As someone for whom this is a real life practical issue, not some idle philosophizing, even asking the question is repugnant to me.
I have incurable cancer and at some point I will decide "enough is enough" and I'd like to be euthanized by a doctor. The doctor will then have to decide if my suffering is sufficiently unbearable and only if he comes to that conclusion is he allowed to do it. He'll have to justify his judgment to a committee and if they disagree he can (theoretically) be prosecuted for murder.
This is insane and caused by assholes who believe human life is sacred or some such bullshit.
(I'm in The Netherlands.)
But euthanasia should not be allowed on a whim. For terminal diseases or other suffering it is more than warranted, but for folks who are going through a depressive episode and want to end their life, they may take a rash decision that they’d regret later. For you, I hope you’re not going to go through too much suffering and will be able to enjoy some quality moments before you leave us.
If the people that remain behind are at peace with the decision it doesn't really matter 'what might have been'.
Also, taking away the 'easy' option means that a large number of people will do it in a way that is more gruesome and much harder for the people left behind.
So what? This is unfortunate but in no way implies that a valid response is "might as well just help them instead". That's not better.
Hearing someone even present this sort if argument makes me wish I could turn their lack of empathy back on themselves. How about we have psyche tests and anyone who would so lightly let other people die, are killed themselves?
Somehow I bet you would say that's immoral and outrageous.
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but this is actually a profound point that a lot of people don't seem to grasp (maybe because they don't really believe in death being final).
If you take this point seriously then it follows that there is only one important thing to do before you choose to die: Make sure your friends and family understand your choice and can live with it.
And it's a real life practical issue for me that there be no wiggle room or ambiguity, ever, in any context, about whether it's OK to kill me. Even if the doctor on the scene doesn't know me personally and I'm not capable of making my arguments to him and defend my self from his, say, religious belief that I'll be in a better place or have outlived his concept of usefulness or worth.
It makes sense to me that this is not something that can be done conveniently. It makes sense to me for the system to be rigged such that errors always result in "did not kill when should have" rather than "killed when should not have".
One of the rules is that two independent doctors need to be sure that you want to be euthanized, so this is already covered and has nothing to do with the ridiculous judgment of whether I am suffering enough.
I'm not aware of anyone who is advocating involuntary euthanasia. I've no doubt that someone is but it is far outside of the mainstream, even among those who support an unconditional right to euthanasia. In all current implementations and all the ones I've seen proposed it has to be actively sought by the patient who is to be euthanized. Your comment seems like more than a little bit of a strawman.
> I've no doubt that someone is but it is far outside of the mainstream […] Your comment seems like more than a little bit of a strawman.
For now perhaps, but sometimes the inclined plane has a low coefficient of friction:
> Evidence of widespread evasion of such safeguards in Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted suicide had previously been legalized, was dismissed as “anecdotal,” while the widening of its application in those countries, from the consenting adults originally envisaged, to children and the mentally ill, was waved away as the product of a different “medico-legal culture.” In essence, the court said, it can’t happen here.
> This was not just an incidental point. This was central to the court’s reasoning, the thing that allowed it to ignore the precedent set in Rodriguez. Legalizing assisted suicide, relaxing the prohibition in place for centuries in virtually all Western countries, need not open the floodgates, as feared. It could be limited to consenting adults, of sound mind, in the last agonizing stages of a terminal illness – the sorts of people who had come before the court in Carter and Rodriguez, the sorts of cases that had moved the public to support their cause.
> Yet here we are, in 2020, considering whether to legalize assisted suicide for non-terminal cases, for the mentally ill, even for children – sorry, “mature minors.”
The miniscule risk of a slippery slope in some remote and unlikely future cannot serve as a reasonable justification for violating the bodily autonomy of adults in their sound mind today. Nor am I much impressed by the existence of an organization that advocated involuntary euthanasia eighty years ago in the US. There was all kinds of insanely messed up stuff going on in our country at that time. Involuntary euthanasia, even if they had succeeded in implementing it, wouldn't have remotely been the worst.
