Horrifying. Absolutely barbaric that we cannot house people, and that some more fortunate people would rather that the poor die.
I'm not exactly sure where I stand on limiting an individual's choice to end their life. But we should care about why they feel life is not worth living. If there is a problem that could be solved, we should try to solve the problem.
> Another 28 per cent pegged “homelessness” as an appropriate bar to qualify for MAID.
> And 20 per cent of respondents were fine with MAID being handed out to anybody for any reason. In other words, one fifth of respondents agreed with the sentiment “medical assistance in dying should always be allowed, regardless of who requests it.”
The headline is focusing on homelessness as reason for assisted suicide, but as we can see a lot of people think it should be available to everyone, for any reason. Which makes sense. If someone does not want to stay alive, why should they have to remain living?
> If someone does not want to stay alive, why should they have to remain living?
As a person who'd have taken the option were it given to me in the past - because it's a cop-out for already negligent healthcare and welfare systems that don't make more than a token effort to genuinely help anyone struggling.
There's already overwhelming pressure on chronically ill people to just shut up, "stop pretending" that something's wrong with them, and just take their psych pills.
I'm sure nobody would say the same things out loud about assisted suicide but you'd just know the expectation that you'll do whatever it takes to not be a burden anymore is there. It's ALREADY one of the top reasons for suicide. Now imagine if society straight up sanctioned it.
It's a bad take. There can be a lot of socially induced situations (meaning reversible) from which humans can't get out due to the variety of problems. Poverty is one of them, there are a lot of studies that below some threshold humans are highly unlikely to get out of poverty on their own. Same with gambling addiction, drug addiction, a subset of mental disorders which are curable or can be mostly mitigated with meds and so on.
Saying that it's ok to allow people commit suicide due to the above issues is incredibly low empathy. It's a social darwinism basically and while adopting such mentality is a valid option, I think that we as a species can do better.
> There can be a lot of socially induced situations (meaning reversible) from which humans can't get out due to the variety of problems. Poverty is one of them, there are a lot of studies that below some threshold humans are highly unlikely to get out of poverty on their own. Same with gambling addiction, drug addiction, a subset of mental disorders which are curable or can be mostly mitigated with meds and so on.
> Saying that it's ok to allow people commit suicide due to the above issues is incredibly low empathy.
No, it’s the other way around. Insisting that someone has to stay alive against their own will, when they are suffering for a long time is the opinion that is lacking empathy.
> > There can be a lot of socially induced situations (meaning reversible) from which humans can't get out due to the variety of problems. Poverty is one of them, there are a lot of studies that below some threshold humans are highly unlikely to get out of poverty on their own.
> No, it’s the other way around. Insisting that someone has to stay alive against their own will, when they are suffering for a long time is the opinion that is lacking empathy.
All else aside, that's an easy cop-out for society to avoid dealing with the fixable issues that can cause someone to feel that way.
It like if someone was trapped in a deep hole and can't get out. Instead doing the right thing, which is going though the trouble of trying to get a rope and throwing it down to them (which is a lot of trouble), you walk a way and leave them in hopeless situation, then delude yourself about how moral and empathetic you are by supporting the trapped person's choice to kill themselves instead of starving to death in the hole (which is easier for you). The underlying lack of of empathy is laundered through a twisted, myopic, absolutist appeal to individual rights and autonomy.
> you walk a way and leave them in hopeless situation, then delude yourself about how moral and empathetic you are by supporting the trapped person's choice to kill themselves instead of starving to death in the hole (which is easier for you)
> The underlying lack of of empathy is laundered through a twisted, myopic, absolutist appeal to individual rights and autonomy.
Nope.
The exact opposite argument makes as much sense as claiming that.
I.e. there are a lot of helpless people out there. But “even though we don’t help them, we are ok because at least they can stay suffering on their own and we will not help them in any way at all.”
That is, in fact, even worse than providing assistance for ending the lives of people who do not wish to live in suffering.
