The future of the assisted suicide debate may depend, in part, on whether Tippetts’s case for the worth of what can seem like pointless suffering can be made either without her theological perspective, or by a liberalism more open to metaphysical arguments than the left is today.Tippetts is Kara Tippetts, a dying woman who wrote an open letter to Brittany Maynard about the value of the part of life that is dying. Brittany Maynard is a dying woman who has announced that she will commit suicide on November 1st.
Douthat's subtitle implies that America is on a road, with a destination, and being poky. But there is no such road, nor an entity called America that walks (or runs) on roads.
As for the bulky sentence. I don't think it would be pointless suffering to endeavor to diagram it, but it's hard to do that in typed script, so I'll just say: 1. The last comma is technically wrong and confusing, and 2. I think Douthat is trying to say that Tippett's argument is religious and conservative, so it would be helpful to hear more argument that is either not religious or not conservative.
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Douthat writes consistently confusingly.
I spent some time yesterday reading the Time's Room for Debate on assisted suicide, and I was shocked at the one-sidedness of the comments. In short: "Any time an individual feels their life is not worth living because they're suffering too greatly, they should have the right to be able to access poison that will enable them to quickly and painlessly end their life. To object to this is an evil imposition of your irrational religious beliefs on me."
And I thought about some numbers I had added up the other day in the context of "breast cancer awareness month": the number of men under 75 who die from suicide is greater than the number of under-75 women who die of breast cancer.
("http://janetheactuary.blogspot.com/2014/10/some-data-on-causes-of-death.html)
And I thought -- if the emerging attitude on assisted suicide is "only the person suffering can make the judgement about how unbearable their suffering is" -- how do we actually engage in suicide prevention? Or does it evolve into "your suffering is objectively bad enough, yours isn't" or even "your life is worth living, yours isn't"?
Anyway, mostly I was really surprised by those statistics.
To get to your grammar point, I find that I sometimes add commas in that technically don't have a reason for their placement, once I've fit so many words into a phrase that I think a comma will help clear up the meaning.
And I think that the second part of his sentence is saying, "the Left objects to arguments with a theological or even vaguely metaphysical perspective, so either the anti-suicide case needs to be made without any reference to theology, however generic, or else the Left has to become more open to a metaphysical argument for the value of life than it is presently."
But I now confess that I didn't actually follow the link because I started typing too soon and didn't want to lose the comment.
I recall an old Peanuts Sunday strip where the whole gang is talking around the Pitcher's Mound about Suffering. Someone -- Lucy? -- says "Who wants to Suffer, don't be ridiculous" after someone else -- I'll guess Linus -- says "But Suffering is a part of life".
There is value in suffering, but one has to be open to seeing it. Are people open to that these days? I'm not sure.
(Goes off to search on google: Aah. Found it. So it was 5 who said Pain is a part of life.)
It's a medically induced comma.
What's the distance between assisted and forced?
Douthat's subtitle implies that America is on a road, with a destination, and being poky. But there is no such road, nor an entity called America that walks (or runs) on roads.
Consider instead America being reluctantly marched, Bataan-like, into national suicide.
Douthat has only one topic, advancing the interests of the Catholic church. He is not a conservative but a CATHOLIC conservative. As such, he shares the church's obsession with the mortification of the flesh. Needless physical suffering before death is an value added component in this world view.
Sad story about this poor newlywed. I would not lower myself to find fault with her hard choice.
Pundits like Douhat think themselves big thinkers when they try to interject this girl into a small movement. He is not a big thinker he is just a doubag.
The GenderDead Person: choose your sexuality, choose your time of death.
PS, to echo AJ Lynch, do not read my comment as a criticism of this young woman's path -- that it is not the path I would choose should not be read as a criticism of her.
My opinion is that the entire life is a journey to experience. Some of the journey is easy, some is not, and to shield yourself from the harder parts is to steal something from your own life.
What's the distance between assisted and forced?
Let us ask Zeke.
They are going to have to find a better phrase than 'Assisted Suicide': 'Pro-Choice', maybe.
"...a road, with a destination, and being poky. But there is no such road, nor an entity called America that walks (or runs) on roads."
Hmmm, what other issue(s) of the day could this "road - destination" metaphor be (mis)applied to...
Edward G. Robinson in "Soylent Green" comes to mind.