The slippery slope is occurring right now in Canada:
> Had you predicted [in 2015] that the right to an assisted suicide would soon come to apply, not only in cases of physical pain but psychological, and not only to patients in the last agonizing stages of death but those who were nowhere near it – had you predicted, indeed, that a patient’s request to be killed would not even have to be repeated and persistent for a doctor to act on it, that the whole process could be telescoped into a single day – you would have been accused of “slippery slope” thinking.
> Had you predicted that, by 2019, just the third full year after it was legalized, nearly one in 50 deaths in the country would be by assisted suicide, even on the (almost certainly underreported) official numbers; and that, this having been accomplished, talk would turn to extending the procedure – not just to competent adults, but the mentally ill and even children – you would have been carted off.
> Yet that, incredibly, is where we are. The cautious, limited exceptions that people understood the issue to involve at the start – what most people understand it to involve even now – have been overtaken by an accelerating drive toward death-on-demand. Had the public known this was where we were headed, they might have objected. Instead it has been done in stages, a series of bait-and-switch routines in which the courts and legislatures have taken equal part.
> The irony is that the very foundation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Carter was that there was no such slippery slope.
Would you consider killing newborns "involuntary euthanasia"? If so, then that would be an example advocation. Per Jerry Coyne:
> If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born? I see no substantive difference that would make the former act moral and the latter immoral. After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties). It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state.
> The slippery slope is occurring right now in Canada:
I see that the right to end your own life is being expanded in Canada. I see no evidence from what you shared that the qualitative change over to involuntary euthanasia is in any danger of occurring, nor that there is any motion in that direction.
> [Baby-related stuff]
As the blog you cite points out, we withdraw care from infants in the first two categories on a routine basis, which has exactly the same effect as euthanasia, but with extra suffering for the infant. As far as I'm concerned, we already euthanize these infants. We just do it in the most painful way possible.
Hey Oleander, I'm not sure if you will see this reply as I'm a little late to the "party" but if you would like somebody to chat to anytime, please put an email address or something in your bio so I can get in touch (or I've put an email address in my bio that you could reach me at).
I see from taking a quick look at a couple of your previous comments that you might appreciate a postcard, even from a stranger.
Please don't feel any obligation whatsoever to respond, for you have no obligation to me whatsoever. I'm just putting this out there from one human being to another. I don't know your circumstances at all, you might have a hundred friends and family members to talk to and support you, but you might have very few or none at all. Or you might be happier to be left alone. I don't know.
In any case, if you would like somebody to talk to, even just once or infrequently, please don't hesitate, because I do very much know what it is like to suffer (not in the same way that people like yourself with cancer do) and I think many people do not understand how unbearable and terrible suffering can be. I find the question itself, being posed by the title of this article, as repugnant as you do.
In any case, whether or not you wish to respond or correspond any further, I do wish you well and I hope that you are spared as much suffering as possible. I will continue to fight for as long as I live, with the limited resources I have available to me, for what I see as an inalienable right for people to choose a happier or at least more comfortable but shorter life than a prolonged and miserable one.
I am sorry that life dealt you this hand. Life isn't fair, suffering isn't equally distributed, and anyone who thinks they have a right to decide whether another person's suffering is, as you put it, sufficiently bearable, is being callous or ignorant in a way I simply cannot understand.
Thank you for your kind reply. I'm actually doing pretty good. I'm not currently in pain and plan to die before I am.
I figured out a good way to end my life myself should my euthanasia request be denied.
I've always been a proponent of the right to die when you wish and my current situation has given me more time to think about this and made me empathize even more with people who want to die for whatever reason. I too try to spend a portion of my time to fight for this important freedom.
At least we in NL have access to Euthanasia. Frankly I would like to see Futurama style suicide boots.
OK, the latter may seem extreme, but why do we have all the liberty in the world to create life, including a lot of suffering, but not to end our own?
In America, Euthanasia doesn’t seem like an option, but access to guns solves that option in practice. Terrible, but the hard reality.
