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I think the core problem is giving out a "free pass" to kill people. Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but

I think the core problem is giving out a "free pass" to kill people. Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but the abuse potential is massive. And the action is, by definition, irreversible. Plus, the people that need this are (quite obviously) unable to make this happen on their own. So this comes with the additional moral qualms of whether this is really what the wanted and if their mental state clear enough to make a decision like this. Lastly, not killing these people is the "safe choice" - you're not getting sued for not killing a person. In the end, it probably boils down to this.

supperburg 5y ago
You are a person who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die. That’s why suicide will never be accepted. Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  The "potential for abuse" GP is talking about could be rephrased as: with assisted suicide, many more people would find themselves in the very unfortunate position of needing to die, just for reasons external to them.
- maccard 5y ago
  I'm very on the fence on this topic; I've watched family members/friends pass in varying degrees of pain, and at least in those cases I'm not sure having assisted suicide would have helped that much. What _definitely would_ have helped would have been better end of life care. > who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die. Defining that line is very, very, tricky. People only reach this point at a desperate time, when they are potentailly very vulnerable. There's a huge difference between two people in an end-of-life situation, one who is willing to die and one who isn't, yet both may "need" to die, and we have the meansright now to provide an easier transition from "terminally ill" to the former, but yet people end up in the second bucket all the time. > Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation. Yet we have many many people who have suicidal thoughts, and who commit suicide (arguably needlessly), when we have methods of helping. We should have the same methods of helping people who are terminally ill. (That's not to get into the mess of what do the family of the patient want; things get messy _really_ fast when money is on the line as I've unfortunately witnessed, and it tears families apart.)
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    It is very tricky to define the line for terminally ill people. But the reality is that if you ended up on the wrong side of the line you would welcome the choice. It's not the same line as "Life is wretched and miserable (because of depression, bankruptcy, relationship breakdown...) and therefore I'd like to check out." Those are all at least potentially fixable with reasonable odds of success. Something like locked-in syndrome after a bad stroke, or late-stage Alzheimer's - potentially a vegetative state that can last a decade - isn't. The real problem is making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members for personal gain, revenge, or some other unacceptable motivation. Possibly after a person is no longer considered legally competent, but may still be signalling a current desire to avoid death even though they left a living will stating they would welcome it. It does indeed get messy very, very quickly. Open legalisation complicates all of that and turns it into a much harder problem than it is already. The courts would spend a lot of time dealing with those cases.
    - scotty79 5y ago
      I think once we figure out depression, assisted suicide will become uncontroversial. If you understand what dying means (end of everything you have and will ever have) and don't have depression, but you want to die then we should let you make that decission. You must have good reasons.
    - Chris2048 5y ago
      > making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members How would you do this? One way or the other, I think you would end up attempting to create a metric for QoL. Some people, for example, might want death after losing their limbs, or their sight - a difficult life, but not a painful one, some people are born without these facilities and manage to live fruitful lives. If you allow death for those cases, why not evaluate regular suicides the same way?
  - supperburg 5y ago
    The line is not difficult to draw. Again, you’ve never experienced it. There are states of existence where it becomes a simple and plain object in your mind that you must die because of the objective and real factors of your circumstances and not because of a feeling or notion. Until you experience that, it will all be fuzzy, grey, wushu washy fluff in the sky. Because it’s never been real to you. You know how people will sometimes change their mind when confronted with reality? You know how some men scoff at a dangerous activity until they are pushed out from the crowd to do it themselves? The reality of the situation sets in. All of a sudden your mind is revealing to you things that you had not considered before. Revealing intuitions and details that it had not performed for you because your brain doesn’t consider things in detail until they are perceived as important to you — until they are in front of you. This also happens for death. All of a sudden, details fill in that have never been emphasized in the idiot internet threads. All the details of how a suicide attempt can go wrong, where the line of death really is, all the ways that you might feel pain. It’s completely overwhelming if you are suddenly in desperate need of death. It’s the experience of the most marginalized and abused group of people to ever exist. Forced to die in gruesome and terrible ways and in horrific home made contraptions that very often create a huge amount of pain before fulfilling their purpose.
dimitrios1 5y ago