I don't want politicians to have the power to literally decided who lives and who dies. Combine legal, government supported euthanasia with Obamacare......what could possibly go wrong?
From the online Encyclopedia Britannic, we used to consider this to be evil:
"T4 Program, also called T4 Euthanasia Program, Nazi German effort—framed as a euthanasia program—to kill incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people. Adolf Hitler initiated this program in 1939 ".......
"the day World War II began, to give it the appearance of a wartime measure. In this directive, Dr. Karl Brandt and Chancellery chief Philipp Bouhler were “charged with responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians…so that patients considered incurable, according to the best available human judgement of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing.”
"Within a few months, the T4 Program—named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4—involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill anyone deemed to have a “life unworthy of living.”"
Look at the bright side: once Assisted Suicide becomes the norm we will have a huge selection of studies and papers concerning how assisted suicide disproportionately affects one sex, race, economic status, etc. more than the others: the coming Inequality of Assisted Suicide.
Within a few months, the T4 Program—named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4—involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill anyone deemed to have a “life unworthy of living.”
Oh Diogenes, we'd never do something like that. We're good people, you know.
"Why I Hope to Die at 75"
"An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly." By Ezekiel J. Emanuel one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, obamacare.
Death panels, but you call them anything you like.
Could have an adverse impact on 'Depends' sales. 'Depends' might need to branch out into the 'Assisted Suicide Last-Go' market. No last-minute chafing.
The sentence is a mess. The future depends on nothing. The debate may conclude in some legislative action permitting or forbidding assisted suicide. Douthat seems to say that Tippet's apparent religiosity hurts her argument. How is not clear. But the left, who presumably favor legalizing assisted suicide, must consider "metaphysics." By that, I think he means some secular notion of God. In short, the fundie Christians need to tone down the God stuff, but the lefty atheists need to pretend to respect the metaphysical if we want to pass a law that will let doctors help us kill ourselves. Or something.
I remember as a teenager people telling me life has value and it came from a secular suicide prevention angle....
Now this?
Whatever I say will fall on deaf ears, because I'm Catholic.
It isnt that people are in favor of suicide, I'm getting the feeling that people think life is pointless to begin will.
I mean really, what is the point of existing?
I know the answer, but again it isn't secular.
The problem with assisted suicide is the Liverpool Pathway . It is too easy to get government doing a cost-benefit analysis.
Families are even tricky. I was once fired by a family because I did an emergency tracheostomy on a patient without calling them. They wanted "no special measures" even though the guy was in his 60s and had benign disease (gallbladder). I told the son he would have to get another doctor to assume care. I kept treating the patient intensively and, even though they took him off the respirator a day later, he survived. A week later they asked me to come back and take over again. He went home in another week.
The trach was an emergency because the balloon on his endotrachial tube had ruptured. No time.
The Nazis never went far away after the 1930s. They are back again with a scientific claim that the State must become stronger by culling the useless and stealing their stuff.
Every one of them should be shot on sight.
" OK, let’s take the 5-billion-year view. Let’s fast-forward to when the sun is a red giant that’s either swallowed up planet earth or burnt it to a crisp. Then does it matter if I spent my weekend feeding the homeless or stealing stuff? Does anything I ever did matter?
For me, this is what it boiled down to: when the last life form is gone from the earth, did anything that ever happened here matter? My answer was: obviously not. To my way of thinking, “meaning” was confined to the human brain. It was something we people came up with. So when people were gone, so was any kind of significance to anything that ever happened or would happen. "
Life and Meaning
Diogenes of Sinope is right about this and T4. The other thing the Germans did was publicize families that willingly euthanized their less than perfect children. Made it seem all goodness and light when it was anything but. This is what I find disturbing about the young woman who is planning to kill herself on November 1st. The suicide movement has found in her a beautiful, young face to promote their agenda. There is just something in us that finds it so hard to break away from the Beauty=Truth fallacy.
That blog post was from. Jennifer Fulwiler who is now a Catholic.
My response several years ago "Life & Meaning"
"To think individuals get upset when a TV series concludes with no ending, but not to care at the end of our own life on Earth, that human life is like a show with such low ratings we will just get cancelled?"
The precedent is Roe v. Wade, which established that the state does not have a compelling interest to protect vulnerable human life from premature death. The normalization of euthanasia will be similarly legalized as a faith-based right under the First Amendment carried out in the privacy of a euthanasia clinic -- Planned Retirement.