In the end, It is about quality of life not quantity of life?. And everything in the medical world should be focused on that. For example, don’t put people on ventilators when there is no possibility of recovery.
Anyway, @Oleander: I wish you the best under the circumstances and that you may get what you wish for.
Futurama style suicide booths would be terrible. A huge fraction of the people who use them would be people who if they had just had to wait a couple of years would no longer have been suicidal.
Some stats [1]. In 2013 among students in grades 9-12 in the US, 11.6% of males and 22.4% of females seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous 12 months.
19.6% of females and 10.3% of males made a plan about how they would attempt it. 10.6% of females and 5.4% of males did attempt it. But only 3.6% of the females and 1.8% of males made an attempt that actually resulted in injury, poisoning, or overdose that required medical attention.
With a Futurama suicide booth where all you have to do is step in and insert a coin, which you can easily do on impulse while passing by, I'd expect that most of those "seriously considered" cases would become "successfully suicided" cases. As would a lot of people who considered it but not seriously.
Yes, many people who attempt suicide are later happier and glad they didn’t die. That’s why it was more of an idea or concept, not meant literally / too seriously.
But for those people that really had enough there is no legal, clean way to end their life. Not even in The Netherlands, where euthanasia was first legalized.
Especially people with severe psychological issues will have a hard time proving that they suffer tremendously and that there is no hope of recovery.
There are actually a number of countries (and US states) that now have euthanasia laws. We got there first, but that also means we didn't get to learn from anyone. There are certainly problems with the Dutch laws, but there is no political will to change it, because it works 'well enough'.
I've extensively studied the Dutch euthanasia law and practice and think I know the right things to say to convince the doctor, but it really shouldn't have to be that hard.
The irony being... isn't euthanasia the ultimate freedom? If it is our body, and we have full autonomy as long as we aren't causing direct harm, the "American Way" should be to allow the freedom of choice as to what happens to said body.
And you are free to commit suicide in the US. From what i understand most laws making suicide and attempted suicide are no longer enforced or were changed.
What’s we don’t do is make it easy for someone else to assist in your death. That opens up an entirely different can of worms and anyone who thinks that’s an easy change to make is delusional. It’s fraught with issues and one needs to tread carefully.
It's definitely complicated, but in two countries the courts have already ruled that the ban on assistance violates the European Convention on Human Rights.
That's a fair distinction. I did some digging, and it appears unassisted suicide only has common law implications in most states since the 90's; however, as of 2019, only 8 states have laws on the books legalizing assisted suicide (https://apnews.com/article/7f0fe9d789294a02852c1669c892f382).
Presumably, suicide is illegal where I live because it may involve another person. Obviously, destroying my own life by my own hand leaves no perpetrator, though it does leave suffering [0] in my social circle. Of course, if I'm unsuccessful, our social net must pay to pump my stomach or sew my gash. Presumably, there is a punishment in place to prevent a proliferation of expensive, half hearted attempts. I agree that policy, unfortunately, affects people who aren't intending to harm themselves.
But, consider my semi mobile 97 year old, arthritic grandmother. If she did harbor a desire, she probably isn't in a position to end herself without suffering while she expires. She's not in a position to get a gun, or jump into a river. She doesn't control her pill supply, so she can't swallow all of her opiods. Maybe she could starve or dehydrate herself for an age.
Her greatest hope for dying without complication means involving an able bodied person. But, it's hard for uninvolved people to prove that murder didn't happen, given that the consenting party is gone. Sure, maybe the medical professional isn't interested in killing this person, but benefactors might be. It looks like murder in Los Angeles County in 2018 was 5 per 1e5 [2] and suicide was 14 per 1e5 residents [3]. (LA county contains 1e7 residents.) That is many cases that would need to be audited, and hence an expense that would be simpler to avoid with prohibition.
To be clear, I'm answering your question of why a society may choose to continue criminalizing suicide. I say this as someone who plans to off myself before my quality of life reduces to what (I perceive) my grandparents have experienced. Of course, it is easy for me to pronounce my intention [4] while my preferred date is still decades in the future.