And in both cases the fact is that the kind of argument and analogy you are presenting, and of which I provide the flip side, is nothing but a straw man.
Here is the fact: People are suffering. We should do what we can to help end suffering. This includes helping people to end their lives if they wish to.
It’s not a “cop out”. It’s widening the set of tools to help people who are suffering.
> Here is the fact: People are suffering. We should do what we can to help end suffering. This includes helping people to end their lives if they wish to.
> It’s not a “cop out”. It’s widening the set of tools to help people who are suffering.
Come on, dude. It's not "helping" someone to kill them, except perhaps if there's literally no other option possible.
Killing people is cheap an easy, so if it's an option, it's easily the economically rational "solution" that will drive out other solutions. Why spend $1 million to make some group's lives livable, when few $1 cyanide capsules will "end their suffering"? Save the money for yourself and promote the capsules instead. Some "help."
There is a big difference between "staying alive against their own will WITHOUT any possibility to improve" and "staying alive against their own will when there IS a possibility to improve". Promoting suicide in the second case, and wasting money on it instead of actually improving lives of people suffering is, lets say dumb. If a human is suffering so much that he wants to die, he can do it on his own fast and painless, by buying a bottle of nitrogen for a fifty bucks or less. But if he don't know about how to commit suicide someone (meaning government) needs to rent some facilities for a suicide booth, pay salary for the qualified personnel there, go through regular intensive red tape, paperwork and inspections, pay for the meds for the procedure, pay for the advertisements about it (even if they are not exactly like some Coca-Cola ads, but any brochures or signs or printed poster are essentially ads). All those money can be better directed at education and health improvements for those same people. Because their condition IS REVERSIBLE. Killing them is both stupid and immoral.
Why don't we solve the individual's homelessness/poverty problem, and then ask them in six months if they still want to do assisted suicide? That way we can eliminate cases where the desire is circumstantial.
why are you deliberately neglecting the context that was just presented to you? it's easy. try to follow the bouncing ball: poverty induces suicide, so you can't just abide by someone not wanting to live anymore. it doesn't even take an empath to make such a simple connection.
> If someone does not want to stay alive, why should they have to remain living?
Indeed. It's quite surprising that someone can be 50 years old, perfectly capable of making their own decisions, and they're free to do whatever they want with their own life (eat until you're medically obese, smoke until your lungs turn black, get into an alcoholic coma and end up in the hospital, it's all legal), but we draw the line at ending it.
Most people can end their own life whenever they chose. This is about the government providing an officially sanctioned process that involves medical professionals so that the process is painless and irrevocable.
> It's quite surprising
It is not surprising that this is controversial, since otherwise normal people can, and will, be coaxed into believing that they should let themselves be killed, just because they pose some inconvenience to their close ones or to society. Supporting such is obviously abhorrent to all who believe they do the right thing when they willingly lend support such "inconvenient people".
I'm not happy with the clickbait title either but the National Post is a reasonably big news outlet. Or at least it was when I lived in Canada 20 years ago.
If someone wants to end their life over poverty, you preventing them is about making you feel better as "we don't want to be that kind of country" rather than them. It is not about their desires at all.
If I see someone in poverty or homeless, I want them to live the same life I have been lucky to have. So my thoughts are how can I help lift them out of their situation, not put an end to them.
Homelessness is terrible, but allowing people to kill themselves when falling on rough times is a terrible idea. It sweeps the problem under the carpet and tries to allow it to solve itself, in the worst way possible.
The little moral grandstand you describe when passing a homeless person does nothing for them.
You abhorr the idea of someone in abject poverty wanting a way out so you hold up a utopic idea as to how things should be - but no solution to get there.
How so? The utopic idea I have is for everyone to have a roof over their head, food in their belly and a sense of contribution to society no matter how much.
There are many solutions to getting out of it, but being homeless is starting with the least bit of opportunity possible.
The moral grandstand we all have, is enough drive for some people to build homeless shelters, provide food and shelter as well as provide programs to help the homeless get jobs.