Your embryonic and fetal stem cells will be harvested. You will be euthanized. Obamacare will subsidize and exploit both the legalization of abortion and euthanasia. The message to moral people: It's over.
In the society of The Vagina as Fascist State the devaluation of Life in the womb inevitably leads to the devaluation of the Life lived. Feminists cannot square the circle of abortion and life, and the men who have succumbed to The Vagina as Fascist State are enablers in this uncoupling of Life from Purpose.
Having the ability to kill an unborn child, while dissatisfied with the World itself, leaves an emptiness that the women of the The Vagina as Fascist State take as a trinket of Intellectual Honesty, while lying to themselves about the source of their despair: the way out, for them, is the Hope of the Shameless Suicide.
This despair must be forced to permeate all aspects of Society, otherwise it would inevitably point back to the Woman's role in the degradation of Life and Purpose, the atheist Eve eating the meaningless apple.
As such, it comes to reason that the society that celebrates women's choice to kill males' offspring delights in rough anal sex against grimy brick walls in dank alleys, procreation denied and semen dripping uselessly down the woman's thighs: the Vagina as Fascist State provides all of this and more.
Renee:
Thanks for the link.
@betamax3000,
Watch yourself, young man! If you keep on writing stuff like your 11:21 post, I swear to God, you're going to end up in an endowed chair at a major university!
As a libertarian, I have no problem with someone who wants to take their own life. As a conservative, I have a huge problem with conscripting or enlisting physicians with this responsibility. We should get our sonderkommando to moonlight, when they aren't aspirating fetuses.
"I mean really, what is the point of existing?"
We are generally told, by the religious, that only religion can answer that question. But I don't quite see, how the existence of one or more gods, provides me with a purpose.
I put commas where I would put pauses, if I were speaking.
To be, or not to be. That is the question.
And the Left, as always, has the answer.
@Renee,
Yes, thanks for the link.
I mean really, what is the point of existing?
The "neo"-atheists tippy-toe around questions like this, as they are basically unanswerable within a positivist framework. An earlier generation of positivists were more honest about such matters.
Nietzsche's bracing yet truly discomforting honesty in these matters make him my favorite atheist. Nietzsche, however, is no friend of positivism, and has as little use for the pretenses of science to be "knowledge of what is" as he does for the preening moralism of believers.
" . . . assisted suicide, whatever its liberty claim, profoundly violates the superseding liberal principle that all lives are to be equally protected"
Or Equally unprotected.
Or the the life of the murderer and his victim are equally protected.
There is no twaddle like liberal twaddle. Always illogical, always self-serving.
"I think Douthat is trying to say is that Tippett's argument is religious and conservative, so it would be helpful to hear more argument that is either not religious or not conservative."
If that's what he's trying to say, and he's supporting assisted suicide, he's clearly wrong.
Most of the opposition to assisted suicide comes from those who are religious or conservative. If you want to shift opinion, those are precisely the people you should be arguing to.
Arguments that proceed from libertarian or progressive premises are just preaching to the choir -- it's a lot more fun as an opinion writer, but it's not particularly productive.
One sign of decadence: An obsession with morbidity and pathology, one of the results of which is no doubt the institutionalized encouragement of suicide. The cliché, "slippery slope," could have been invented for the idea of institutionalized assisted suicide.
I don't much mind if someone and an ordinary citizen accomplice, friend, relative, etc., decide to mutually participate in what amounts to death-porn, but inevitably the doctors will be involved, for humane reasons, of course. After the medical profession has been tainted by this added grisly duty, I wonder what kind of subconscious decisions will influence the care and treatment of patients.
Kill yourself if you want to inflict that act on your circle of loved ones and friends, but do not, please, pull the rest of society down that vortex by insisting on institutionalizing self-murder.
"What's the distance between assisted and forced?"
It is not a difference of degree, but of kind.
Everyone should read Kara Tippetts's letter.
The foreword to her book is by Joni Eareckson Tada, someone who knows suffering and might have been a candidate for death panel judgment in 1967.
It is a religious argument no matter how you look at it if you can muck your way through the medical and ethical issues, and punctuation.
"To be, or not to be. That is the question.
And each person, as always, gets to answer for themselves."
Fixed it for you, Jupiter. You might not like that argument either, but at least you'll be engaging the actual argument.
Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people. (Proverbs 14:34)
As our nation abandons the righteousness of the Holy Scripture, it descends further and further into the amorality of secularism with its meaningless and chaos. Why not death? Life has no meaning anyway.
I'm an old man. I've had several friends and relatives go through the final spin. It's harrowing to watch, especially when it involves cancer......The Romans knew about torture. Crucifixion was the preferred method of execution. The condemned's will to live kept him pushing against the nails in order to take another breath. The victim tortured himself to death. That's the kind of thought that occurs to you when visiting a friend in the hospice.......I don't deny there's a slippery slope, but a mountain has many slopes.
What percentage of people who desire "assisted suicide" genuinely need assistance - i.e., are physically incapable of procuring the means and carrying it out? It certainly seems that many of the cases I've read about involved people who were still perfectly able-bodied. People kill themselves all the time. Why can't they?
I'm not being either callous or flippant here, nor am I unaware that some people would need "assistance". But one thing that has always struck me about this debate (aside from the obvious concerns about "the distance between assisted and forced", as Gusty Winds notes above) is a certain passivity and deference to authority that often seems to underlie these demands.
The claims to a "right to suicide" are of course couched in terms of individual choice and individual autonomy - "how dare you presume to make these decisions for me, a free individual", "how dare you interfere with my free choice". Yet they in the same breath insist on involving, or rather, implicating, others in an act fraught with moral complications. Why? I don't believe this is merely a matter of wanting access to quality drugs and expertise in their administration. I suspect it's often a matter of wanting it legal for unexamined moral and emotional reasons - they want the group to say it's all right, they want to transfer the moral ambiguities onto some authority (in this case, medical professionals). "I am a free man, a totally sovereign individual, so STFU you religious freaks and...help me out here?"
I also do not doubt that some others, suffering from "liveable" or treatable conditions, are really desperately hoping that somebody will say, "No! You have value! Don't leave us!" Instead they get ghastly "affirmations": "whatever you think is best, honey, we'll support your choice. (One definitely gets that impression reading the stories of Kevorkian's "clients".)
In the society of The Vagina as Fascist State the devaluation of Life...
The Declaration of Pro-Choice.
Death Panels will assist.
Anglelyne said...
What percentage of people who desire "assisted suicide" genuinely need assistance - i.e., are physically incapable of procuring the means and carrying it out? It certainly seems that many of the cases I've read about involved people who were still perfectly able-bodied. People kill themselves all the time. Why can't they?
It's rather surprisingly hard to die, even on purpose (without excessive pain, etc.)
Although the numbers are complicated by "help me" fake suicides, here are some:
"Some suicide methods have higher rates of lethality than others. The use of firearms results in death 90% of the time. Wrist-slashing has a much lower lethality rate, comparatively. 75% of all suicide attempts are by self-poisoning, a method that is often thwarted because the drug is nonlethal or is used at a nonlethal dosage. These people survive 97% of the time."
So 10% of people who shoot themselves survive: I saw a gross picture of someone who had shot their own face off, but ended up in the hospital rather than the morgue. As for "self-poisoning", above they omitted the fact that a lot of drugs to overdose on, like barbiturates, will make you vomit; if that happens soon enough, you don't die. People jump from the 10th floor and live.
Yet they in the same breath insist on involving, or rather, implicating, others in an act fraught with moral complications. Why?
Probably largely the same reasons as for wanting state approval of homosexual marriage, whatever they may be, beyond the obvious potential financial perks.
(I'm not interested in state approval of much of anything and don't think the gov't should be involved in marriages. Or suicides. Who cares what a buncha politicians and bureaucrats claim to think?)
I don't believe this is merely a matter of wanting access to quality drugs and expertise in their administration.
Probably not, but as you said "People kill themselves all the time", and they're not waiting for the state's approval. So, do you know where and how to get some heroin and a needle?
I do. But the needle won't be clean.
I don't think Douthat favors physician-assisted suicide.
anglelyne drills down to the substance.
Roe V Wade taught us nothing, mostly because to define the true issue settles the debate.
Human life.
It is not withing the govts constitutional authority to approve or disapprove the value of life. Only the people can do that.
The only roll that govt can take is to provide a neutral judiciary, to rule on individual cases.
If I and my spouse decide to aid one of us, end the suffering of the other, we should not need the blessing of some govt bureaucracy. And, if some person thinks a murder took place, file the charges and let a jury determine.
