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Deliberatly Ending a Human life- How can we justify it ?
Angus
Vietnam Explorer
What do people thing about the normalization of euthanasia? I ask because a good friend of mine in his 70s recently told me he has a plan, already paid up and prepared for when hes going a bit senile he will just get himself "put down"-a bit like what people do with their dogs when they get too old. It seems to me its directly against the 1st precept, although of course people in the west will come up with their own interpretations to justify anything so they can feel ok about it. Apparently my last post on the subject was deleted because it caused offence- maybe because it mentioned abortion.
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Euthanasia is legal in Switzerland. Someone we knew from there, who was in constant nerve pain, decided after visiting us to end her constant pain. She had aready decided we wer not causal ... You think she should just suffer incurable pain?
We looked after my mother at home with Alzhiemers/Dementia until a week before her death in hospital. She could not drink and was barely responsive. Two doctors recommended taking her off drips and support. Me and my siblings agreed to this. We did not have to BUT she would never have wanted to be a burden. She was very well looked after by the NHS.
So to answer your question. Suffering is optional. Not for you? OK, don't!
Job done.
You are not offensive. Did you want everyone to suffer for your preferences? Just askin'.
I think most human lives are ended like that these days, @lobster … my stepfather had a bowel obstruction which wasn’t responding to treatment, and he wouldn’t have survived the required surgery. He would have died from this in 2-3 very painful weeks. Instead we decided to give him morphine and he slept for a week and then died in his sleep. A shorter life, but much less painful.
I worked in healthcare for years. My wife worked in healthcare her entire career until retiring a few weeks ago. In the critical care fields, ICU, CCU, Neurotrauma, etc it is an overwhelmingly widely held perspective among the caregivers that euthanasia should be much, much more widely available. These are people who see the prolonged suffering firsthand, and care for the patients and their families.
Every human life will end. Every single one. Euthanasia has no impact on that inevitable outcome; instead it compassionately establishes the how and when.
Cruelly and deliberately prolonging agony, pain, and suffering — How can we justify it?
The more traditional Buddhist teachings I've heard around pain at the end of life is that it offers an opportunity to purify much negative karma before moving on to the next life. If those are your beliefs it makes more sense to allow the end of life to occur naturally. Having those ideas will help relieve much of the mental anguish that also occurs from feeling like you're suffering needlessly. I wonder how you feel about removing someone from artificial life sustaining machines or stopping feeding someone who can't feed themselves?
Most people, don't have those beliefs though and unless you can conclusively demonstrate their reality to others on what grounds do you suggest to coerce them?
Its also a little like lying to protect someone from harm. Lying is negative karma, but in some cases it seems justified to prevent a greater harm.
So strictly speaking euthanasia does violate the first precept, but perhaps letting a terminally ill person die peacefully rather than in pain is more compassionate?
On the other hand, removing or diluting the sanctity of life may, down the road, lead to people being okay with something like someone killing themselves when they're going through a hard time.
What do people think about the normalization of euthanasia?
Life necessitates the consumption of other life to exist.
For this Buddhist, the 1st precept is not an ideal that offers an escape from that truth.
It is a teaching that asks a practitioner to minimize the suffering caused by that necessity whenever possible. Otherwise, I'd be a Jain.
A practice that is having to address the question of euthanasia need only ask whether an individual considering euthanasia for themselves will result in more or less suffering for all concerned.
The answer is probably different for each case. Trying to reduce it to a black-and-white pronouncement of righteousness for everyone seems the more obvious breakage of the 1st precept that you expressed so much concern about.
It is not just the people of the "West" who seek to justify whatever they want.
@Angus I'm under the impression that when a being is 'ready' to enter this world or leave it, it all depends on Karma...Some spend a short time (succumbing to illness, disease, intentional or accidental taking of life) some a long time (eventually succumbing to old age, illness, disease, intentional or accidental taking of life) and some in between...it all depends on what accumulated Karma has in store...It can be full of surprises....
One is just a vibrating bundle of energy flux held together by Karmic glue.
Arriving and departing this Samsaric world, when our Karma package is through.
Not so long ago in the Dutch parliament there was a request that was debated about a new right which some of the political parties were sponsoring to be put into the constitution. This was a right to die at a completed life, so basically euthanasia for people who felt their life was ‘complete’ and what remained would only detract from it.
