sometimes there's no proof. you just know.

No worries! If I run out of time you’ll just stop hearing from me haha

original post for reference

It’s true that I’m religious and that that’s in the background of my beliefs about this, but the argument I gave is not strictly religious. The religious argument is “your life does not belong to you, it belongs to God and you are the steward of it”. (It’s not my favorite argument, in fact, because it treats life as a possession.) My argument is more like:

The worth of a human life is intrinsic [because it is given by God].

Suffering is an evil but it does not reduce the person to less than a person [and by the mercy of God can mysteriously be the means of grace].

Dependence is not an evil, [as all living creatures are by nature dependent on God].

With these three premises, taking one’s own life is morally impermissible simply because it is the taking of a life. Your life does not have less value if it’s yours, and the loss of your life would be no less tragic if you’re the one who ended it. Suicide is wrong for the same reason murder is. Even if you disagree with the religious background, to make assisted suicide permissible I think you would still have to disagree with the main body of at least one of those three bullet points. You would have to say “the worth of a human life is dependent on a person’s abilities and when those abilities are absent or reduced their life is worth less”, or “suffering does make a person to be less than a person, a person in great pain is reduced to the level of an animal”, or “dependence is undignified and evil and we are justified in taking extreme steps to avoid becoming dependent and avoid wasting resources on those who are”, or some other version of one of those. 

You have to reject one of the three bullet points because what you mentioned about suicide being a “freedom” is not enough to make a judgment about whether it should be considered permissible or not. Thought experiment: a person is kidnapped by a Batman villain and injected with a paralytic and a slow-acting poison, so that they cannot escape and they know they are going to die. They’re in horrible pain and they’re afraid. And the villain comes up and puts a button in their hand and says “The last freedom you have is this choice: if you press the button you can poison Gotham’s water supply!” Poisoning the water supply doesn’t save them. It’s not a trolley problem, a choice between poisoning the water supply and killing Batman. It’s just press the button or do nothing. The button IS their last freedom. But that doesn’t mean the choice to poison the water supply would somehow be more legitimate, let alone laudatory, than if they made that choice in other circumstances. All choices are free. That’s what make them choices. It doesn’t mean they are by virtue of that good or moral choices. Sometimes it’s better to make no choice, rather than a bad choice. 

So when you say “it’s their last freedom”, behind that is the assumption that it’s their last freedom to make a good choice, one that isn’t like poisoning Gotham. And so one of my premises would have to be false. And you are welcome to believe one of my premises is false! But I think when you wipe out those unconditional premises, limiting whose life has worth and what kind of life is worth living, you start down that treacherous slippery slope which is so deadly for vulnerable communities. I’m going to mention again the idea that certain options exert pressure as soon as they exist: society doesn’t have to work too hard to actually help people when it could funnel them towards suicide instead. And so once assisted suicide is thinkable, life for disabled, mentally ill, elderly, and poor people gets worse. (The United Nations agrees with me: article 10 paragraph 19b)

And if you make freedom itself the condition for life’s value, i.e. “a person’s life has value if they freely confer that value on it”, the danger doesn’t disappear. How do we know the difference between a person who has with full freedom decided to stop valuing their life and a person who is so mentally unwell that they should be considered unable to freely consent? If you’re going through a rough patch and you start to have trouble seeing the value in yourself, does your value immediately disappear? How quickly can a medical professional sign off on your death? That same day? The next? And are we saying, then, that people only have value when they’re able to exercise freedom? What about mentally disabled people who need a lot of support and whose autonomy is limited? There is an extremely thin line between the principle of a person going to the doctor and saying “I have freely decided my life has no value” and the doctor assessing them and agreeing that they have the mental fitness to make that free choice, and the principle of a doctor looking at a person (with advanced dementia, intellectual disability, etc) and assessing that they don’t have the mental fitness to choose to give their life value.

As modern people we are obsessed with autonomy, and terrified of not having control, but in reality, most people have quite limited control. Obviously it’s an admirable goal to restructure society so that the poor and marginalized are less trapped by their circumstances, but we should also be really, really careful about making being-in-control the ultimate value—because it confers more value upon the powerful and leeches it away from the poor and marginalized. Bad enough that they don’t have a ton of choices! Now their humanity is somehow less because of that? Their lack of autonomy shouldn’t make them disposable.

