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And I'm supposed to favour the alleged interests* of a infintesimal percentage of unproductive disordered strangers to have their decisions overriden over my own interest, and that of everyone I know and love to not end our lives in agony because???
How well do you think opiates control the pain of having fluid building up in your lungs so that you can't breath? What exactly do you think a "natural" death looks like?
Oh, he died in his sleep, you might say. But did he? Did the pain ripping through his chest shake him out of his final dream while he stared into the dark or did his brain merely confabulate a drowning, or burning within it?
Of course I don't expect these issues to matter much to you, just like a woke person's fetish for sacred diversity is entirely unaltered by the mass rape of girls in Rotterham. Both easily disgust the average person, and yet it seems we've been condemned to be ruled by zealots whose vision of morality is entirely unconnected to the reality of the human experience. In either case the Publics preferences are destined to loose most of the time.
I'll add Scott Alexander's poem, inspired by his own experience working in hospitals below:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the gurney that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sack of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene with cancer, bitter with the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues
My friend, you would not so pontificate
To reasoners beset by moral strife
The old lie: we must try to cultivate
A culture of life.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
Before I nitpick, I just want to state that I mostly agree with you, and certainly have little interest in Amy's moralizing claims on any given day.
That being said:
https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/50/5/1701153
Opioids, other than themselves causing respiratory depression, are also effective in reducing the unpleasantness of breathlessness. It's commonly used for that purpose in palliative/EOL care.
I've seen enough people die ignominiously in ICUs to share your views of euthanasia, but just wanted to correct an error!
Thanks for the data, nitpicks are always appreciated!
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If I and mine are to shoulder blame for "death by suffocating slowly on the fluid in your lungs instead of a tidy medical overdose of morphine", then you and yours will have to shoulder blame for "no, we can't get you a stair lift, but how about we arrange to kill you?"
It starts with "mercy". It ends with "lives unworthy of life".
Well not exactly, one is the immediate result of nature and the exact realization of your political values. The other is the (highly plausible) result of my not having full control over other players, most of them my sworn enemies, in a likely slippery slope scenario (*).
Nonetheless, I will bite the bullet and say that yes, I'd prefer a world where the horror stories you mention are normal than one where the current state remains. One involves 1) a willing victim I probably won't ever meet, the other an 2) unwilling one that I'm likely if not guaranteed to know and love. I see choosing 2 over 1 is basically the definition of completely inverted moral instincts.
As for your "lives unworthy of life" comment, I love it how ostensible righties just can't help accusing lefties of being nazis, when leftism in it's current stage is most accurately described as the worship of the weak, the ugly and the stupid.
Of course I suspect our gap is even greater because opposition to euthanasia tends to be a terminal value in and of itself for fundamentalist types; with the horror stories being merely how you lobby people who do not share these. This is of course entirely fair, I just feel it should be mentioned.
(*) I use this phrasing ("slippery slope") reluctantly because I know well that there are agents actively working for the worst case version of euthanasia. A decent person must be willing to face the likely consequences of their actions, and not hide behind platitudes.
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