There was this young Indian guy who sued his parents for bringing him into this world (to make a point). This sounds absurd, but it also makes one think - I and I alone should decide what to do with my life, no? Especially if I haven't had kids. Why should some politician, religious leader or bureaucrat decide if I have suffered enough?
Agreed. Although I do believe you have a moral obligation to attempt to make the people who care about you understand your thought process and ideally agree with your decision.
It is, but there are complications. My parents are still alive and I'd like them to be present (and they'd like to be present), but when you are present at a suicide you automatically become suspected of 'assisting' and that is not something I want them to have to go through when they are mourning.
Sir, that is the social contract you agreed to when living your life - that it is good to live it. Please do not disparage the legitimate consideration of human life as precious with corruptible bureaucracy which presupposes you are too stupid to make decisions about your health. I, for one, believe it is your body ergo your natural right!
I believe that much of our fundamentalism about maximising lifespan is fueled by fear of a swing in the opposite direction. The slippery slope from "it's ok to not always maximise" to "people routinely get shamed into agreeing to euthanasia" and beyond isn't just imaginative.
But I believe that it's one of those slippery slopes where we need to make up our minds about where we want to be and learn to stand there, despite the slickness and the angle. Because there is no easy ground anywhere near, we could keep human cell cultures that once were a person metabolizing for decades if we really wanted (and if it was done at scale it would make life hell for the actually living).
How much of our attitude towards end-of-life is "learned" and result of "we have always done it like that"?
It's easy to imagine a planet/culture where people chose to go voluntarily and on their own terms and then everybody celebrates around that.
I do think it's a high burden on younger generations to pay "up-keep" for older generations, especially when technological advancements are pushing out/eliminating natural reasons for dying. How do you justify that especially if one can't contribute much to society anymore and maybe didn't raise kids on your own?
There's a certain danger in framing life continuation in terms of value to society though. I don't say this flippantly because I've wrestled with these things in a very real sense, and appreciate the argument you're trying to make. I'm not trying to trivialize it.
However, it's ethically a slippery slope in the strongest sense:
There's the argument that older people don't have an obligation to live as long as possible because it puts a burden on younger individuals when the older individuals aren't contributing "'much' to society anymore."
But how do you define "much"? Who gets to define that?
Logically, too, that argument can't just apply to the elderly anymore, so now you have to apply it to the population at large. Where do we draw the line at that? People in prison? The severely disabled? The socioeconomically less fortunate? How do you make the distinction between the self-destructive thoughts of the depressed versus others? Is the depressed person always wrong?
I tend to think that the decision to end one's life is the ultimate manifestation of autonomy, and as such should be protected and respected.
But by the same token, sometimes I think these discussions are slightly misguided, in that we should be focused on improving life circumstances rather than on the means by which someone dies. To extend your example a bit, I'd argue that if age burden is a tremendous issue for society, why not invest, in a "moonshot" kind of way, in eliminating old age as a disease state, along with the stereotypes that go with it? Why is there so much focus on preventing suicide rather than improving people's well-being?
Death is inevitable, but sometimes I think we spend too much time focused on whether people should be able to choose to end their lives, and not enough on how to prevent them from being in that state where the decision is even an issue.
Finally, I see a lot of these types of posts on HN, about suicide and euthanasia; I appreciate them but wonder if, and if, so, why, they appear here more than in other places.
> Why is there so much focus on preventing suicide rather than improving people's well-being?
There isn't a focus on merely preventing suicide while not improving well-being. Anyone working in suicide prevention or public health will talk - at length - about the wider determinants of health and mental health.
If it appears that there's a focus on preventing death over other measures that's because the work has focussed streams of activity. General health and well being does get discussed on HN.
>How much of our attitude towards end-of-life is "learned" and result of "we have always done it like that"?
Probably most of it, but there might be a underlying reason for that information to have passed on for thousands of years, across cultures.
