Why? There is no more personal thing than your own life. Why should not we be able to choose when to end it? People will be doing it anyways, just in all the gruesome ways it is usually done. Hopefully this container doubles as a coffin that can be either buried or burnt.
Sucide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Usually, atleast a few other methods should be used to help, before deciding on suicide (with a notable exception of being close to a very painful, inevitable death, and just wanting to shorten the suffering).
Please advise: what therapy could help the terminally ill father of a friend of mine? Stage 4 lung cancer. Talk to a psychologist? The only thing that "helped" him were large doses of opiate painkillers.
The side effects of most pain killers can also be extremely unpleasant. You'll have more time, but you'll be miserable or marginally conscious for most of it.
In case of opiates, what side-effects are you thinking of? Constipation is an easy fix. Assuming proper use and dosage, opiates are way safer than NSAIDs.
Presumably most if not all people who end up doing an assisted suicide have tried one or more methods to ameliorate their issue before they go to the more extreme approach. Do you have some reason to believe they do not?
Studies of psychedelic therapy for terminally ill patients have had some super interesting results, there’s a section on the topic in Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind which I found fascinating. Seems there is a lot of potential for helping people deal with the existential dread and get more enjoyment from their remaining time with friends and family. Here’s an article for reference: https://nyulangone.org/news/mental-health-benefits-one-dose-...
That said I’m a Swiss citizen and knew someone with a terminal illness who used the “Exit” program and it seemed extremely humane and a positive thing overall and I fully support having it available to everyone in that situation.
That’s nice and all, but but in the real world, those things aren’t always available (for any number of reasons, not just financial). In the absence of other solutions, sometimes the best choice may be to end a life rather than continue suffering.
Curious as to why you see parent as lucky to hold a binary view, if you care to say. I would say holding such a view is unlucky. Perhaps I’m missing something important.
The use of the cliche "Sucide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" demonstrates binary thinking, as though there is only one temporary problem and no compounding factors.
It's also a pretty shitty thing to say. It's designed to make people who may want to die feel worse about themselves by calling their feelings merely "temporary".
As an example: Old age is a permanent, and worsening, problem. Why should one be forced to live to an old age where they are dependent on others, IF they don’t want to?
Perhaps it could work with a much more extended cool-off period. Over the course of a year, the person needs to affirm they want to go through with it on the last day of each month. If over the last 12 consecutive months they have said yes 12 times, then assist them, otherwise no.
I’m personally biased towards hope. Meaning that I keep thinking that things will be better and that I will reach a point where things will be meaningful. I call this a bias because I can remember the past and how long I’ve been in this state of mind without it panning out—it’s a false hope more often than not.
If average people are anything like me then I would think that they are more likely to think that a permanent problem is a temporary one rather than the other way around.
That’s such an absurd point of view. When the duration of the problems is comparable to your expected lifespan, it is permanent for all intent and purposes. Sure, an incurable illness is not permanent in that it has to end when the person die. That’s not a useful point to make.
Life itself temporary, hence the death-is-permanent thing. Hence all things in life—pain, happiness, pleasure, suffering—are temporary. Suicide is just the shortening of all of these possible states (or potential states—for the hopeful). Thus a shortening of a bunch of temporary states.
Doesn’t sound as menacing and dramatic when you put it like that. And it’s equally true.
This suicide capsule concept is clearly targeted for people who have made a well thought out decision on their life. Heat-of-the-moment suicides, won't happen with rare specialty devices but common tools/environments/drugs/poisons that are found all over.
It would be a weird assumption to think that a person who carefully plans their suicide in advance, and orders a specialty device for it, hasn't considered options other than suicide. Most likely such a person has tried everything else already.
It's a good point about the rollout strategy. Is this a specialty device you must order? Or is there a row of them on display at the mall next to the massage chairs?
And what of the excruciatingly painful existence that doesn't come with a near-term "inevitable death". What you're advocating is long-term inescapable torture.
You can already kill yourself if you really want to. Nobody can stop you.
The whole idea of "assisted suicide" is like Bitcoin - invented for the express purpose of finding and abusing loopholes in the current legal frameworks.
There are multiple ways one might commit suicide, it is true. But some are more reliable than others; some leave a terrible mess for someone (perhaps a family member) to clean up; some are more painful than others; some may put other people at risk. The worst outcome is when a person tries to kill themselves and ends up alive but in an even worse condition.
For people who don't have religious prohibitions on suicide, having a reliable, simple, low cost, low-pain, low-mess option sounds great to me.
Yes, someone who is paralyzed from their neck down can easily take their own life, of course. Don't see any issue here.
You have to excuse the sarcasm, but if you really can't think of any cases where taking your own life in a dignified manner is not actually possible, then I'm not sure there's any discussion to be had here