Posted by alexandra_k on December 16, 2013, at 18:11:34
In reply to should we have the Right To Die?, posted by Phil on December 16, 2013, at 13:30:09
people do have this option in some cases. from within the law, i mean.
do not resuscitate orders are about letting a person die. refraining from intervening to keep someone alive.
providing increasing amounts of morphene for the purposes of pain relief with the knowledge that one is approaching and will eventually provide lethal dose.
i think these things do happen rather a lot. the public tends to hear about the odd problematic case where things go wrong... but there are lots of cases where things seem to run smoothly enough...
i used to know someone who was on an ethics board at the hospital. as an ethics professor. in that capacity. the board would be comprised of a bunch of different people... managers. nurses involved in the particular patients care. doctors involved in the particular patients case. social worker. etc. not quite a jury of your peers, but something approximating...
mental illness cases are thought to be harder. depression. etc. the thought is typically that you wouldn't want someone to kill themselves during an episode when they might go on to recover. when it might be the case that later in their life they would be grateful to be alive. most people seem to have this intuition. there are problems with it, though. future discounting. etc. problems of personal identity and what (if any) obligations we have to future selves / to ourself down the track...
then of course problems of chronicity. how long do you have to feel this way before it seems like you really aren't going to get better? how many years must one suffer for?
currently i'm thinking...
it might be a little like immunisation...
don't ask 'what can immunisation do for me' but ask 'what can my being immunised do for others?' people do think of it as weighing costs and benefits to themselves... but perhaps this is the wrong way to think on it. you have the power to make the world a better place... in some way. so maybe you have a duty...
(i expect more than half a room of philosophers would turn on me at this point)
heh.
i remember being in australia, actually... one of my friends was severely anorexic. eventually... a couple of my friends managed to bundle him up into their car and drive him up to hospital. when he was too weak to protest. they said... he actually seemed relieved. his demise was gradual... and there was some kind of group delusion where everyone seemed to think that he couldn't really be that bad or someone would have done something... and so this seemed to result in nobody doing anything. and then when people really started to step things up (us, going to uni counselling and to the managers of the hall etc) people attempting to actively prevent our intervening (because if we were right it was only going to make them look bad, one can suppose).
and then he fell into a coma from hypoglacemic shock from refeeding and they nearly lost him...
but they kept him alive. even though... what are the stats on recovery from such a thing?
i don't know what to say.
i wished i was dead for a great many years. actually, i would have preferred to not have existed in the first place. in some religious arguments people are like 'pain exists because you couldn't have pleasure without something to contrast that'. but of course that is b*llsh*t. think of the brief life of an infant born where there isn't enough food... whose total existence is pain. do they have pleasure to balance that in their lifetime? of course they don't. why think pleasure has to be different? (pleasure and pain are neurologically distinct at any rate).
anyway...
now... i'm glad i'm alive. i'm glad i'm still here. i feel so much gratitude over the last few weeks, actually... sometimes i feel this as a slight betrayal of my former self / selves... like i'm not appropriately honouring their pain... but i guess it is like recovering from grief more generally... to think that the best way to honour the pain is to make it such that it wasn't for nothing. to try and do something so there is less pain in the world. if my experience of pain can be utilised so that there is less pain in the world than there would have been without my expeirence of pain then...
i guess...
that makes the world a better place.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1056343
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20131211/msgs/1056366.html