'm sure that jumping in front of a speeding train and laying one's neck on the rail isn't what you have in mind, based on your objection to people jumping off bridges.



Of course you'll refrain from elaborating, because it will always come back to some kind of 'sanctity of life' mysticism, combined with ignorant prejudice against the mentally ill.



There should be absolutely no risks involved in ridding onesself of an unasked for imposition. Whether "practical" or otherwise. Not even a 1 in a billion risk, let alone a 24 in 25 risk.

My understanding of psychopaths and comic-book villains is that they typically don't want the same thing for themselves as they want for others. For myself I want what is consistent with my values and desires, and I want for others what is consistent with their values and desires (whether that is living until dying of natural causes in old age, or being assisted to die when they are suffering from chronic depression). My position stems from empathy - I have lived through suffering and continue to do so. I can extrapolate from my own circumstances and imagine myself in the position of someone whose position is truly desperate and without any hope. What I would like you to do is to imagine what it would be like if you were suffering from severe chronic depression for maybe 20 years, you'd been on numerous courses of medication, none of which had helped and your doctors were really struggling to think of something that may help which hadn't already been tried. I want you to imagine what it would be like if you were facing the prospect of being forced to endure a life sentence of the same thing and not being able to envisage any easy way out. You've claimed the 'empathy' card, but haven't demonstrated that you've ever imagined yourself in the situation of someone who is suffering (which is what empathy actually means).



I've had no emotional outbursts either on the Internet or in real life, although I cannot help it if your biases have caused you to interpret anything that I've posted as being such. You actually haven't met me, don't know how I behave in real life, what I sound like, don't know what my moods are, etc. The natural thing to do is to build up a picture in one's head of strangers with whom one interacts on the Internet, and that construct is probably more based on one's own biases than it is on the content of the person's posts. I know this from having met people from IMDb in real life and finding out that they're very different from how I pictured them.



Whether it's positive for the majority (a dubious assumption) isn't really the point. The point is that it is known that there exists grievous suffering in the world, and there's not really any kind of fairness mechanism which ensures that the people who get the suffering are the ones who 'deserve' it. For all that 'desert' has to do with it, you could have been the one paralysed for life, or having to contend with chronic depression. And I'm not sure that you've grasped why this is a problem. Perhaps you don't understand or care about the value and important of fairness. But many people do.



You're eliminating all of the statistically most common methods of suicide as being 'rash and irrational', without saying what is the failsafe method of suicide that everyone in the world knows about, has access to, and which is used in all cases of rational suicide.



It's not true that all individuals with mental illness are incapable of periods of lucidity, or incapable of having consistent and rational desires with respect to their own wellbeing. If you applied that reasoning more broadly, there would be no laws in place to protect the mentally ill against unfair dismissal from work if their employer sacks them upon learning about their mental illness without having evidence of how that condition impairs their job performance.



I don't think that you're getting it. In your life there is "some chance of a bad outcome". However, in the world at large there is an absolute iron-clad guarantee of a bad outcome for some of the people who come into it. The people who get the bad outcome are not deserving of it, because there is no fairness mechanism built into the system.

The 5 year old suicide thing was to show that it is not realistically possible to reject the 'gift' until many years after it has been 'given' (or imposed) and therefore there is the possibility of years of suffering from which it is not possible to escape.



An 'easy exit' using the failsafe method of suicide that everyone in the world apart from me knows about (despite the countless hours of research I've applied to the matter) and has ready access to. 



But apart from the authoritarian argument (something along the lines of 'people must be kept alive so that the state can extract maximum productivity from them') and the argument that the desires of the many should always outweigh the rights of the few ('suicide is selfish because it causes others emotional suffering'); sanctity of life is the only concept left to appeal to. Because you cannot explain how being dead as the result of one's own request is an objectively bad thing for the individual who requested death.