I am allowed to be abhor a particular idea, without offering a solution to it.
Plenty of solutions have been offered, but they all involve comprehensive systemic change, to which there is significant resistance from those taking advantage of the current arrangements.
None of the solutions ever presented (communism, UBI) are realistic, they're college student "let X pay for it" fantasy, where X cannot actually pay for it for more than a year or two before we're worse off than before.
UBI? Immediate huge drop in economic input from working people who won't have to work anymore. And within a couple of years, not enough productive people left for UBI. Don't bother linking those studies on UBI boosting the economy, I've read them, and I think they're typical soft-science nonsense. I have a lifetime of observed experiences that tell me what happens when people don't have to make any effort to get by: from children, to friends, to animals, to entire populations like Kuwait (where anyone with a job is gifted $3000/month by the government on top of their salary. This resulted in the laziest, least competent people I have met, who just hire foreigners to do their jobs for them. It reminded me of Wall-E.)
Communism? It has never and never will work. As soon as you remove private wealth, whoever is in charge becomes a perpetual dictator within months, since any objectors depend on him for their survival. Nearly instant dystopia.
I'm really curious, is there ANY scenario where someone like yourself will demand that a homeless person become a productive citizen? Let's say you offer them magical housing and a magical job. They trash the house, don't go to work, and stay at home taking drugs. What then? Do you continue supporting them? Endless counseling? Let's say it doesn't work, no matter how patient you are, they refuse to work. Is there any breaking point where you are able to tell them "if you don't clean up and get to work, I'm not paying for your house and meals anymore"? Or are productive people expected to foot the bill for them forever, even in a fantasy scenario?
You can remove physical capital inheritance, and distribute it across the entire population, it's not communism, it's not UBI, it remove the 'landlord' mentality from otherwise good/capable people. Also it allows removal of a lot of regulations (hence even right-wing ancap, Aren't-style, can support the idea), notably rent, by naturally pushing limited equity housing co-op (since your kids won't inherit your house directly), and freeing a lot of buildings that currently are under inheritance conflicts (I've heard 1/3 to 1/2 of Paris currently vacant houses). The redistribution should be enough to handle a lot of issues.
Also it does nothing to social, cultural and symbolic inheritance, so rich heir will probably still be rich at the end of the day, but at least they would have to work for it.
Parents work hard because their #1 priority is to secure their children's future, which includes giving them any morally-acceptable leg up in an increasingly uncertain, overpopulated, and competitive world. The main way of doing this for millenia has been to leave them what you saved up.
Now you're saying I can't leave my kids anything, not even our family home? Because it has to be shared asset with the other 100 million people (or 7 billion, if you're one of those open border types)? That's completely unacceptable to me. It also removes my incentive to work hard. Are my children to become equal to everyone else (which given overpopulation drives them down to a bad comfort and safety level) if I get hit by a car?
You don't seem to think anyone would mind, "Oh, you'll be dead, why would you care" , right? What you're missing is that I care more about my children and their future than about myself. Every good parent thinks like this. A suggestion like yours likely comes from the moralism of detached, childless, too-online rationalists. To put it as a trolley problem, if I have to choose between my kid and 5 other kids, the other 5 kids are getting a train in their face without a moment's hesitation. I'm saving my kid even if 50k other kids are on the other end.
Seriously, talk about this to your parents (as I'm certain you have no children of your own), see what they think.
But i will be 60 when my father hit 80, and my child would be 30 (actually 29).
The life expectancy of men is 79.4 yo, and while he's a woodworker, he actually is healthy for someone in his 50 (and he's doing a lot more painting and tapestry now, which is easier on the body), so i hope he won't die until his late 80s, but let's say he only last until 80.
At 60 year old, i would expect to retire two years later (might be 4, but let's wait and see). Anything that he leaves me, i wouldn't really need. I would rent his house (maybe, i think i would just lend it to a non-market housing coop), but hopefully i would have one at that age. My child at 30 would hopefully have found his path, since i have enough resources for him to fail a dozen time.