Either for practical reasons (like they're a source of the accumulation of information and life experience), or because it's out of fear (let us give the example to younger generations so when it's our turn they won't leave us to die, or just kill us to save resources), or maybe because you have a bond and a moral sense towards elders, or all of these and some more...
Even if they serve the sole purpose of introducing us to death, and to remind us of our brief passage and reframe our perceptions and align our selves and our actions towards something with that end in sight, the fact is that elders are seen as a integral part of the family structure.
This pandemic actually got me a bit worried for the example set to younger generations, that framed the elders as statistics that just die a lot and stripped a lot of the humanity in this situation - and we're the ones that are going to deal with this when it's our turn, that despite your efforts, contributions and value is completely disregarded just because you're old and old people are just numbers that die a lot.
I don't mean to say this as a criticism, but you sound like someone who hasn't been around elders and you might not have much life experience.
End of life care in the last 5 decades is nothing like the previous thousands of years. I have so far had 2 great grandparents live to 100+, 1 great grandparent to 95+, and 2 grandparents to 95+.
All of them did not want medical intervention when their time came. I lived with 2 of the above myself growing up, and one needed dialysis at 93. There was no reason to give them dialysis at that age. It’s brutal for them, the staff, the government spending all this money. Even my grandparent was bewildered at this misplaced priority in society.
I also see many families, especially in traditional ones where the children take care of the parents, spend a ton of their resources on the elderly frequently sacrificing resources that could go to their young. My parents did this, and while I understand they didn’t have a better option for various reasons, but I will not spend a ton of time and energy extending my parents’ lives if it causes me to take away from my kids’. And I wouldn’t want it for myself, obviously.
For now, I hope when the time comes that I have to rely on someone else for basic bodily functions, I will still have the energy (and willpower) to get on a boat and tie a cinderblock to my ankle and go overboard or something.
Well the quality of life improved greatly in the last 50 years, when I was younger people in their 60's and 70's were way older - both mentally and physically.
>Every one of them did not want medical intervention when their time came.
That's their choice, because they have something to chose from. I'm not saying that we should do everything to keep the age ticker ticking - I'm saying they should have the same rights as everyone else, and they should be free to make their choices.
Else, what would be the age threshold that would strip us from rights? Who would decided that?
To clarify, I’m specifically talking about very old people who I think should have the option to take or be given a cocktail and go peacefully, rather than continue to live in a painful state that ties up everyone around them. For example, my grandparent that lost their kidneys at 93, they continued to live through dialysis for a couple years, but if they were offered assisted suicide, they would have taken it. They would not have had to suffer through dialysis, the country could have invested those funds elsewhere, and my parents would have been free to do other things.
But right now, a 93 year old with kidney failure would not qualify for assisted suicide in most states, maybe not even the ones with assisted suicide.
What I also meant was that in decades prior to recent ones, there were no possibilities to extend someone’s life for weeks/months/years with things like dialysis, artificial lungs, etc. So there’s a lot more resources that can be spent on extending someone’s life compared to before.
Whether or not society should refuse to treat a 93 year old with dialysis is a question I am not able to address right now.
>How do you justify that especially if one can't contribute much to society anymore and maybe didn't raise kids on your own?
Interesting point. I do think it is kind of insane that like 70% of our government money goes to old people. Investing in the past instead of the future? Meanwhile everything else is getting cut, because SS and medicare are "mandatory" spending. The reality is that these old folks did not pay high enough taxes and save enough money to justify the money going to them now. Younger generations are getting pillaged.
That’s a pretty gross and ignorant perspective. Try reading a little less Paul Ryan.
Apropos to Medicare, I live a block away the president of a local hospital and healthcare network. I remember just before COVID, he drove by in his Porsche and waved, on his way to go on TV to complain about reimbursements from Medicare falling (because the quality of care in the the hospital sucks) and that state government was “killing” them by reducing an increase in Medicaid.
Meanwhile, he makes $30M for what should be a $200k/year civil service job, is in the middle of a massive, unnecessary hospital expansion, funded by Medicare dollars, and cut the salaries of nurses 20% to be “fair” to the employees of a small hospital they purchased with a big infusion of people debt.
