The closing paragraph of the post immediately above yours is a full and sufficient rebuttal, given the facts of this particular case (her illness guaranteed her inability to continue fulfilling these asserted “obligations” in any case; thus, complaining about her failure to do so is like complaining that your cat is refusing to help with your calculus homework), but the fact that rebuttal is not an exercise in attempting to nail Jell-O to a wall is an improvement.
No, it will not do, because the entire essay, summed up in the last paragraph, is nothing more than a banal argument against casual suicide. It carries the same naive implicitly assumed nonsense that we’ve been hearing from you right from the beginning, namely that this is some “one-percenter globetrotting elitist who took the coward’s way out and encouraged a culture of death”; that you yourself could handle her situation just fine: “It would not be an ideal life, but we’ve known locked-in people on this very board in the past who have been capable of pursuing intellectual stimulation and social interaction thanks to modern technology” and other complete nonsense like “She gave up what could have remained of her life because she was afraid that it wasn’t always going to be as good as it had been”.
So if you’re quite done insulting this spirited and brave young woman who experienced more life in her short 29 years than most of us ever will, and had the courage and fortitude to end it with dignity while championing the cause of compassionate medicine, I just have one simple question:
Do you know anything at all about glioblastoma multiforme, its symptoms and prognosis, and what it does to a person in its terminal stages? Do you, in a word, have any idea what you are talking about? Just a simple “yes” or “no” is all that is necessary.
You used the word “compelled” and then the word “requiring” in describing the legal position of medical professionals in this situation. Please cite the section of the Oregon Death With Dignity Act that “compels” or “requires” physicians to do anything with regard to assisted suicide.
Are you saying that all families and friends are broken and irreparably damaged every time a loved one dies? If that’s the case, then none of us would be able to function and grow. Yet we do.
Of course we miss and mourn the deceased, but that doesn’t mean that our lives end or are always wrecked.
I’ve already lost aunts and uncles, grandparents, my dad, a pen pal/friend, neighbors, and a cat. I think about them, but their passing has not left any of us incapacitated or ruined.
We function and grow in spite of that which we have lost, not because of it. One who has a leg removed can still live and be happy, but they are diminished by what they have lost.
Do you know for sure that Maynard didn’t give of her talents and aptitudes and other gifts on a regular basis? Maybe she did and all the details just weren’t in her obituary. If they had been, would that have satisfied your desire to see her give back to the community and to the world at large?
I support your right to choose not to commit suicide under any circumstances.
I support the right of people to make this decision for themselves, rather than having it decided for them by people who think they know what’s valuable to an individual and that individual’s family.
Whenever you make a statement of value concerning another individual and their family, you’re at best, guessing. At worst, you’re imposing your values on others. In any case, you’re very frequently getting it wrong.
I agree with your arguments as arguments to pose to someone making the decision. They’re valid arguments. But they’re not sufficient to override the values and choices of others.
The only thing you’ve given her so far is to call her a one-percenter globetrotting elitist who took the coward’s way out and was also insane. You also managed to completely derail a thread that could have been a sensitive and informative discussion about the issue – just the kind of discussion she was hoping to promote.
Yeah, right. You understand her condition just about as much as your political kindred spirits understood the condition of Terri Schiavo, except that this is incomparably worse because at least Schiavo wasn’t suffering. If you had the slightest inkling of her condition, you wouldn’t be writing insensitive nonsense like “She gave up what could have remained of her life … it would not be an ideal life” and “a brave person faces it head-on and stays lucid and fully aware until the end.” Those are not the words of anyone who has a clue about the disease.
What the hell does that even mean? Again, what part of the Oregan Death With Dignity Act compels physicians to do anything? (Hint: reading the act might help.)
Per Wiki, she had a 47% chance of surviving more than one year after diagnosis (which she didn’t even allow herself to live to), and a 4% chance of living more than 5 years. Which is a long shot, but it’s still infinitely larger than the 0% chance she gave herself by committing suicide - and that survival chance is getting larger every day thanks to new developments (detailed on the same page) that she deprived herself of because that would have been too hard.
Seems to me that we’re having that conversation just fine.
