[sdiacom]

The doctor should not react with horror in any case, because the doctor is a medical professional, not a paid actor in a pro-life advertisement, and I would certainly hope for him to behave as such.

I'm not sure what your fixation with how criminals die is about -- there is no "nice" way to die, just more painful and less painful ones, more prolonged and less prolonged ones. Euthanasia gives us a choice that, speaking purely of the physical experience, is on the often-preferred end of the spectrum.

The doctor should consider it to be an acceptable measure under a limited set of circumstances, and should consider it not to be acceptable in almost all other circumstances. In all cases, the decision is only to be taken by the person whose life is going to end. All the doctor can do is authorize or deny that decision, never to make it on their behalf.

Family should often be consulted by the doctor in order to make that decision in an informed manner, but family doesn't get a vote. Your family does not own you or your body.

I don't have any prior commitment to "ending the lives of others", and to say so is to willfully misinterpret what I have said to an absurd extreme. My only commitment is to others, and myself, being able to decide how to end our own lives, and no one else's lives but our own, in a dignified manner, when our very existence entails suffering.

It does not matter whether I "like the sound of it" or not. I am not currently seeking euthanasia, and I am not a doctor for someone who is, so rest assured that nobody is asking for my opinion. What matters is if the person whose life is going to end does, given that they are of sound mind to make such a judgement.

I'm glad you will still try. We should always try to make others' lives better, to provide better lives instead of easier deaths. But sometimes we won't be able to.

[1123581321]

You need to look at this from multiple aspects: the ability to make the "right" choice in an individual's case, factoring in all ethical, medical, social and financial forces and beneficiaries involved. The policy from an aggregate level, factoring in the same at an aggregate level. To make these decisions, you do need to periodically step outside the decision-making process and see it with fresh eyes, which is what I and the other user were attempting to prompt by inviting you to think about the similarity to state-administered violence in a legal system.

You are definitely entrenched within an intentionally limited set of inputs similar to what the MAID process has devolved to in some circumstances, sorry. In your current position, you would not be in a position to fully and most beneficially evaluate the decision to end life, whether as an individual, family member, physician or policymaker.

[sdiacom]

Again, you can rest assured that nobody's asking me my opinion on whether other people's lives should be ended, and I'm not looking to end mine, either.

And fortunately, given how these processes are set up, nobody will ask you, either. You win some, you lose some.

[barry-cotter]

> The doctor should not react with horror in any case, because the doctor is a medical professional, not a paid actor in a pro-life advertisement, and I would certainly hope for him to behave as such.

Indeed, and in 1910 progressives were saying similar things about sterilising the feeble minded. This is why the education system is so important. If you control the education system you get to decide what a professional should think. If there are professionals who disagree there’s always disbarment.

[sdiacom]

A key distinction, though, between euthanasia and forced sterilisation or eugenics, is consent. The latter are, almost always, decisions taken or considered based on the externalities -- they're not done for the benefit of the person that the procedure is applied to.

While a dystopian society could consider choosing to kill people based on their externalities (such as, for example, as we currently do by putting criminals in death row) advocates of assisted suicide put the wishes of the person undergoing the procedure first and foremost. Euthanasia should never be something that is done to you without your explicit, self-driven, sound-of-mind consent.

And indeed, morality judgements are always influenced by the context of their time. Eugenics was a somewhat popular idea around that time, but it's important to note that this does not mean that early 20th century people were less moral than we are.

Families required the labor of all of their members to survive, and an unproductive member of the family that required extensive care carried a very clear cost in opportunity and quality of life to the family, often one that permanently impacted the life of the mother. It was seen as a moral good to somehow use science to figure out a way to "spare" families, and especially women, from what was seen as an arbitrary misfortune, an "act of god".

One of the reasons why eugenics is not nearly as popular today is that society takes on a more collective approach to supporting and caring for disabled people. While there's still a long, long way to go, there are schools for children with special needs, there are disability payments, there are ways through which society organizes to help those who care for others, alternatives to what was often a very tough choice for mothers, between abandonment, murder or misery.

Eugenics didn't change. Morality didn't change. Society changed, and in doing so, it shifted the balance, and it is no longer seen as the moral choice to engineer humanity so that Jerry doesn't exist, because the alternative to that no longer is to make his mother's life untenable. By having better options, we are enabled to make better choices.