Discussion The right to die vs overpopulation/overconsumption (take 2)

[gospel4sale]

Hello everyone,

Previously I posted a TMBR post about the idea in the title [1]; I have since gone through CMV and have expanded the FAQ even longer. There are a few issues still (ethical issues like religion, idiocracy-esque scenarios, societal contradictions, laws, etc), but what I think I need to now expand upon is the "beginning stages" that could lead to the changes that I claim.

Currently, we as a society prefer to not discuss the suicidal, and instead hush up and provide cover stories, like Korea's fan death superstitions, or obituaries with vague causes listed. However, if people acknowledged when death was a suicide, it would more likely lead us:

• to acknowledge the person was in pain;
  
• to consider that the pain was so immense that death was preferable;
  
• to think about what they/society could have done to avoid this;
  
• to improve mental health services and emergency care for the suicidal;
  
• to make suicide a less taboo subject;
  
• to enable people to seek help without the risk of psych jail.

There are many people that commit suicide and trends don't seem to be abating. So what we need is not to hush it up but to bring it out into the open, where we can have a public dialogue, and once we have identified and agree on the causes, we can have a chance at reducing the suicide rate. This doesn't seem to be happening today despite statistics for some reason, so one way to bring it out into the open is to give the suicidal the right to die.

Many (ethical) questions arise, but I'll focus on "things will get worse" perspective [2]:

Have you considered the implications of suicide in a for-profit healthcare system like Americas?

If suicide is a legal option, why would my health insurance pay for a lifetime of therapy and mental health medication when they could just lead me to kill myself and save them money?

Even if you want to exclude health insurance or assume there will be some kind of legislation preventing this, depression often comes with the feeling of being an unworthy burden. By legitimizing suicide as an option, wouldn't it be more likely these depressed people kill themselves to save their caretaker from the cost and hassle of dealing with them? I feel like this is already a factor in some peoples decision to commit suicide, but at least now suicide is clearly shunned both legally and socially.

This is a fair criticism, where it seems things will get ugly forever, but over time, the postitive right to die could lead to a triggering event to reform X (where X = for-profit healthcare, among other things), because what I think it will do is test our "humanity for each other", for lack of a better phrase.

There is a common trope about doing anything to save our loved ones, fight for the family, etc; I've recently heard it said by Rose in one of the Star Wars movies, "We're going to win this war, not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love." Everyone has different things that they love, and if they love it, then they want to save it.

How it works is subtle and I've had a hell of a time trying to explain this in my previous /r/changemyview post [3]. Like the OP said, the right to die should be allowed, but not supported. Then there will be forces that are encouraging suicide, like the ones identified (but not limited to). People who "feel like an unworthy burden" will experience others try to save them on a case-by-case basis as they are currently. The difference (after the right to die) is that they must respect their right to die, so if people really want to save their loved ones, they have to look to the forces that are encouraging the suicide and "fix" those: in our case, going after for-profit healthcare and "feeling of being an unworthy burden". So then by "fixing" the encouraging forces, you won't just be saving this one individual but others as well.

The right to die addresses human biases like "if I don't see it in front of me it's not my problem". This is not encouraging death, because this doesn't need any further deaths: there are already lots of suicides in the past that we can reflect on, and the right to die will only serve to highlight them unlike we have before.

How this looks in linear form is:

If suicide is allowed, and must go through a psychologist..

• .. then there will be a lot of official, formal, recorded paperwork about how many people are dying by suicide,
  
• .. and this will make it very up-front, visible, and unavoidable. Society won't be able to ignore it.
  
• .. Showing all the combined suicides together, instead of each one happening alone in their own apartment
  
• .. and that might be enough to prompt society to take it seriously

The (positive) right to die will give an efficient/guaranteed/peaceful means of suicide, and should elevate the discussion above logistics (e.g. "well someone who really wanted to would make sure to get it right the first try") and onto other things. The positive right will have asserted records, which differs in quality from the current negative right and their records, and could lead to elevated principled discussion. Take Anthony Bordain's public suicide as an example: finally, people were beginning to ask the question, "if he had it all and still committed suicide, then why not me?" But soon after, discussion faded away, for many reasons, one of which is logistics. Posting suicide helplines across reddit whenever a suicide happens is a nice first step for the future potential victims, but I think the next step should be going after the forces that are encouraging suicide: currently with the negative right, these forces are difficult to identify.


The thing I'm having trouble putting across is that it's ethical and not encouraging death. The ethics of the trolley problem is often sidestepped by saying, "well they shouldn't be put in that situation in the first place". This is how I see as analogous with the right to die, that we will be thinking of how to not make them "pull the trigger", metaphorically speaking. As well, the right to die I liken to guns, an amoral but efficient mirror technology, and the technology is not at fault, because "guns don't kill people; people kill people."

So the right to die will erect something like a scale in balance, and we can identify the forces that are encouraging suicide by the forces that are tipping the scale - something we can't do very well today.

[1] https://sanctioned-suicide.net/thre...ulation-overconsumption-tmbr.1273/#post-16755

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyvi...hink_suicide_should_be_a_human_right/e6cbw28/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyvi...the_right_to_die_is_the_best_shot_we_have_at/

 

[gospel4sale]

Now, most people want to draw a line, and at least it's better than no positive right to die. But suppose there wasn't a line drawn? I think it has the potential to solve a lot of problems, including wicked ones like overpopulation and overconsumption. I reproduce my original argument here:

---

With the recent reports in the rise of suicides [1] [2] [3], if some agent is to do something drastic about it, that agent would be the government because they have the most power.

The government doing nothing is unlikely to lower the rate of suicides. If the government won't treat mental health on the same level as the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism (where there is a will, there is a way), then they should give everyone the right to die. Paradoxically, granting this right also has a possibility of simultaneously lowering our ecological footprint/resource depletion rate.

People commit suicide all the time, so it's more humane to give them the most peaceful way out that we know. This doesn't involve any top-down government-sponsored eugenics program to eliminate "undesirables"/"outliers" either. If the right to die is granted to everyone, how I think the scenario will play out is:

• The old and the sick will be "encouraged" by market forces to "voluntarily" self-euthanize
• The "degenerates" of society won't need any (further) encouragement
• Future parents will be faced with the question, "what kind of world will I be selling to my children?"

If a critical-enough mass of suicides happen, this might trigger society as a whole to look in a mirror and self-reflect on itself, hopefully leading to the realization that it can't live beyond its means and finally curb its global consumption average. And recently, there is new research [4] that suggests 25% as the critical mass.

But I have used a lot of weasel words, so there is always the nagging question: what if the right to die is not enough? Nevertheless, it has not yet been tried en masse and might get us pretty far.

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Current full FAQ here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TimeToGo/comments/97wrjq/cmv_the_right_to_die_is_the_best_shot_we_have_at/