Having a 'right' means that the government doesn't construct any barriers to exercising that right, unless the exercise of that right would directly endanger others. It means that whilst I don't have the right to force you personally to kill me, I should be allowed to make that arrangement with someone who is happy to provide that service. In absolutely no meaningful sense does the 'right to die' exist in the country in which I live, or the one in which you live. Being physically capable of doing something without impediment does not equate to a 'right'; because otherwise I could argue that I have a 'right' to mug an old lady in the street based on the fact that I'm physically capable of doing so and probably would be able to evade legal consequences for the action. And like I've mentioned above, the fact that a person suffers from a mental illness does not preclude them from having occasional moments of lucidity, or being able to formulate rational thoughts on certain subjects. 



From the perspective of the dead person, there is no objective reason to think that they will envy the living. From the perspective of someone who is about to be assisted to die (upon their request) death is a positive and welcome cessation of the intense suffering that they had theretofore been enduring. There is no objective negative from the perspective of the patient; only from the rest of society.



I'm not claiming that governments and citizens are not prone to errors of judgement. I'm saying that there is no possible way that it could be objectively determined that the state is failing its vulnerable citizens by furnishing them with a voluntary pathway to assisted suicide.



Of course included in that statistic are going to be teenage girls who took a handful of pills as a 'cry for help'. But it also includes many people who came to the conclusion, after a long period of sober reflection, that they would be better off dead. I don't know of any fail-safe and painless suicide method to which everyone in the world has ready access, and I know many, many other suicidal people who are similarly unenlightened.

I'm such a supervillain that I don't want suffering to be imposed on those who have not consented to it and do not deserve it. Makes sense. I let out a maniacal, villainous laugh every time I hear or read of a situation where a patient's views and desires are listened to and respected (such as in Belgium and The Netherlands), rather than being treated with a 'government knows best' paternalistic attitude.




And it's depraved and deplorable that I fail to appreciate the celebration of the sanctity of life which epitomises the way that psychiatric patients are treated in Indonesia, being chained to the floor whilst their teeth rot in their heads and their bodies become emaciated and malnourished. It would take a paragon of empathy and compassion such as yourself to rejoice in the fact that Indonesian society cares so much about these patients that they value life so highly that they'll literally chain people to the ground so that their muscles atrophy rather than giving them any possibility of ending their life so much as a picosecond earlier than the maximum amount of time that their life can be dragged out. Because even if it were possible to keep people imprisoned in such conditions for an eternity, that would be infinitely superior to allowing their conscious torture to ever cease.






Well if I were reading my posts out in a video recording, you would find that my tone remained measured and modulated and that I didn't get red-faced and pounding my fists on the computer or bursting into sobs. Compared to your posts, which often seem to have an angry and very combative tone, where you can't get through a sentence without breaking down into ad hominem attacks. And I'm not so emotionally invested in this message board that I keep a dossier on each and every poster that I dislike and then go from thread to thread responding to their posts and copying quotes from that file and linking them to random videos that nobody will ever watch.



Fairness means that nobody should get to maximise their joy at the expense of someone else's suffering. It means that you should have liberty, but that should only extend as far as it can without violating someone else's right to consent. And I've suggested a way in which it is possible to avoid and minimise suffering without extinguishing the human race, which you have rejected out of hand, because other people need to suffer in terrible ways in order to validate your ideas about the value of life.



Typical cop-out. Nobody is going to report you for mentioning this suicide method that supposedly everyone in the world knows about, has unfettered access to, and which is completely painless and risk-free. Even those who don't have access to any means of performing research.



If the patient reports that their suffering and have an unwavering desire to die every time that they are interviewed; then there is absolutely no reason why their request cannot or should not be taken at face value. The very concept of 'mental illness' implies unpleasant mental sensations.



The world is not a suffering-free utopia yet, and there are some very good reasons to doubt that such a state of affairs will ever obtain. And even if it did, I don't think that justifies the collateral damage (to both humans and other animals) which is recklessly left in its wake. And a person can be suffering terribly before they have the capacity to consider suicide as a possible solution to that. Such as a 5 year old with autism or severe emotional disturbance. Call me a madman as much as you like, but I don't think that we should be expecting 5 year old children to pay the cost of our experiment (experiment being bringing new life into the world to see how it turns out), especially if nobody can come up with a rational argument for why it needs to be continued. I'm sure it comes off as truly deranged that I wouldn't want to have 5 year old children suffering horrendously and needlessly in the pursuit of something that their parents desire.