Hi anon! Here’s the gist:

The goodness or worthiness of a human life is not dependent on the abilities of the person. It is also not dependent on how easy or pleasant their life is. It is inherent.

Suffering is an evil, but it does not reduce the person to less than a person. A person in pain is still a person. 

Neediness and vulnerability is not an evil. To be dependent on others for help and care is not undignified. We are all of us dependent on one another.

Death “on one’s own terms” is not a desirable or admirable category, and is merely dressing up the ordinary category of suicide. Taking one’s own life is not better than having death “happen” to you. We wouldn’t feel comfortable with a happy, loved, young person suddenly freely deciding that it was time for them to die; we only invent this category for lives that we feel are unworthy.

Assisted suicide assumes that when a person a) no longer has all the abilities they used to (including mental capacity), b) is in pain, and/or c) finds themselves in need of a lot of help, either in the sense of nursing care or in the sense of “becoming a burden” on their family, that it is more compassionate and dignified to help this person end their life. This is an affront to the inherent worth of human life, and it also makes a mockery of compassion. Compassion literally means “to suffer with”. Rather than doing away with a person so we no longer have to face their suffering, compassion accompanies them, does its best to alleviate their hurt, and mourns with them the hurt that remains. Hospice or palliative care is infinitely more compassionate than assisted suicide. 

That’s more or less the inherent argument against assisted suicide. There are also slippery slope-type dangers which are reasons to oppose it. Once assisted suicide is legalized for those in a state of physical pain and dependence at the end of their lives, it becomes ever more difficult to explain why suicide isn’t also the answer for mentally ill people who are suffering mental anguish, or disabled people who are in physical pain and/or dependent on others, and then assisted suicide expands and becomes ever more and more predatory. Our culture worships autonomy and usefulness, which has always had the effect of making the lives of mentally ill/disabled/elderly people seem to be worth less. Assisted suicide is the ultimate reinforcement of that attitude, finally claiming that it is actually true that these people would be better off dead and society would be better off without them.

This should horrify us. What is the difference between a mentally ill person who has made the choice that their suffering is too great and their quality of life so poor they would like to exercise their right to die, and a mentally ill person who succumbs to their suicidal ideation and steps into traffic? Only a doctor’s note. And who are doctors to decide when life is no longer worth living?? How are they to know that circumstances will never improve? How are they to know what impact a person’s life has on all those around them? And how naive would we have to be to imagine that these decisions would be made from a position of neutrality? Medical facilities and insurance companies would be less and less incentivized to actually care for vulnerable groups, when they can much more easily and cheaply funnel them towards self-destruction.

The possibility of assisted suicide, once it is introduced, is not just going to be picked by individuals with a lot of options exercising their autonomy with perfect understanding and consent. It’s an option which as soon as it’s on the table exercises a kind of pressure: aren’t you afraid of pain? You don’t want to be a financial burden on your family, do you? What good is your life if all you can do is lie in a bed? Won’t your loved ones come to resent all the help you need? If insurance doesn’t cover care and it does covered assisted suicide isn’t it selfish for you to go on living? Its very possibility is corrosive of civilized society, breaking down the connections we have to one another and leaving us all alone and afraid. It holds our worst fears over our heads—what if I’m only really worthwhile because of what I can do, what if helping me is a burden, what if my pain is too big for people to love me in it. I think these fears are wrong about human nature and human friendship. But a culture which has legal assisted suicide is a culture which does its best to make those fears into a reality.

Now, there still is nuance. Purposefully ending one’s own life is morally impermissible, but that does not mean that we are obliged to prolong life infinitely using any means necessary. If there is a surgery which will slightly prolong your life but drastically decrease your quality of life, you do not have to have the surgery. If you’ve been on dialysis for years and the toll it’s taking on your body is starting to pile up, you can cease dialysis. You can have a DNR. You can receive morphine in the days leading up to your death, even in quantities which would hasten (but not cause) your death, if that is what is required to keep you comfortable. If death is on its way to you, it’s okay to stand and face it and allow it to come.