And we see how this has worked out for abortion. The 0.10% case of either saving a woman's life or in cases of rape and incest as turned into the justification for aborting 189 babies for every 1000 live births -- or in the african american community 487 babies for every 1000 live births. Once you open the flood gates, you will have plenty who kill themselves who otherwise wouldn't with just a little bit of extra support.
- thatfrenchguy 5y ago
  And a lot better societal outcomes. Unwanted babies suck and end up having bad lives, negatively affecting their parents’ lives as well.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    Too bad we can't ask unwanted babies if they would rather have been born into a bad life. This isn't directed at you, but I have had countless conversations about this very topic. The detriments are greatly overstated. I've found usually people are talking of these things outside looking in in an ideological vacuum, and not an experiential one. Let's take societal outcomes for african americans, as an example. What people don't realize is, when people speak of abortions in a vaccuum (and lets be frank -- it's usually white liberals who champion it the hardest), the elephant in the room is with african american women carry out the disproportionate volume of abortions, and the the overwhelming majority of Planned Parenthood locations being located in poor and black neighborhoods. There is a large argument now that is catching on in many african american communities that maybe if we had the estimated 11 million more black babies born in this country, black representation would be much better off in all matters of the socioeconomic and political spheres, resulting in better lives overall for the general population. In 2015, in association with National Black Pro-Life Coalition, Protecting Black Life, and National Black Pro-Life Union met with CURE to deliver a congressional report detailing all of these facts, and making the strong case that the economic and societal impact of all the abortions in the black community is far greater. I encourage everyone to read it: https://www.congress.gov/115/meeting/house/106562/witnesses/HHRG-115-JU10-Wstate-ParkerS-20171101-SD001.pdf https://www.congress.gov/115/meeting/house/106562/witnesses/...
slg 5y ago
> but the abuse potential is massive. How so? We don't have to create a system in which it is legal to shoot someone in the head and then claim they asked you to do it. Have it be a medical procedure that must be done in a hospital by government certified doctors. You can even require a psych evaluation before it becomes an option. I can understand there being some gray area in which it isn't clear that the person has all their faculties to the point they can request it, but that shouldn't stop us from creating a system that works for all the obvious cases.
- metalliqaz 5y ago
  ... then the psych evaluator gets sued by kin, etc.
  - JamesBarney 5y ago
    Well the first problem is that it's not legal. Lets fix that problem for fixating on the secondary issue of the American legal system exacerbating principal-agent problems
- SCLeo 5y ago
  Family members can pressure the patient to give up.
  - birksherty 5y ago
    Family also pressure to give birth even in cases where the potential child leads a terrible life and it's abused too.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      This is the reverse case, though. Plus, child abuse can in principle be found out and mitigated. Death is irreversible. Incentives are different too. Outside of highly fundamentalist cultures, there isn't really a strong benefit to a family from pressuring someone to keep a child. In developed countries, children are a huge liability for the first ~20 years of their life. Meanwhile, with assisted suicide, there are strong incentives around cessation of ongoing medical care (costs), and obviously inheritance. Between that and possibility of presenting some murders as assisted suicide, I think if the idea is to be implemented, it really needs to be done extra carefully.
skissane 5y ago
> Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but the abuse potential is massive. Many terminally ill people receive substandard palliative care, and want assisted suicide – it seems likely that at least some wouldn't want it any more (or might never have sought it in the first place) if their palliative care was better. What are the ethics of saying to people "we aren't going to do anything to fix the substandard palliative care you are receiving, but we are happy to help you kill yourself"?
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  This isn't how it works, though - they are two separate issues. Of course we shouldn't have substandard care, palliative or not. Of course we should try not to let people suffer. It isn't like palliative care is at all affected by whether or not we have assisted suicide, as we can obviously have good palliative care without allowing assisted suicide at all (or the opposite, but we aren't that cruel yet). But not matter how much we try to make folks comfortable, it simply doesn't always happen and not everyone wants to die slowly, even if they are comfortable in the meantime. Even the most comfortable care we can muster for the majority of folks doesn't result in a good quality of life, after all. (Of course, some folks are more comfortable than others just because of income and situation, which we can lessen but not get rid of entirely). Assisted suicide shouldn't always come from the folks receiving palliative care, either. I'm fine with folks having plans in place to die if they have dementia, for example, or if their wish for a decade has been to kill themselves, despite getting are. Or heck, even if someone wants to die at x age, if they live that long. Well-planned assisted suicide should be available.
birksherty 5y ago
There are lots of things that are abused but still not illegal, like cars, giving birth. If people can bring someone without their consent to have poor life, there should also a way to exit if one wants. Otherwise life is a prison for many.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