And yet you demur when asked about the 100% failsafe, painless and readily available means of suicide to which all but one (me being the one exception, of course) of the world's 7 billion plus humans have ready access and know about. And apparently the thousands of people on suicide forums desperate for a way out also don't know about this method, so it's me, plus several thousand people (predominantly from wealthy western nations with high quality education systems and abundant access to the internet) with whom I've come into contact.



Before you were born, you didn't care one iota about the chance to have a "blast", and when you're dead, you will no longer care about the fact that you will never again have a "blast". Going on your logic, if it ever becomes possible for science to make humans immortal, it should be mandatory for everybody, and everybody should be under constant surveillance to make sure that they don't commit suicide, such is the crazed irrationality of wanting the prospect of ever dying. 


And if your appeal is not to the sanctity of life, then it is to the benefits of slavery. Because forcibly keeping people alive because the "shared subjectivity" of most people holds that life is always better than death, is in fact slavery. If you woke up tomorrow with a severe mental disorder and found that medical science was never able to cure that disorder but kept you imprisoned in a psychiatric ward for the rest of your life (with suicide-proof features such as collapsible curtain rails just in case you started to entertain any ideas about escape), then you'd likely end up being outside of that shared subjectivity, and go from being one of the slave-drivers to one of the enslaved.



There's no such thing as an intrinsic right. The concept of a "right" only exists in a human society, and it is defined by society. If there are unnecessary legal impediments to having any person exercise his choice to cease living, then death is not his right. If death is a right, then by definition, the government is not able to interfere to prevent you from privately contracting a willing individual to assist you in suicide. Not unless the contract that you agreed upon was going to be something that would infringe on others' rights (for example your assistant throwing you in front of a speeding train).



And it used to be a "shared subjective" belief that homosexuals were repulsive and therefore homosexuality should be illegal, much less homosexual marriage. Shared subjectivity is something that can evolve as attitudes become more enlightened. Many people who now support the full raft of gay rights were probably thinking 20 years ago that there shouldn't even be such a thing as a right for homosexuals to be engaged in a sexual relationship, much less defile the sanctity of marriage. I believe that this is what will occur with respect to the right to die, but it is taking an exasperatingly long time to happen. I also think that if your attitudes fail to evolve within perhaps the next 30 years, you will eventually find that you're not very keen on, and don't have a lot of respect for the types of people who share your objection to extension of the right to die.



And yet somehow nobody I ever speak to seems to know about this 1 (or more) failsafe and painless suicide method with ready access, except for the people who are most trenchantly opposed to the right to die. They all seem to know about it, but all of them are very very good at maintaining their iron-clad resolve to refrain from revealing what that method is...even though this method is supposedly so commonplace that everyone knows about it and it's as readily available as tap water.

And yet you still refuse to name the well known method of suicide that is readily available to all of the world's population and has never had a single case of failure in the entirety of recording history. The fact that the suicide would be carried out at the request of the individual, and with their consent at the end, and then without them being able to regret the action means that they will never deem themselves to have been trespassed against. Therefore the only rationale for not allowing this to occur would either need to be authoritarian in nature, or assigning some kind of infinite metaphysical value to each individual life which supercedes the individual's right to have their wishes respected.

And all along, I have been arguing in favour of good quality medical treatment for all, plus assisted suicide for those who desire that course of treatment. Those who are denied the right to die are enslaved and tortured by the state, even if the beds are rather nicer than the ones in Indonesia. You have stated that any country which would respect an individual's wish for death is failing those individuals. Does that mean that Belgium is failing its mentally ill citizens (with its comfortable and modern treatment facilities, combined with right to die) more than Indonesia (which chains its patients to their beds and to objects on the floor, denies them facilities for maintaining personal hygiene and fails to nourish them properly)? And it is the assertion of the natalist that the suffering of the most unfortunate of us is 'worth' the enjoyment experienced by those who have better fortune. So it is a case of you deciding that the suffering endured by others is worth the pleasure that you experience.