Even if i die at 60, i really hope my child doesn't need my money, because that would mean i had failed him a dozen time over, don't you agree?
But let's say we just put a small limit, let's say 20k in 1970s dollars (to adjust for inflation), that would still remove the need for income and housing taxes in my country. tax collection would be more efficient, that would pay for the most basic social nets + free education (and police, and military), and the only taxes you would pay on income wouldn't be taxes but cotisations (health, unemployment).
Also, not only education basically free, i have family that is nice and helpful, and even if i die tomorrow i don't care if all my money had to go to the state.
And for those who do not have this family, i would hope that if inheritance tax is the only tax, each orphan would get the same treatment as nations'pupils (orphan from military or police, i worked with them 3 summers a lifetime ago) and taken care of better than they are right now.
[edit] And because i don't want to be too obtuse (i honestly didn't understand you until now): of course if you live in a low-trust society, it's a bad idea. If i were Indian or from an emmerging country, i wouldn't think this. To me, capitalism and the pursuit of individual wealth is the best vessel to reach a high-trust society (basically what marx said), and once we're there, we can shed id, we do not need it anymore. That also mean that, unlike Marx's Internationale, i do not believe each society can get there at the same time, and high-trust societies have to enforce immigration quotas from low-trust ones (to respond to your "no border" comment).
You missed out the point that UBI will just go to the landlords. Once the landlords see u getting a cheque they will up the rent accordingly. Hence taxpayers will be subsidising landlords.
Yes, there are negative social impacts to assisted suicide in cases such as this. But the moral question here is: why do the societal impacts trump the personal pain and suffering?
I don't want people to take their life because society made their future prospects bleak. But I certainly don't want to force them to keep living because it might improve society in the long term.
But look at it the other way. This normalizes suicide. It will increase the number of people that are temporarily in a bad way ending their lives. That is not a good outcome.
Wow, that's a radically different view than mine. Can you expand on your world view and your views on the value of life? It would be interesting to understand where you're coming from.
I don't believe there is any value in being alive. What would it even be?
As long as you exist, you need to keep sustaining yourself, taking care of yourself, and that requires incredible reserves of the ability to function. Ability that you can end up losing for any number of resson, potentially irreversibly. And once you can't take care of yourself, you just sink like a stone, except this ocean has no bottom.
If you're lucky enough to be all of born into a wealthy country, healthy, into a functional family, to meet the right people, if all the stars align you might be able to live a decent life until you're old, but... what if they don't? As long as you exist, you're not safe from that eventuality.
Above all, you lose nothing by being dead, as you're not there to experience it. But you gain the safety from suffering.
It is, and the only people who don't believe so were driven there by society and culture. Dial back the enlightened rationalism, put down the philosophy books, and try to live like every other animal does.
It's more than that. They are suggesting to people that are homeless to take their own life who hadn't even considered it before. I know someone who this happened to. It's creepy.
very bleak, even bleaker still are the sociopaths in these threads dismissing poverty or environmental conditions and just shrugging an okay on assisted suicide. truly disheartening and disgusting the fact that people like this exist. I question their possibly traumatic upbringing...
There is a whole subspecies aka neuro divergent behavior out there adapted to heinous muder in bad times and bribed into good behavior with economic surplus. Once the situational loop goes over the top, all sorts of wild things crawl out of the woodwork. Including large parts of the population on the schizoid spectre under stress, ready to saw the bread factory into nuts and bolts, to satisfy some loop deformed instincts.
The ideal human of the enlightenment era is dead for a while now, but that spectre of a interest rational being refuses to follow. Let's find out if our "new" social implants hold up under pressure.
Can you restate your point more clearly? I think I understand what you're saying, but the way you've stated it is hard to parse, and I do want to make sure I'm receiving the intended message.
I'm not exactly sure where I stand on limiting an individual's choice to end their life. But we should care about why they feel life is not worth living. If there is a problem that could be solved, we should try to solve the problem.
Bleak as hell.