1
music, art and culture / Re: Assisted Dying, UK Parliament
« Last post by remus on Today at 08:54:16 am »Sorry for your loss Sam and thanks for sharing on the forum.
For anyone interested, here's a long, very good (IMHO) article by philosopher Duncan Reyburn that he published about a month ago. Not that I'm agreeing with what he's written but I found it very thought provoking.
https://open.substack.com/pub/duncanreyburn/p/citizen-disposal?r=4n4mm&utm_medium=ios
An interesting piece, but I found it hard to get past the constant hyperbole. For example calling the doctors involved murderers, calling MAiD a "state-approved murder", a "nazi dystopia" and "the modern equivalent of the gas chamber".
Ultimately I don't think they make much of an attempt to balance the opposing sides: is being able to optionally end your life e.g. in cases of great suffering worth the risk of people being coerced in to ending their lives.
Quote
Imagine a child handing the relevant lethal dose to a parent to administer, if indeed that is the process followed. Imagine a friend handing a gun to another friend. Imagine a little girl watching the substance of that lethal injection being deployed into the arm of her mother. Can we honestly reconcile ourselves to what would be required of us to make such acts palatable? Nature may be cruel at times, and life hands very difficult endings to many of us. But to emulate that which opposes life is precisely to side with death. It is to side with the poison, the car crash, and the natural disaster.
I think this quote makes my point. It is certainly unpalatable helping someone kill themselves (I would certainly find it very hard, and of the doctors I know I think they would find it difficult too). But equally forcing someone who has expressed a clear wish to die to live against their will, while they descend into madness, or suffer in great pain for months or years, is obscene.