Anti-Euthanasia Apologetics

Opening questions (goal: set up tension between suicide prevention/assistance):

• What do you think of assisted suicide?
  • What do you think about suicide?
  • Are there any situations where you think we should offer people suicide prevention rather than suicide assistance?
    • Trot out the Teenager: If someone supports assisted suicide as a matter of freedom/choice/autonomy, ask whether or not a suicidal 19-year-old¹⁾ should have access to assisted suicide

There are three possible positions to take in response to the suicidal:

1. 100% Assistance: Everyone deserves assistance
2. Assistance/Prevention: Some people deserve assistance, others prevention (most popular)
3. 100% Prevention: Everyone deserves prevention (the pro-life position)

The goal of this apologetic is:

• to move people from Position 1 to Position 2 by reaching for intuitions that there are at least some situations where suicide should be prevented
• to move people from Position 2 to Position 3 by showing that Position 2 is untenable/ablist/discriminatory

Key question: Who gets suicide prevention and who gets assistance?

If it's really about autonomy/freedom/choice/control, why should we ever prevent someone from committing suicide?

• Is it really about autonomy? Or do we only say that when we agree with someone's suicidal thoughts, when we agree with them that they might actually be better off dead?
• Doesn't offering prevention to some and assistance to others reveal a judgment that some lives are worth living but other lives are not worth living?
  • It's not really about autonomy them, or else we'd never intervene to prevent suicide. Isn't it about a judgment call that some people are better off dead?

transient will to live

Oregon data and disability issues

These are fundamentally disability issues.

• Quality of Life
• Unbearable Suffering
• Incurable
• Terminal (?)

Dialogue techniques:

• Wheever someone brings up terminal illness, ask them about a non-fatal disability
  • ASA: “Well, if someone is terminally ill, I think they should have access to assisting suicide because of unbearable suffering”
  • PL: “What about if someone is suffering from a disability that's not terminal, should they have access too?”
    • People might agree as a first instinct, but as you tease out the ablism, this is actually quite powerful for people when they realize their initial instinct was so ablist
• When ever someone draws up a specific case, ask about the exact same case without the disablity:
  • e.g.
    • ASA: “Well, what if someone was a quadriplegic with early onset Alzheimer's?”
    • PL: “What if someone had early onset Alzheimer's but wasn't quadriplegic?”
  • e.g.
    • PL: What if someone was wheelchair-bound, and wanted assisted suicide because they found life unbearably isolated and difficult?
    • ASA: Well, maybe they should have access too, they shouldn't be denied
    • PL: What if someone wasn't wheelchair-bound, but wanted assisted suicide because they found life unbearably isolated and difficult?
    • ASA: I mean, you have to ask why they're feeling that way, try to get to the root of the problem
    • PL: Why would you treat someone differently in the same situation just because they're in a wheelchair?

Any attempt to offer suicide assistance to some and suicide prevention to others is fundamentally ablist, it's discrimination against a class of people. If you're able-bodied and suicidal, we'll step in to prevent you from harming yourself. If you're facing disablity issues and suicidal, we'll help you kill yourself.

The overall point is that everyone has an equal right to suicide prevention. Everyone deserves to be prevented from harming themselves. Suicide is the ultimate self-harm. And we can see that suicide is always a symptom of some unmet need, even for the terminally ill. Our duty to other people is to meet this need, to support people in finding meaning in their lives amidst suffering rather than validating their despair and aiding their self-harm.

Key question: Is there ever a case where we should prevent suicide? (If yes, back to Position 2)

• Is suicide ever a tragedy?
• D = S - M
• Up until now, suicidal ideation has been a diagnostic criteria for depression. How are we supposed to distinguish between being rationally suicidal and being suicidal as a symptom of depression?
• How can suicide be rational?
  1. “sound mind” (subjetive)
  2. good reasons (objective)
  • How do you determine whether or not someone has a sound mind or good reasons? The only way you could see them as being rational is if you're already made a judgment about whether or not they're actually better off dead (back to Position 2)
• What is your responsibility to your fellow human beings?
  • Do we have a responsibility to decrease the will to die?
  • Is mercy killing about releasing the person who is suffering from suffering, or releasing the people around them from responsibility?
  • Peter Singer: love > his philosophy