America has deep issues to solve in this domain.
This sounds like a sci-fi movie to people in other countries
... and the other countries are not perfect either.
It will take some kind of amazing leadership to solve which could be a long time coming if current climate is any indicator.
Interesting - I've kind of stolen my view on this question from Cicero. You don't have an obligation to live for as long as possible, per say.
What you have is an obligation to live a life that results in 1) you still finding meaning in what you are doing despite your old age and 2) that contributes something back to those around you, even in your old age.
At the end of the day, humans need to feel like that have responsibility / are making a difference (generalized statement I know) to feel their own life has much meaning. Just because you become a burden due to frailty or sickness does not mean you are unable to benefit others still.
Selected Cicero[1]:
"But bear well in mind that in this entire discussion I am praising that old age which has its foundation well laid in youth. Hence it follows— as I once said with the approval of all who heard it— that that old age is wretched which needs to defend itself with words! Nor can wrinkles and grey hair suddenly seize upon influence; but when the preceding part of life has been nobly spent, old age gathers the fruits of influence at the last."
But it is our duty, my young friends, to resist old age; to compensate for its defects by a watchful care; to fight against it as we would fight against disease; to adopt a regimen of health; to practice moderate exercise; and to take just enough of food and drink to restore our strength and not to overburden it. Nor, indeed, are we to give our attention solely to the body; much greater care is due to the mind and soul; for they, too, like lamps, grow dim with time, unless we keep them supplied with oil.
Those, therefore, who allege that old age is devoid of useful activity adduce nothing to the purpose, and are like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of the ship, because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller.
He may not be doing what younger members of the crew are doing, but what he does is better and much more important. It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgement; in these qualities old age is usually not only not poorer but is even richer."
I feel like we have a lot to learn from past philosophers on this topic. To Cicero I would add Seneca, especially in his "moral letters to lucillius" in which he very often discuss life, death, meaning, &c.
It basically goes over all the points mentioned in the article but in greater detail, a few of my favorite quotes:
> You wish to live; well, do you know how to live? You are afraid to die. But come now: is this life of yours anything but death? It matters not how long the action is spun out, but how good the acting is.
> A person like him has not lived; he has merely tarried awhile in life. Nor has he died late in life; he has simply been a long time dying. He has lived eighty years, has he? That depends upon the date from which you reckon his death! ... Nay, he has existed eighty years, unless perchance you mean by "he has lived" what we mean when we say that a tree "lives."
> Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.
Epictetus has a similar view, saying that it is not the longest but the best play that brings the most joy. (Showing his age there, newer philosophers would probably have used "book" instead of "play" but the point does not really change)
Dragging out your life just for the sake of not dying is an empty pursuit.
I read an article about this, written by a doctor, about how doctors do it, he writes his colleagues mostly don't choose the longer but miserable life extension.
I tried to DDG the phrase "how doctors choose to die" to find the link, I didn't find it, but the search results tells me it's not a new topic.
> We might do better to ask whether we have good reasons to prolong our lives or whether we act virtuously if we seek to prolong our lives.
I think it all comes down to quality of life. If a person is still able to enjoy living, great. If they’re miserable and suffering from physical deterioration, I consider it immoral to suggest life-extending treatments unless there’s a good chance that life enjoyment is also restored.
I support the right-to-die movement. If I’m only able to survive on a machine in a bed, give me time to say goodbye and then let me drift away and die. Definitely don’t pressure me and suggest that I have an obligation to the living to stick around.
Recently I have started believing that humans are just another part of nature and nothing more. I don’t know whether this idea is part of some greater philosophical tradition. I have not looked into it, but it feels like it should be, i.e. probably somebody else has already thought and written about it.
The good part of thinking like this is that you become content with everything, you don’t worry about stuff not working out because you believe there’s no reason why it should in the first place.
The bad part is that you might affect the people around you.
I think you might be referring to something like Ecocentrism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecocentrism), as opposed to Anthropocentrism which centers around humans.