supperburg 5y ago

You are a person who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die. That’s why suicide will never be accepted. Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
The "potential for abuse" GP is talking about could be rephrased as: with assisted suicide, many more people would find themselves in the very unfortunate position of needing to die, just for reasons external to them.
maccard 5y ago
I'm very on the fence on this topic; I've watched family members/friends pass in varying degrees of pain, and at least in those cases I'm not sure having assisted suicide would have helped that much. What _definitely would_ have helped would have been better end of life care. > who has never been in the very unfortunate position of needing to die. Defining that line is very, very, tricky. People only reach this point at a desperate time, when they are potentailly very vulnerable. There's a huge difference between two people in an end-of-life situation, one who is willing to die and one who isn't, yet both may "need" to die, and we have the meansright now to provide an easier transition from "terminally ill" to the former, but yet people end up in the second bucket all the time. > Because so few people ever get stuck in that situation. Yet we have many many people who have suicidal thoughts, and who commit suicide (arguably needlessly), when we have methods of helping. We should have the same methods of helping people who are terminally ill. (That's not to get into the mess of what do the family of the patient want; things get messy _really_ fast when money is on the line as I've unfortunately witnessed, and it tears families apart.)
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  It is very tricky to define the line for terminally ill people. But the reality is that if you ended up on the wrong side of the line you would welcome the choice. It's not the same line as "Life is wretched and miserable (because of depression, bankruptcy, relationship breakdown...) and therefore I'd like to check out." Those are all at least potentially fixable with reasonable odds of success. Something like locked-in syndrome after a bad stroke, or late-stage Alzheimer's - potentially a vegetative state that can last a decade - isn't. The real problem is making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members for personal gain, revenge, or some other unacceptable motivation. Possibly after a person is no longer considered legally competent, but may still be signalling a current desire to avoid death even though they left a living will stating they would welcome it. It does indeed get messy very, very quickly. Open legalisation complicates all of that and turns it into a much harder problem than it is already. The courts would spend a lot of time dealing with those cases.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    I think once we figure out depression, assisted suicide will become uncontroversial. If you understand what dying means (end of everything you have and will ever have) and don't have depression, but you want to die then we should let you make that decission. You must have good reasons.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    > making sure the choice is free and informed - not being "encouraged" by other family members How would you do this? One way or the other, I think you would end up attempting to create a metric for QoL. Some people, for example, might want death after losing their limbs, or their sight - a difficult life, but not a painful one, some people are born without these facilities and manage to live fruitful lives. If you allow death for those cases, why not evaluate regular suicides the same way?
- supperburg 5y ago
  The line is not difficult to draw. Again, you’ve never experienced it. There are states of existence where it becomes a simple and plain object in your mind that you must die because of the objective and real factors of your circumstances and not because of a feeling or notion. Until you experience that, it will all be fuzzy, grey, wushu washy fluff in the sky. Because it’s never been real to you. You know how people will sometimes change their mind when confronted with reality? You know how some men scoff at a dangerous activity until they are pushed out from the crowd to do it themselves? The reality of the situation sets in. All of a sudden your mind is revealing to you things that you had not considered before. Revealing intuitions and details that it had not performed for you because your brain doesn’t consider things in detail until they are perceived as important to you — until they are in front of you. This also happens for death. All of a sudden, details fill in that have never been emphasized in the idiot internet threads. All the details of how a suicide attempt can go wrong, where the line of death really is, all the ways that you might feel pain. It’s completely overwhelming if you are suddenly in desperate need of death. It’s the experience of the most marginalized and abused group of people to ever exist. Forced to die in gruesome and terrible ways and in horrific home made contraptions that very often create a huge amount of pain before fulfilling their purpose.

