TORONTO (AP) — Alan Nichols had a history of depression and other medical issues, but none were life-threatening. When the 61-year-old Canadian was hospitalized in June 2019 over fears he might be suicidal, he asked his brother to “bust him out” as soon as possible.
  •  Gaywallet (they/it)   ( @Gaywallet@beehaw.org ) 
    3•2 years ago

    there’s always the prospect in your mind that a person will eventually get better. (but that in kind also begs the question: what if they don’t?)

    I think it’s important to view this through the lens of absolute suffering as well. Imagine we had some way to calculate suffering and recovery and we found out that it would take someone 50 years of suffering to get better. How old would they need to be for it to be okay for them to choose to die instead? Even when we deal with short term suffering, at what point do we get to make the decision for others whether they wish to be burdened with that suffering, or whether they’ve decided for themselves that said suffering is just not worth it?

    It begs the question of how much autonomy should we be allowed to have? If it’s my body, do I have the choice to end myself? When should that autonomy be taken away from me? I think on the extreme edge cases, we can see why slowing down the process can help people from making impulsive decisions, but it ultimately comes back to a question you posed:

    is it possible to make some sort of objective framework by which to judge whether someone should be allowed to die, or to kill themselves?

    I don’t think humans will ever agree on a universal framework, simply because we’re in such a gray area. When is the amount of suffering enough to justify a death, is a question which people will have different answers to. How much autonomy should someone have over their own body is another question which people won’t agree on. You need to answer both to create a framework which allows people to choose to kill themselves.

    This gets even more complicated with the linked article because we now have a government making some of these decisions and removing some barriers and disincentives from killing oneself. I no longer have to research and find a way to kill myself without suffering too much, if I so choose to do so, because the government is willing to handle that part. Is this an okay function for the government to do? In what cases? I think naturally people are inclined to allow this in extreme cases, such as terminal cancer or some kind of extreme suffering, but we are left with yet another question for which humans are going to disagree which is the role of government itself and what we are choosing to invest in.