A lot of the people sponsoring it were elderly, and were thinking about a possible dementia or Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Some were mental health patients. Some were sufferers from other illnesses. There were quite a few groups whose needs would have been addressed by this.
But in the end the debate in parliament failed to gain the needed majority.
I think when it gets to medically assisting someone's death due to factors of mental illness it gets pretty controversial and sketchy. I also worry if that becomes socially acceptable will there be a next boundary that gets pushed.
Yes, I can see that worry. But on the other hand, old people often don’t want to become a burden. In a way this is the result of better medical care and prolonged life, previous generations didn’t live so long and didn’t have these issues. Perhaps it’s time to modernise our morality.
We have 8 billion people on the planet, population growth is slowing and so people are having fewer children. The demographics tell us there will be a wave of greying populations sweeping the globe. That’s a lot of end-of-life suffering and strain on healthcare if we have to let them all die naturally.
Policymakers will have to face this question.
This gave me something to think on. The burden population decline puts on the younger generations is an issue that will need to be addressed as this century continues. My thought on this has been that it will act as an impetus for the development of robotics (not that it really needed more). But the idea that maybe the elderly could voluntarily end their lives to ease that burden isn't an awful idea.
A couple concerns that occurred to me thought were the value the experience of someone who's lived a full life can offer to the younger generations shouldn't be lost on us. I've heard suggestions for mandatory civil service post high school where kids interact with the elderly as being good for both generations.
Two, if the idea of old people taking their lives to relieve the burden on society becomes normalized would there be the danger of some sort of social pressure for old people to do it? Like, rather than an option that some might take, there becomes a social stigma on the olds that opt to keep living?
Some of these questions can’t be answered before it is enacted. It might depend on the culture, I imagine in some countries there will be more resentment than in others, in the Netherlands there is a strong socialised care system where people are paid quite well for the time spent caring, in other countries it might be more family based and more of a strain and a bigger moral question.
I imagine household robots will be something like a second car or a colour television — expensive and at first rather limited. We will have to see whether they catch on, just to do the vacuuming, tidy the dishes and so on. I’ve heard Apple now has a household robotics team that is going to try and build one within the next decade — mostly engineers who came off the unsuccessful self-driving car project.
My mother (93) is against voluntary euthanasia, or assisted dying. Yet she wants DNR on her medical records, should the question arise, and hopes to be able to pass away 'free of pain'. So she's not above some kind of medical application. I personally consider it to be an acceptable premise, for reasons already stated eloquently by others.
I am planning on dying very soon. Only a few years at most left.
During this time I will not be having more children to adopt, abandon (like Sakyamuni) or abort. However, anything is possible.
Ideally, I would like to turn into a rainbow. Fat chance. Or live in my own temple or between a couple near my head.
My stepfather’s death was kind of an interesting case. He had advanced Alzheimer’s, he could no longer move or speak under his own power, an electrical lifting device was needed to help him stand up. He was doubly incontinent. Then one day he could no longer poop. The doctor diagnosed an obstruction in the upper bowel, and said an operation would probably prove fatal, but without one he would die after two very painful weeks. So my mother opted for palliative care, and after a week on morphine he died.
There were options which might have extended his life by a week or so, but it would have been at the cost of considerable pain and suffering. So was that ‘taking his life before his time’ or was that ‘the most comfortable way to leave this life’? My mother has very much struggled with this question, as she was called upon to make the decision.
Over the years of his care, we watched him lose his decision making capability, he was declared mentally incompetent about three years before he died, and we watched his personality change as well, from a very sweet man to someone who could turn nasty in the blink of an eye. He even got physically violent on a few occasions. But it was all the illness talking. It was very difficult for my mother.
If the man my mother knew and loved had known what was waiting for him, might he not have opted for euthanasia? The UK health system refused to diagnose him with early Alzheimer’s when he first started noticing symptoms some 10 years before his death, sending him home with a diagnosis of ‘normal age related decline’, and by the time he was officially diagnosed he was already in an advanced stage and mentally incompetent.
Bad Buddhist here!
I recently heard Chelsea Handler say that at the first sign of illness, she's going to ask her drug dealer to put her self down like a horse in a barn.
As someone who has internally questioned other people's choices in slowly gurgling or thrashing, millimeters above the surface, in a circling of death's drain pipe....
