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Assisted Suicide - legalised?

Posted by iratedog • 9/25/09 • Subscribe to this Discussion [RSS] • Report This Topic
Topics: assisted suicide, irate dog

Here in the UK there has been uproar recently over the clarification of assisted suicide laws that have amounted to people not being prosecuted if they can prove it was done out of compassion and with the patient's permission.

Should assisted suicide be legalised? I think it's one of those questions that's on a par with whether the death penalty should be used - very VERY difficult to answer.

Blog post on this topic: theiratedog.blogspot.com/2009/09/legalising-assisted-suicide-should-we.html

User Comments

9/25/09

dbowles1017

I think I have a new business plan to work on...

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9/25/09

MissSuzie

There are quite a few people I would be more than happy to "assist"...

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1. 9/25/09
  
  iratedog
  
  haha, *backs away slowly*
9/25/09

harveyavatar

As someone who has weighed in on national ethical debates, I think Avatar has something to say.

There are imo three errors with regard to patients who are ill at the end of their life: affective abandonment, life support and euthanasia.

All three are in vogue at the present time, and concerning Europe, Holland, Belgium and France are leading the pack.

Euthanasia in particular has a merit which is economic. It is expensive to protect the end of life, whereas a mortal injection is not so expensive… To invest without profit in staff and expensive medication to soothe the dying is obviously not as profitable an investment as speculating on oil. The problem is analogous to that of refusing to distribute expensive medication in Africa. What are they on about? They have no more dignity… so we may as well assist them in dying in a dignified way, before they lose their dignity!

The debate is in fact not just medical, it is more radical: it plays out in the redefinition of the “human person”.

The Western World, considering that the Judaeo-Christian culture could not be the norm anymore given the multiple convictions ranging form atheism to all sorts of different positions, has decided to renounce the two pillars defining heretofore the “human person”, i.e. that each human is the image of God on the one hand (and thus sacred regardless of race, convictions, origins, social status…), and having a soul which resists to death on the other hand.

A number of philosophers, lawyers and doctors in the US pondered over this problem which constitutes the redefinition of the human being putting aside these two dogmatic points: soul and image of God.

Here is what they arrived at: man is man when he is autonomous on the one hand, and conscious on the other hand. They have thus substituted the notion of autonomy to that of image of God, and the notion of consciousness to that of immortality of soul.

Thus, is considered a “non person” (that is the term employed) any new born infant, any handicapped person, any senile person, any human being assisted in one way or the other, medically and even socially, any individual non integrated, non desired, non loved, etc.

Do not thing I am joking. On this matter, one of the principal proponents of this redefinition is called Tristam Engelhardt, and the reference worldwide is his book, “The Foundation of Bioethics”, published in 1986, so it is not anything new.

That the majority may be satisfied with this situation, does not change the fact that we are living what I call the dictatorship of humanism, and that I reckon this ideology will eventually be more or less precisely worse than nazism, much worse than nazism.

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9/25/09

HollytheHousewife

Would u just stop and put a smile on ur face....u wanna dance

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9/25/09

quack18

Its kind of a tough debate, but i think if the person that is handicapped agrees in ending his/her life them he should be allowed to do it. We cant decide what other people do, and i dont think its fair to put a law that stops a person from commiting suicide if they were ill, and were to live the rest of their lives in suffering and struggle. I had a relative who was paralyzed from top to bottom.He couldnt move and do anything, not even shake his head and could hardly talk. It was a tough life for more than 15 years, before he got ill and died. I dont think people should be prosecture if they helped a person travel to commit suicide. But the scary thing is that, what about those that cant express themselves, will the people taking care of them take them to commit suicide and convice the governments that they didnt make the decisions for him/her.

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