tony nicklinson - 'locked-in syndrome'

spudbynight said:
Laws should be enacted for the public good not for the wishes of a minority OR a majority.
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Ok. I'm gonna say something that will sound heartless.

The public good, the public benefit from the man in pain because.. nope no arguement for.

Now for the other side.

The public good, the public benefit from the mans right to end his suffering.. public is no longer paying to extend a life that the man no longer wishes to have.

A horrible way of looking at it, but it makes more sense than " he cant die because i say its wrong. "
 
spudbynight said:
I don't think it is a whim. I really do feel for the guy but I am strongly opposed to suicide no matter what the rationale.

I think it is a sad indictment on our society that within a generation we have moved from suicide being illegal to people campaigning for it as some sort of "right"
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You keep bleating the same point that you can't condone suicide, but have failed to elaborate any further. Can you please explain your thinking on this; describe how you have come to this opinion? Just stating your opinion is no use in a debate, you need to explain further why you think your view point is correct.

Personally I think someone in this state should be allowed to make their own choices. You wouldn't keep a pet alive if it lived its days in endless suffering.

At the stage in life Mr Nicklinson is at, the choice should be his and his alone. He shouldn't have to rely on family to act on his wishes as they may "bottle" it at the last minute.

It cannot be right to tell someone they must live in suffering.

I would be very interested to see you live a month in Mr Nicklinson's shoes.
 
cm1179 said:
terminal cancer wouldn't stop you being able to do it. (not that i wanted this to turn into a discussion on suicide though i understand by the very nature of the topic it will come up)
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Depends what kind of terminal cancer you have and at what point you decide to end it. If its early on you probably can do it..if its near the end well without dwelling on personal experience, I've seen someone beyond the point of being able to do it, but they didn't want to do it earlier as there was still something left. By the time you'd like to be able to still do it..you might not be able to.

This probably leads people to take their own lives earlier than they would have to if they could be clear about the time they wanted to go in and the state they wanted to be in.
 
There should be a law that says when a persons quality of life drops below a certain level with no hope of change they should be allowed to die if they choose, if they can't choose then their family can, it's disgusting to force a person to live when they are suffering or simply don't want to exist any more.
 
spudbynight said:
I don't think it is a whim. I really do feel for the guy but I am strongly opposed to suicide no matter what the rationale.

I think it is a sad indictment on our society that within a generation we have moved from suicide being illegal to people campaigning for it as some sort of "right"
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I think its sad that you think that is true, lots and lots of cultures haven't had any problem with suicide for millenia. The first people afaik, who campaigned to have it made illegal was...... shock horror, Christians.

It's okay to kill an animal for food, its okay to kill an animal in pain and suffering, but a human must suffer every last ounce of pain possible until their body can no longer go on...... brilliant logic there.

The right to life includes the right to end it whenever they want for whatever reason.

Life is completely and utterly meaningless, for every person who has a happy enjoyable life there is someone going through complete hell each and every day, how on earth anyone can decide that the person going through hell each day has no right to choose to simply not do that is beyond help.

There is no logical argument against suicide for those who want it.

Religion, which used crusades, wars, and millions of death to establish power, which continues to have thousands of murders commited for the cause, that continues to split the world and cause massive hatred, decides life is great and killing is bad....... I really can't believe anyone can buy into religion, and I can't believe anyone can choose to ignore all the bad bits because it suits them.

People who are suffering should be free to choose to end that suffering, or continue it, free choice.

The fact that we got into two completely illegal wars and have killed upwards of 150k people, of which a HUGE number is completely innocent victims, based on nothing, but won't make it legal, safe and painless to end the suffering of those here says so much about the hypocrisy of modern western thinking.

We can kill innocent people living in 3rd world conditions because very few people here will complain about it, but can't make assisted suicide legal because a lot of (mostly religious people) will complain about it.
 
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spudbynight said:
The good of society as whole.
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I'm sorry but you can't use utilitarian arguments from the 18th century to safeguard the right to die in a secular 21st century. It just doesn't work. Plus what sort of cuckoo land are you living in? The world is massively over-populated. We are consuming the earth's space, food and finite resources at a rate that is bankrupting the planet's supplies. Not to mention our medicine and culture has evolved to such a point that healthcare is now a completely secular and scientific enterprise; there is no 'God' morality or ethics involved in patient care now.

If a tiny minority of people suffering from terrible illnesses and constant pain want to end their lives - and if you want to use a crude utilitarian argument about the 'greater good' - then in the 21st century context, it is technically in the greater good to let these people die. There are too many people around, to be churlish about it.
 
Jamsames said:
give me some examples where having a bad life is better than death?
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a bad life is better than no life, it isn't rocket science to understand this.

It is a good thing that suicide is illegal.

freedom = free doom. Why have the choice to make the wrong decision. you would be better off being forced to not kill yourself.
 
starfighter said:
Any example you can think of. Being dead is the worst thing that can happen to a person.

Sorry, I thought suicide was illegal, I suppose it is hard to convict a dead person so it doesn't really matter.
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not being dead i have to say i do not know what it is like

however i can see it being better than having a fully conscious mind entombed in a body that is slowly shutting down
 
Jamsames said:
i deem this stupid post of the night/morning

how can you arrest someone for suicide?
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The law would arrest people who attempted (and evidently failed) a suicide up until 1961. Of course it was stupid but the idea was, much like the argument for keeping assisted suicide illegal, to stress the state's disapproval of this 'immoral' behaviour. Now suicide isn't seen as immoral or harmful to wider society as such, so it is 'allowed' (or rather it isn't policed at all).
 
Jamsames said:
not being dead i have to say i do not know what it is like

however i can see it being better than having a fully conscious mind entombed in a body that is slowly shutting down
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It would be a terrible existance, but it is better than no existance, there would still be some small level of pleasure a person could experience in this position.
 
starfighter said:
It would be a terrible existance, but it is better than no existance, there would still be some small level of pleasure a person could experience in this position.
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The poor fella in the news-story would evidently disagree with you.

I imagine every day being a personal humiliation and shame would be considerably worse than just being dead. The guy feels like he is a burden on everyone around him; he feels as though he's trapped and that outside life is 'passing him by'. In his view he should have died - quite naturally - when he first had the stroke; that was 'his time'. The doctor saved him but kept him in a state of being that is practically worse-than-dead: he can no longer do anything for himself and is, as an adult male, now completely reliant on strangers for every day tasks.

Can you not see how this could possibly be worse than death? The guy has already stared death in the face once and, clearly, if the emergency services had not been there, he would have been dead already.
 
starfighter said:
It would be a terrible existance, but it is better than no existance, there would still be some small level of pleasure a person could experience in this position.
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what pleasures?

his body is to put it bluntly redundant

sure if we could transfer his conscious to a robot then yea great he may have a better life

i suggest you stay in your bed all day and not move and ask your relatives to play along. see how it is
 
starfighter said:
It would be a terrible existance, but it is better than no existance, there would still be some small level of pleasure a person could experience in this position.
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Surely it would depend on the quality of there life before they became locked in would it not, for instance, a friend of mine is a total out doors type, he's an ardent, v highly skilled amateur mountaineer, who's been climbing pretty much all over the world, when he's not climbing he's hiking, or out on his mountain bike, or he's fell walking, anything but sitting still vegetating.

For him to become locked in would be akin to torture, he'd take no pleasure what so ever in his own continued existence, quite the opposite, to keep him alive would be quite frankly, cruel & inhumane.
 
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