dimitrios1 5y ago

And we see how this has worked out for abortion. The 0.10% case of either saving a woman's life or in cases of rape and incest as turned into the justification for aborting 189 babies for every 1000 live births -- or in the african american community 487 babies for every 1000 live births. Once you open the flood gates, you will have plenty who kill themselves who otherwise wouldn't with just a little bit of extra support.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago
And a lot better societal outcomes. Unwanted babies suck and end up having bad lives, negatively affecting their parents’ lives as well.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  Too bad we can't ask unwanted babies if they would rather have been born into a bad life. This isn't directed at you, but I have had countless conversations about this very topic. The detriments are greatly overstated. I've found usually people are talking of these things outside looking in in an ideological vacuum, and not an experiential one. Let's take societal outcomes for african americans, as an example. What people don't realize is, when people speak of abortions in a vaccuum (and lets be frank -- it's usually white liberals who champion it the hardest), the elephant in the room is with african american women carry out the disproportionate volume of abortions, and the the overwhelming majority of Planned Parenthood locations being located in poor and black neighborhoods. There is a large argument now that is catching on in many african american communities that maybe if we had the estimated 11 million more black babies born in this country, black representation would be much better off in all matters of the socioeconomic and political spheres, resulting in better lives overall for the general population. In 2015, in association with National Black Pro-Life Coalition, Protecting Black Life, and National Black Pro-Life Union met with CURE to deliver a congressional report detailing all of these facts, and making the strong case that the economic and societal impact of all the abortions in the black community is far greater. I encourage everyone to read it: https://www.congress.gov/115/meeting/house/106562/witnesses/HHRG-115-JU10-Wstate-ParkerS-20171101-SD001.pdf https://www.congress.gov/115/meeting/house/106562/witnesses/...

slg 5y ago

> but the abuse potential is massive. How so? We don't have to create a system in which it is legal to shoot someone in the head and then claim they asked you to do it. Have it be a medical procedure that must be done in a hospital by government certified doctors. You can even require a psych evaluation before it becomes an option. I can understand there being some gray area in which it isn't clear that the person has all their faculties to the point they can request it, but that shouldn't stop us from creating a system that works for all the obvious cases.

metalliqaz 5y ago
... then the psych evaluator gets sued by kin, etc.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  Well the first problem is that it's not legal. Lets fix that problem for fixating on the secondary issue of the American legal system exacerbating principal-agent problems
SCLeo 5y ago
Family members can pressure the patient to give up.
- birksherty 5y ago
  Family also pressure to give birth even in cases where the potential child leads a terrible life and it's abused too.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    This is the reverse case, though. Plus, child abuse can in principle be found out and mitigated. Death is irreversible. Incentives are different too. Outside of highly fundamentalist cultures, there isn't really a strong benefit to a family from pressuring someone to keep a child. In developed countries, children are a huge liability for the first ~20 years of their life. Meanwhile, with assisted suicide, there are strong incentives around cessation of ongoing medical care (costs), and obviously inheritance. Between that and possibility of presenting some murders as assisted suicide, I think if the idea is to be implemented, it really needs to be done extra carefully.

skissane 5y ago

> Very few people (at least in my experience) think that assisted suicide itself is bad, but the abuse potential is massive. Many terminally ill people receive substandard palliative care, and want assisted suicide – it seems likely that at least some wouldn't want it any more (or might never have sought it in the first place) if their palliative care was better. What are the ethics of saying to people "we aren't going to do anything to fix the substandard palliative care you are receiving, but we are happy to help you kill yourself"?

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
This isn't how it works, though - they are two separate issues. Of course we shouldn't have substandard care, palliative or not. Of course we should try not to let people suffer. It isn't like palliative care is at all affected by whether or not we have assisted suicide, as we can obviously have good palliative care without allowing assisted suicide at all (or the opposite, but we aren't that cruel yet). But not matter how much we try to make folks comfortable, it simply doesn't always happen and not everyone wants to die slowly, even if they are comfortable in the meantime. Even the most comfortable care we can muster for the majority of folks doesn't result in a good quality of life, after all. (Of course, some folks are more comfortable than others just because of income and situation, which we can lessen but not get rid of entirely). Assisted suicide shouldn't always come from the folks receiving palliative care, either. I'm fine with folks having plans in place to die if they have dementia, for example, or if their wish for a decade has been to kill themselves, despite getting are. Or heck, even if someone wants to die at x age, if they live that long. Well-planned assisted suicide should be available.

birksherty 5y ago

There are lots of things that are abused but still not illegal, like cars, giving birth. If people can bring someone without their consent to have poor life, there should also a way to exit if one wants. Otherwise life is a prison for many.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]