Yes, I am referring to a nature-centric approach to life and ecocentrism seems to be getting there. However, I don’t agree with the ethical claim in ecocentrism which seems to imply an ecological movement: humans should respect nature and compensate for destroying it.
This very idea gives humans a special role. I believe humans destroying nature is part of nature itself, so motivating ecology using ecocentrism raises a contradiction.
PS: I am not claiming we should destroy nature.
define first exactly what
we mean by a “moral
obligation”.
A moral obligation or a
moral duty is a morally
required form of conduct.
This defines the word obligation. The word "moral" and "morally" remains undefined.
Let's be frank, moral means good and evil, right and wrong, already antiquated concepts these days where money matters more than truth, and goodness/righteousness are interpretations that can more or less be purchased, or are entirely contingent on your perspective/the perspective of the agent reporting information to you.
The closest thing we have to a definition of moral or "good" and "evil" these days is "adheres to the law" and "does not adhere to the law" since there is no higher authority on the value of one's actions (unless you're a subjectivist/nihilist etc but if you're any of those positions, you don't really care about the question this article poses).
There is an idea of a shared common morality that makes certain things objectionable, cheating on your partner for instance, is frowned upon by many people. But is it immoral? It cannot be, because the opinion of infidelity changes with time, and to a growing number these days infidelity is considered natural, inevitable, or at least trivial. If the immorality of something shifts with the group mentality over time, and was merely inherited from a previous generation but without consideration in law (infidelity is considered in divorce proceedings, but only as grounds for the legal proceedings not as something that can be prosecuted itself) whence call it a matter of morality? Good and evil can change with time too -- but that's largely why I say these concepts aren't very useful to talk about. May as well constrain morality to law, even though that changes as well, it's less dynamic than group taboo.
So you have an obligation to live in accordance with the laws set by your host society.
Moral obligation to yourself and others begins and ends there. It is argued that you should be good to others -- those arguments are made entirely by those others , but in defence of their obvious bias, being good to others is just good business.
So how can the length of your life fit in? The law doesn't state that you must live as long as possible or that you must use your every waking second to help others, and even if it did, it would also have to stipulate that there is an imperative to achieving a high score at the end -- the achievement of which would be greatly aided by long life.
No, the length of your life has nothing to do with the law, so it either has nothing to do with morality or morality and law aren't equivalent in the case if this question.
Maybe it's a question of do you prefer being alive or being dead?
Since death is a state of existence no one can talk about, but could quite possibly be equivalent to ceasing to exist as a conscious, thinking person, I would argue that being alive has a good chance of being preferable to being dead in most cases.
On those grounds, living longer is preferable, but not in a moral way.
Some people are suffering and would prefer to end that suffering, even if the consequence is no longer existing. Can you call their desire immoral? Can you say with certainty that they are wrong to feel that way, if they have a condition that causes them extreme pain without end?
You can argue that they should keep going to wait for treatments to improve, to try experimental treatments etc. You can argue that pain makes us bad decision makers, that's certainly true as well.
Can it be argued that for all possible states of living, that they are all preferable to being dead? I guess you could be born into a messed up situation where you're imprisoned, abused and tortured by a creep or creeps, and if you're in that position there are surely moments where you think death is better. But again, everyone not in that position would say "better to wait for rescue no matter how long" -- it just seems unfair to say that death is always worse than being alive regardless of the circumstances of your life.
But bottom line, even if someone who terminates their life prematurely has made a bad decision, it cannot be said to be a morally bad one. Just an irrational one at most, and quite possibly a very rational one from their point of view.
It's just a choice based on maximising enjoyment/minimising suffering. That's not a moral question, it's just "do you like being alive? then keep living"
The whole concept that we can specify a universal judgment on whether a given act is moral or not relies on the idea that there is an inherent and universal morality (which I define as "what ought to be done"). This is a left over notion from the days when there was some reason to believe in a higher authority. For most folks who think about these issues seriously today, the question posed in the title can only be answered with another question: "From whose perspective? According to what values? In what frame?"