I laughed nervously with the rest of the audience.
Talk of death, in ordinary social circles has, until relatively recently, been a taboo subject. We have different euphemisms to describe it; kicking the bucket, pushing up daisies, passing on or away, going before, going West, crossed over, beyond the veil, met their Maker, closed the book...people feel it's a morbid subject, and shy away from discussing it, for fear of facing their own inevitable demise. Maybe for Assisted Dying to not be so controversial, we should strive - skillfully, appropriately, and kindly - to make talking about dying, the same way we chat about going on holiday. Only, there's no Return Ticket....🤷♀️
During my aunts funeral reception a couple of days ago my cousin showed up with his five young kids aged 13 to just a few months. The coffin had been closed just before the reception began, but still, there was inevitable talk of the deceased and dying. In a way that was very good, to not hide the fact of death from those young kids, and to let them partake in this facet of life also.
I’d like to add a coda…
My father’s death was another interesting case. When he was admitted to hospital it was with a stroke, not something you usually die from. Initially his prospects of making a decent recovery were rated quite highly. But then he had a lung infection and spent ten days on a breathing machine in Intensive Care, and by the time they moved him back to Neurology there were serious doubts whether he could survive unaided.
So what does it mean - surviving unaided. It means you can breathe and eat and drink without assistance. They put him on a Code 3 protocol, which means no invasive actions which extend life, so no liquid food via a tube, no extra liquids via injection, no breathing machine etc. And he couldn’t swallow. He had a less than comfortable 24 hours before he passed away quietly.
It was clear that my father required less aid in dying than my stepfather. He was not on morphine as far as I know, he didn’t get a deep sleep medication at the end, it was just his time. It was also his wish not to live on if he was going to be stuck in a wheelchair, something he made very clear to us over the years.
Yet if we had our own private hospital and a nurse and doctor, his life could have been extended. For the doctors it was very clear that by choosing the Code 3 protocol they were removing the supports which had been keeping him stable. So there was a conscious life or death choice on their part.
There is a big difference to taking someone off life support and putting a needle of > @Steve_B said:
Yeah your right. Human life has no value really does it. Just murder them when it suits YOU.
I dont know why on earth this site calls itself Buddhist seems more like its frequented by a bunch of materialist-Athiests.
You will be happy that the UK is moving closer to legalised murder then? aka euthanasia...just askin.
I don’t know why on earth you keep visiting this site if it’s not ‘Buddhist’ enough for your liking. 🤷🏻♀️
That’s obviously not what they said, though, is it?
why are you hanging around? just to argue your point? life is short Angus. dont waste it trying to prove your points. you are like anyone else entitled to your opinions, but dont grasp them too tightly like they are the only truth
Life is a sacred value to you. That means its inviolable. Often when a value is crossed, devalued (?) that one violation leads to a further violation until the value is meaningless. This is the importance of sacred values, they hold the line on important things. I think many of us can understand that.
On the other side there are often a set of competing values. In this case it is the value of life vs the value of compassion for a reprieve from suffering. It can be a case of one set of values competing for dominance over the other or it can be the case of balancing the values.
I feel an additional factor is perhaps the level of conviction in multiple life karma. That suffering at the end of life isn't unnecessary it acts to remove negative karma that would have to be experienced anyway. The truth of this belief isn't demonstratable to anyone and I don't think they're compelled to hold it. As such their views about the value of end of life pain, or the value of a fetus vs the woman carrying it, will differ.
I have a lot of respect for the sacredness of life, but if someone wants to end their life they should be allowed to do so with ease and respect. I am a big believer in the right to die, and don’t consider it murder in any way for a physician to supply the means for an assisted death.
There are a lot of reasons why someone might choose to end their life. Intolerable pain, incurable disease like Alzheimer’s, even a completed life and feeling ‘it is time to go’. In all these cases I feel the decision stays with the patient, not with the doctor, and it should be allowed.
Do you want to force people to go to alternative suppliers like the recent case in the Netherlands of elderly people buying a ‘Medicine X’ on the internet which was “guaranteed to provide a quick and easy death”, or even step in front of a train?
I apologize. Your question and dialog was an end of life philosophical discussion.
Your dialog, given the goings on in my country , triggered my diatribe.