I don’t know who you think my “political kindred spirits” are, but this is in no way comparable to Terri Schiavo. Terri Schiavo wasn’t a living person choosing to die - Terri Schiavo was a dead person whose body was being kept alive after her brain had ceased to function.
See above. At the time of her suicide, she was not a person who had mentally diminished to the point where she was no longer capable of living life.
It means that the Oregon Death With Dignity Act exists.
Evidently, Smapti wants the dying and those in agony to conjure up some strength so they can give, give, give until the very last second–never mind the fact that they may not have the energy to do so or even the cognizance.
Well, it certainly demonstrates that you have an actual belief that you are defending.
The numerous leaps to conclusions unsupported by their predicates fails to actually make a case, but I did not ask for a defensible rationale.
While there may be an obligation to abide by laws, nothing you have posted supports the notion that there is an obligation to preserve life. That is just something you made up. A person who will clearly be a drag on the resources of those among whom he or she lives would more logically have an obligation to die as soon as possible. (I do not hold that view, but it is the logical extension of your society based obligation.)
This is only true for persons who are capable of supporting family, country, or future children. A person who is unable to provide that support and who will clearly be unable to provide that support before his or her death cannot have an obligation that he or she is unable to fullfill. Taken to that logical extreme, a person who is sufficiently ill or old/feeble, has an obligation to die. Your argument seems to work much better against your position than for it.
As a person who has lived long enough to have had both parents and numerous other relatives and friends die and whose spouse has worked in hospice for a decade or more, I can state, unequivocally, that this is bullshit. Certainly, death can be those things, but it is often a release that the family prefers to watching their loved one suffer.
The statement also fails to address the issue of hastening an imminent death. Keeping a person alive for an extra hour or an extra month–particularly a person who is weakened to the point where they cannot perform any of those “duties”–would seem to be nothing more than a form of torture inflicted by someone who is following an absolutist position regarding death without having actually paid attention to what their beliefs actually mean.
And yet, when they cannot fulfill these obligations that you have imposed on them, (remember, I noted that you have actually failed to demonstrate that they are genuine obligations), you have made statements that indicate that you still would deny them death.
Sorry.
I still have no idea why you believe what you do, since your argument is so flawed as to be worthless, but I do agree that you set forth something.
Self-preservation is instinctual and axiomatic. I no more made it up than I made up that life has value or that food is good. It is one of the fundamental precepts upon which our existence is qualified.
To argue that an individual is logically obligated to die would be to deny the self-preservation instinct.
As long as one is capable of conscious thought, one is capable of these things, as Brittany Maynard demonstrated by making a celebrity of herself in her final days.
Inability to fulfill an obligation does not negate it.
Human beings employ coping mechanisms to try to ameliorate the psychological harm suffered by the death of a loved one, as Kubler-Ross described. Convincing oneself that the death was a release, or was preferable to suffering, are forms of bargaining.
An hour or a month not lived is an hour or a month stolen from those who upon the dying depend.
No one living is incapable of discharging their obligations.
So far so good. It’s not quite the typical secular morality system á la Dillahunty/Harris, but there’s at least something to it.
You know, this is a perfectly valid argument…
…Against “casual” suicide. Against suicide made as a personal choice motivated by factors which are, in the long run, fairly immaterial - hell, even very material things.
The problem with this argument in this case is, it’s not only death that renders people incapable of dealing with these issues. A permanently brain-damaged person is also incapable of loving and supporting his/her family. A person who, for the rest of their lives, will never stop being in insufferable pain is incapable of such things. Nobody here is arguing the morality of suicide in standard cases. If I were to, for no good reason, just jump off a highway bridge on my way back from a lecture, that would be an exceedingly immoral act. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about someone in the end stages of dying of cancer.
This is simply not true. People get old. They die. Accidents happen. My grandmother died last year, and while my mother was really upset for a while, she got over it. She’s not traumatized or irreparably damaged. Neither was anyone else in the family (save for Auntie J, who was already crazy to begin with). You seriously overstate the power of the bond of family, and equally overstate the effects that death has on it.
