If you could be a God...

You lot are the 'wolves', and I want to protect the vulnerable from you, because I care profoundly about their wellbeing. And the last sentence is just a sidestep to avoid the fact that you know that people who have requested to die and whose desires are respected do not experience any adverse consequences.

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.

Philip Nitschke and Exit International only want to help people die in a way that works reliably, is not risky, and if possible, does not cause pain. If you look at the statistics on how people have successfully committed suicide, it's usually by hanging (which is risky, terrifying and uncomfortable), shooting (in many parts of the world, ordinary people do not have access to guns), jumping from a great height or in front of a fast moving vehicle (which is risky and disturbs and potentially traumatises other people). Neither myself nor the philosophers that I follow on Youtube are of any threat to any 'vulnerable' person, because we believe in allowing people to make their own choices. We aren't looking for people to coerce into killing themselves; we believe that those who want to die and have sought out assistance to do so out of their own volition should be allowed to access that assistance. 

Allowing homosexuality to be legal has more or less the same negative consequences as assisted dying does. It offends the religious sensibilities of those who believe that the act is immoral, and it upsets the families of those concerned. Same thing with abortion, in which case a foetus is terminated and prevented from having the 'chance to have a blast', but yet in those instances, you find that morally unproblematic.

Claiming that I don't want people to have the right to treatment is another libellous strawman, and I've even suggested a compromise in terms of a right to die law that would still privilege your religious beliefs to a degree that is unwarranted. Meanwhile, you are perfectly content to ignore and/or downplay the cases where the person still cannot be helped to live a healthy life even after numerous courses of psychiatric treatment, spanning the course of many years. A bit of psychological collateral damage is fine, as long as isn't you being damaged, right?

As ever, the person being put at risk would be whomever comes into existence as a consequence of the selfish and reckless actions of imposers.

Some of the suicide attempts were fake, but are you really making that generalisation for all failed suicide? Do you honestly think that the guy who shot his face off and survived just wanted attention and pity?

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.

Of course some of the suicide attempts were fake. Which ones were fake isn't relevant to a scenario where you'd be offering people a method that would be guaranteed to be successful. The fakers would just continue to swallow a handful of pills from the medicine cabinet, given that they don't want the chemicals that would actually kill them.

There are many people who attempt suicide and end up maimed. On the Dignitas website I can remember reading about a man who jumped from a multistory carpark and ended up badly disabled and incontinent. It happens every day. There was also a TV celebrity here in the UK who ran out in front of someone's van on a busy road. The celebrity survived (he was badly injured but recovered), but a driver who stopped to comfort him was so badly traumatised by seeing the injuries that he himself later committed suicide:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3149218/Van-driver-swerved-avoid-Clarke-Carlisle-dead.html

You are making it your business by supporting laws that make it illegal for people to seek assistance in dying. Nobody's asking you to personally kill anybody; that has never been the issue. It isn't my business who wants to choose to die, and therefore I support laws that don't allow anyone to interfere with someone else's right to choose. If people have the right to access drugs that will always work, then only people who actually want to die will choose that method. Therefore your objection concerning people who don't really want to die doesn't even make sense here.

I don't care what you're "granting". Your objection is absolutely irrelevant to assistance in dying to those who want it and know that they will never wake up from taking the poison. I've seen footage from suicide clinics, and they always tell the patient, in no uncertain terms, that if they choose to imbibe the poison, that the decision will be irreversible. My standard for who should be allowed to be assisted to commit suicide is very simple - anyone who wants to commit suicide. Hope that makes it clearer for you.

Nobody shoots themselves through the skull or jumps off a multistorey carpark thinking that they're going to do hardly any damage and are just going to get the sympathy and pity that they need in order to continue with their lives. Whether suicide intentions come and go or not isn't irrelevant, because they will no longer come and go when the person has died and the person will never feel deprived of anything that they may have experienced had they decided against suicide or had religious tyrants implemented laws which disallowed them the right to control over their own body.

Anyone who chooses a method that is known to be 100% successful (as advised by the medical professionals who would be assisting in the procedure) actually wants to die and there is no reason outside of the minds of delusional hubristic theocrats why they should be not assisted in having their desires granted. Someone who is severely disabled cannot kill themselves by any means not requiring assistance, or at least the people around them allowing them to slowly starve to death.