“Deserves to die: I dare say he does! And many who die deserve life: can YOU give it to them?”
I know this was Gandalf speaking, I think in reference to Gollum.
Is this right? We can’t make people live, so it follows we shouldn’t make them die, that line isn’t ours to draw. We don’t even have to believe in some kinda divinity to conclude that it just isn’t our job.
I think the only reason we even ask the question is because, at both ends of life, the potential decedent is BOTH helpless AND may be conscious (at least, some pro-life people dwell on the fetus’ consciousness of pain). We don’t ask that when we recite the number of deaths caused by car accidents, nor when we contemplate war, or self-defense.
It always makes me laugh when pro-death penalty people worry about the “cruelty” of the means of execution of the death sentence. It’s like “Now, we’re not going to HURT them, we’re just going to KILL them”…in the first place I agree with what I think CW may be saying about “painless “death: I’ve always felt it can’t be easy to snuff out the life of a healthy adult organism. And second, what about the “cruelty” of knowing the day, hour, minute of one’s own death?
Hey: where there’s life, there’s hope, right?
With assisted suicide, we are not talking about the “life of a healthy adult” – we are talking about people who are sick, in pain, and Waiting for God. Or, if one prefers, Waiting for the Inevitable, because every one of us will die.
What concerns me, and probably many others who have witnessed it, is the near-total loss of human dignity that our efforts to extend life regardless impose on the seriously sick.
This is a very difficult issue – and one that exists mainly because today we “can” keep sick people alive for a long time. It is easy to translate “can” into “should”, without a proper concern for the individual. It was not so very long ago that pneumonia was known as “the Old Man’s Friend”, because it brought their suffering to an end. But that was before we could cure pneumonia. Who or what is the Old Man’s Friend now?
We have cancers now that were pretty unheard of some 50-60 years ago. Their lethality varies, and as we learn more we find new ways of keeping patients alive with the cancer. Sometimes the conditions seem cruel, but those change with time and our level of knowledge and experience.
Let me give you another story, to counter some of your horror stories. I once had a nice 80-some Y/O lady we found colon cancer on. Not having CT’s back then, we took her to surgery. When we opened her, we found her abdomen socked in with cancerl. Clearly we were not going to cure her, so we debulked her of several pounds of tumor and closed her up. We went out and told the family what we had found, and that the expectations of the time were that she would live about 6 months more. She ended up living 9 years more - in relative good health otherwise, and a succor and boon to her family - children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
?So would you be morally justified to “suicide” her - because the “statistics” said she had little time left. THAT’S the problem you get into when you start playing “statistics” - they aren’t about people - they are about averages, and those can cover a lot of variation.
Play fair, Devereaux! Who is talking about “suiciding” unwilling people? (Apart from the Usual Suspects on the Left).
Assisted suicide is about helping people with serious problems and no prospects of recovery to avoid a long degrading deterioration in which they lose all human dignity.
?So would you be morally justified to keep her alive simply so she can suffer some more – See how silly that line of discussion is?
That’s your current view. But like gun control, we know government, if allowed anywhere near this - and we really can’t realistically keep it from intruding - will morph into something different. Medicine has already been driven from taking care of individual patients to dollars and cents (it started with the military renaming physicians “providers” so it would look like they were giving the same care, when in fact they were now using NP’s and PA’s to do the work of MD’s - because they couldn’t recruit enough MD’s for the ridiculous pay they provided). ?Why would any rational person think government would do differently.
Government always goes from a good, helping idea to nonsense - because they fail to recognize an old adage - the enemy of “good” IS “better “, so they proceed to overpromise - and get caught in the monetary quandary that causes.
That concern applies to a whole lot more than assisted suicide!
I agree that the human beings who gravitate to government positions are too often despicable power-hungry inadequate individuals (which is what your comment implied). However, the solution is not to keep sick old people alive in suffering & degradation long after their natural end; the solution is to put very strict limit on what we tolerate from the people in government – on this, and everything else. That is probably something on which we can agree.
But discussions on the costs of late-life health interventions and government camel’s noses under the tent on assisted suicide don’t get to what seems to me to be the heart of the matter – How should we universally mortal beings regard our inevitable mortality? As something to be accepted & celebrated, or as something to be pushed out of mind and delayed as long as possible? It is a big unaddressed issue in these irreligious times.
The problem as I see it is that the Left hijacks all rational discussions. So one needs first to eradicate the enemy and then have rational.discussions. Else what we say will be used against us.
I have been rereading your post numerous times. I understand what you are aiming at (I think) but somehow I feel it is the wrong end of the speculation.
You seem to spend all your effort in inquiring about how to face the end of life. I kind of think that may be the wrong way to look at things. We should, instead, be looking at how to prolong life.
Let’s face it. We live as long as we do not because we focused upon how badly the end of life may be, but how much better we might be able to make it. Once even young people died of pneumonia; now one rarely does - in any setting. Once people lived to the ripe old age of 60. Now they go to 85 - and beyond. Imagine if we could find ways for people to live to 110-120 well. Indeed, go to science fiction and think on regeneration, giving you a new body with all the reserves one needs to help feed your mind. Capt. Nemo and the Nautilus were once figments of imagination; now we have nuclear-powered hunter-killer subs capable of incredible underwater speed AND depth.
Perhaps individually we ought to think about how we want to live the end of life. But as a society we ought not be negative, like England and Canada, and consider restricting to scarce resources (which are frequently scarce because of the intervention of government) when we should, instead, be focusing upon the future and how to be better. We owe that both to ourselves and to our progeny.
I think we have to get some operational definitions. There is the category that given treatment will have their life extended with quality. There is a category where their life is just extended. The difference is probably measurable in the probability they leave full time care.
I don’t think anyone disagrees with the value of the first category. The second category is debatable.
You indicated we learn via experience. Do we learn from experience on group two that helps group one?
If we improve the category one by experience gained on category two, then that is potentially a great investment.
Maybe you are saying that the experience gained trying to extend the life of category two, we will move people from category two to category one over time.
I suspect that in order to extend quality life, the change has to start much earlier.
We all have curious activities. One of mine is wandering through old graveyards, trying to make out the writing on the headstones. Something that becomes quite obvious is that people living into their late 70s, 80s, and even 90s is not a recent phenomenon. Average life spans have increased substantially because of the great reductions in deaths of children, of young women in childbirth, of working-age men in accidents, of anyone from disease. Medicine deserves some of the credit, but so to do sanitation and machines which make work safer.
Thanks to all of those good things, we now end up in a world with increasing numbers of older people.
Where we can use medicine to prolong life of good quality, that is excellent!
Eventually, we will still reach the point where those individuals with extended lifespans will have declining quality of life as they approach death. What then?
There really is no conflict between trying on the one hand to extend life of good health & good quality while on the other hand pondering what to do when the quality of life has gone. The first of those is basically a medical/technical question (with an economic component); the second is a moral & philosophical issue (in the absence of religion), and has no easy answer.
I believe you gentlemen look for “progress” to be a serial process when in fact it is much more a parallel one. You frequently don’t know where the next advance will come from.
No one, and especially not doctors, want people to suffer at the end of their lives. The trouble is that you just don’t know. Some make it, some don’t, some suffer. But it happens. And some of it is the family wants “everything” done for grandpa, when some of that is simply unrealistic. Physicians once made these kinds of decisions, helping the patient get the most out of available treatment and calling an end to it when it no longer was feasible to continue. No longer. And today too many physicians no longer seem committed to truly fight for the patient. Instead they respond to corporate decisions, none of which are made by real doctors.