That is not correct. Cicero in his Laws Book I emphatically states right and wrong as attributable what is proper and improper vis-a-vis Nature. That is to say, what is consistent or what is contradictory to natural action. This is in no way related to believing in a higher (and I suppose you mean) personal authority - and which he uses to demonstrate the wonderful idea of “Natural Law” as that which is supreme to any man.
That's just like, his opinion, man. :) The concept that what is natural is moral is just a higher authority in another guise. (Or a redefinition of morality away from what it means to me.) It's also inconsistent in many cases with what most humans would label as moral and immoral behavior.
I don't know what you're getting at in the first sentence. If you restate it in the active voice, it goes: "Biologically scientific ergo naturally scientific principles presuppose your speech." That sounds pretty incoherent to me, but maybe it means something to you. I don't see how these principles could presuppose my speech given that my speech came after.
I would argue that any system of morality that is divorced from what humans think is right is of at best questionable utility.
Is not your speech an extension of your biology? Thus it is ordered according to natural principles. This is the fundamental point Cicero makes. So while, yes, it is his "opinion", to deny a natural foundation to any morals is itself incoherent and not worthy of entertaining for dialogue, because dialogue itself presupposes the pursuit of the correct mode of living: wisdom.
And please make the distinction between "most humans" and exceptional humans. No doubt we all have a sense of right, but it is in its fulfillment - there's the rub!
I agree that morals arise from nature, in the same way that all things do, since there is nothing that does not arise from the physical. In that sense all things are natural.
I don't think that's what natural principles or natural law mean, and some brief wikipedia reading confirms my suspicion -- this is equivocation. For example, communism and authoritarianism also arise from speech and reason and ultimately human biology, so they are also natural in the sense you referenced. But Cicero would not have endorsed either of those forms of government and would not consider them part of his natural law.
Just because speech is biological that does not automatically cause it to be moral, only that it serves, as Plato describes, the "self-moving power" of Life. So then, communism and authoritarianism are contradictory to Nature, as has been visually demonstrated.
I highly suggest Reading Cicero's Laws, it's quite an original reflection and condenses Western classical thought brilliantly - it after all inspired the founders of the American Republic: http://www.nlnrac.org/classical/cicero/primary-source-docume...
P.S. If you believe "nothing [does not arise] from the physical" then how do you explain the ordering principles of logic? Are you to suggest that the mind does not exist independently of the physical brain? If so, where is your evidence?
Definitely not. Modern morality must not place individuals in debt simply because they exist. Becoming alive isn't a choice. Participation in society in any way is not an obligation.
No human being wants to die technically. You want release from a bad situation. People who commit suicide are trying to free themselves not from living, but from some kind of suffering. They imagine it will give them rest. It won't. This points to a fundamental principle, that we will the preservation of our own being. No one wants nonexistence. We are constitutionally unable to will that, to will nothing. In order to do what appears to be that, we must first confuse being with nonbeing and construe this nothingness as something. But here we must distinguish between permission and active willing. I do not will my death, but take a permissive stance toward it under such and such circumstances.
So, you have the obligation not to shorten your life per se or to harm yourself intentionally, but you can under certain circumstances licitly permit your death.
In this case, we must distinguish between ordinary care (supplying the needs of the body, etc, as much as possible) and extraordinary care (administering medical treatments) and the nature of the illness. Examples (simplified because I'm not writing a book here):
x. If your illness is treatable and curable, but refusing treatment will lead to death, then you are obligated to receive treatment to the degree that such treatment does not compete with equal or superior concerns. Can you afford treatment? Could it deprive you of the means to live anyhow? These considerations would make treatment an option, but not an obligation.
x. If your cancer is terminal (i.e., it is incurable), and you are able to absorb nutrients, you are obligated to take in nutrition, but not to receive treatment.
x. If you are unable to receive nutrition (or the offering of nutrition causes harm), then you are not obligated to receive nutrition.
x. If treatment causes disproportionate harm in relation to the disease, then treatment is not an obligation.