This is exactly what happened before state legislatures, first immunized mothers from prosecution, for finding a Dr. to end her motherhood. Then other states enacted laws preventing The same Dr from doing the same job on the other side of an imaginary line, state line. Neither state was right. If the taking of the life is wrong, a jury of your peers will pass judgement. Today, prosecutors have short circuited the value of juries for expediency.
For my money I would welcome an opportunity to defend myself to my neighbors in a jury box. I would demand a jury trial within 7 days of being charged and welcome the local prosecutor to try to convict me of 1st degree murder.
This has no place on a legislative docket
So the only thing that Althouse takes from the starkly different beliefs of Mrs. Tippetts and Mrs. Maynard is that Ross Douthat wrote a bulky sentence.
"So the only thing that Althouse takes from the starkly different beliefs of Mrs. Tippetts and Mrs. Maynard is that Ross Douthat wrote a bulky sentence."
As I recall, Althouse believes that it is wrong to kill oneself. Largely because of the effect on others, but I may have that wrong. And I think she may even regard it as worse than bad writing.
If I am on a long flight, do I have a right to sleep through a bad movie? Or must I suffer through every grueling moment of it?
1. The last comma is technically wrong and confusing
No, it isn't.
2. I think Douthat is trying to say is that...
But that is.
Jupiter:
Althouse is pro-choice. However, she recognizes that abortion is premeditated murder, and that suicide is self-murder.
I have not been able to reconcile these characterizations with common legal and moral standards. Obviously, others have succeeded where I failed.
Of course, each individual has their own faith, as well as religion (i.e. moral philosophy), and consequently set their own threshold for normalization, tolerance, and rejection of behaviors. The unwanted and dejected fall through the cracks.
When I was a freshman in college, my roommate argued for "ethical suicide" (I may have the terminology wrong -- it was a long time ago). The idea was that when you reached your highest level of happiness, then it was all downhill from there, so you should kill yourself right then, to maximize your happiness.
Flipping to the other side of the coin, if you've reached the point where life is unbearable to you, does it make sense to kill yourself? One argument against that is that there may be some pleasures ahead that you would miss, if you off yourself.
But if you have NOTHING to look forward to except suffering, and if your suffering doesn't save those you love from suffering, then ONLY a faith in an after life could justify your continuing to suffer.
What's the distance between assisted and forced?
One democrat vote.
"But that is."
Yes, I left a stray word in the process of editing a sentence down to its clear meaning. With your help, I have corrected it.
Douthat had editors helping him before publication, and he deliberately wrote and kept a sentence that repels the reader with unnecessary complexity and that lacks even the basic niceties of parallelism and rational punctuation.
"They are going to have to find a better phrase than 'Assisted Suicide': 'Pro-Choice', maybe."
coffee spew, wet keyboard, CPU suffering (laptop)
"Renee said...I do {i.e. - not a Prof, is this a place to use sic? - can find heroin and a needle}. But the needle won't be clean."
Maybe this was your point (somewhat ambiguous to me) but if it's a successful suicide, who cares if the needle was clean or dirty? Reminds me of the pointless conversations I have with my wife, "Do you want me to bury you with your wedding ring?" "Do you want me to find another when you're gone?" -- for some reason "I won't be here to care anymore" doesn't satisfy her. Projection?
Maybe one indicator of whether the demand for suicide is valid should be whether or not you'd use a dirty needle; if not, you aren't ready to give up on living yet.
"The future of the assisted suicide debate may depend, in part, on whether Tippetts’s case for the worth of what can seem like pointless suffering can be made either without her theological perspective, or by a liberalism more open to metaphysical arguments than the left is today."
Well no, it's not. Any such debate will (or should) include the likely consequences of legalizing assisted suicide.
These consequences will surely include considerable pressure on at least some of the terminally or chronically ill to "get it over with already," so as to spare the rest of us from having to witness their suffering and to reduce the cost their treatment. And it likely will advance proposals to limit treatment for the elderly and some chronically ill to palliative treatment (perhaps while requiring physicians or others to remind these patients of that always-available Final Exit door).
It has a great deal to do with normative values and as always, hard cases make bad law.
Why America is moving slowly.....
Obviously, we are waiting for the White House to take the lead.
Why America is moving slowly.....
Obviously, we are waiting for the White House to take the lead.
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