And even beyond that, again, this is not applicable. I’m sorry, but this person going through the end phases of glioblastoma is not able to fulfill the obligations she once had, unless her obligations included “screaming in pain” or “being drugged off her tits” (in which case she could very easily fulfill exactly one of them at any given time). For her family, it’s essentially a matter of watching her slowly suffer and die in increasing stages of brain damage and unconsciousness, or watching her die quickly, cutting the “anticipatory grief” phase down considerably (you know the feeling of knowing someone near you is going to die and there’s nothing you can do about it? It sucks almost as much as when they actually do.), getting closure, and moving on with their lives.
Beyond that, though, you miss the point of these obligations. The entire point of morality (indeed, I would contend that if this isn’t the point of morality, then you’re not talking about morality, and you’re probably not talking about something I consider worth giving a shit about) is, in very loose terms, to make things as good as possible for humanity. Blindly applying these rules you’ve created as general catch-alls that seem to work in general to this case helps no-one.
It doesn’t help her - she’s going to suffer, and still going to die, just having spent another while in excruciating pain or a drugged haze (the latter of which you seem to consider bad as well for some bizarre reason).
It doesn’t help her family - she’s still going to die, and your rule merely ensures that they get to go through as much of the (legitimately traumatizing) process of watching her suffer as possible before she dies. I wouldn’t want that for a loved one. I probably wouldn’t even want that for someone I hated.
It doesn’t help society at large - in her condition, she has nothing more to give to the world. I don’t mean that in the sense she doesn’t want to, I mean she can’t. And in the meanwhile, we’re helping foot the bill for her increasingly futile palliative care.
So applying your “morality” here fails completely in the only goal morality can reasonably be said to have. Unless you want to hold these obligations up as an end unto themselves, at which point I’m just not going to care, because why should I? Your “moral” system is bizarre, dogmatic, and not based on anything that actually matters. I mean, when you say something like this:
Why should I care? The only reasons to value these obligations have to do with the effects I have on others. I care about my family and would not like to see them suffer. Me killing myself would cause immense suffering for them, therefore I don’t do it. I care about my own life, and I look forward to each new day because I love living. Me killing myself would put an end to that, and that’s a prospect I find quite awful.
But I’m not dying of cancer.
I’m not in a situation where I am in excruciating pain 24/7, and will be until I die. Indeed, if the life I had ahead of me was “suffer excruciating pain until the day I die”, I would choose death sooner than later, and I would expect anyone who loved me to understand that decision. I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to offer them much love and support, I’ll tell you that much.
But they’d be harmed by it anyways. Remember, this isn’t a case where the person had a long, fulfilling life ahead of them. This isn’t even the case where you could squeeze in a few more heartfelt chats over the beep of the ECG. This person is going to be either non-responsive from pain, or non-responsive from the medication needed to handle the pain. What’s more, they’re harmed by watching the person suffer. The difference between me dying today and me dying a week from now to my family is almost nothing if that entire week is taken up by me wasting away while screaming incoherently.
Well that’s a ridiculous slipperly slope if I’ve ever seen one. “Because a life is considered not worth living due to the fact that it’s almost over and the entire rest of it will be spent suffering or comatose, this leads to a general diminishing of the value of human life”. My evaluation of human life is not diminished by Brittany Maynard’s “suicide” (I find it ridiculous to call it such), and I sincerely doubt anyone not in her situation feels any differently.
Which Maynard demonstrably was not, as demonstrated by the fact that she was able to give TV interviews and pose for magazine photo shoots and blog and write her own suicide note in the days leading up to her death.
Perhaps you understate it out of grief.
Which she was demonstrably not in, as per above.
If the rules are not universally applied, then they cease to be rules, and thus lose all value whatsoever.
Maybe. Or maybe not. She didn’t give herself enough time to find out.
Maybe. Or maybe not. She didn’t give herself enough time to find out.
I wouldn’t want anyone I loved to deny themselves tomorrow.
She can set an example. Freddie Mercury set an example. Harry Daghlian set an example. Franklin D. Roosevelt set an example. Brittany Maynard chickened out.
A worthwhile expense.
If you care, then cancer is irrelevant.
We are all in a situation where we are in pain and will be until we die. It’s called life.
Then perhaps you should work on that.
Except that it is, as noted above.
If those who love you know that you are hanging on because you love them as well, then no harm is done.