I have a couple of questions that I would like to be debated about.
* Why is assisted/suicide due to mental illness still not accepted and illegal?
I know that there are countries (famously Switzerland (*1)) in which assisted suicide is legal, but a person that wants to make use of such services must meet a series of strict conditions (*2). In particular, among others, this person must suffer from an unrecoverable or highly disabling physical impairment or must be just old enough. It follows and is even explicitly stated that assisted suicide can't be offered to people with mental disorders.
I would like to understand the reason for such a broad exclusion. I know that a person can potentially recover from a mental condition and eventually achieve a fulfilling life. But, as far as I see it, as there are physical conditions for which there is no known cure, something similar might be said for mental illness.
I want to state a few reasons: sometimes (*3) a person doesn't fully recover from mental disorders. sometimes (or in some places) there isn't enough medical expertise to cure a illness that would be otherwise treatable. sometimes people are just broken beyond repair. sometimes a person just doesn't have the resources to obtain appropriate treatment.
And I'm noticing that these four reasons can be equivalently applied to physical conditions too.
Footnotes:
(*1) In my country (Italy) assited suicide is illegal and we happened to have a few cases of people going to Switzerland for the service. Marco Cappato helped people travel to the clinic and subsequently challenged the Italian law by self-reporting for some specific crimes which such law mentions.
(*2) This might be a whole other topic, but I always wondered how ethics and laws choose thresholds for various classifications.
(*3) I just use "sometimes" because I didn't research any known precise statistics.
* How is civilization dealing with the flaws of the legal system?
There have been many cases of people unjustly sentenced to prison or even with death penalty. It's clear to me that often there can't be a total certainty that the defendant was really responsible for the crime. Conversely sometimes it's obvious that the defendent is guilty, but by a glitch of the law it happens to be walking free.
Acrobatic-Cause-4925 t1_ivgbeal wrote
Reply to /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | November 07, 2022 by BernardJOrtcutt
I have a couple of questions that I would like to be debated about.
* Why is assisted/suicide due to mental illness still not accepted and illegal?
I know that there are countries (famously Switzerland (*1)) in which assisted suicide is legal, but a person that wants to make use of such services must meet a series of strict conditions (*2). In particular, among others, this person must suffer from an unrecoverable or highly disabling physical impairment or must be just old enough. It follows and is even explicitly stated that assisted suicide can't be offered to people with mental disorders.
I would like to understand the reason for such a broad exclusion. I know that a person can potentially recover from a mental condition and eventually achieve a fulfilling life. But, as far as I see it, as there are physical conditions for which there is no known cure, something similar might be said for mental illness.
I want to state a few reasons: sometimes (*3) a person doesn't fully recover from mental disorders. sometimes (or in some places) there isn't enough medical expertise to cure a illness that would be otherwise treatable. sometimes people are just broken beyond repair. sometimes a person just doesn't have the resources to obtain appropriate treatment.
And I'm noticing that these four reasons can be equivalently applied to physical conditions too.
Footnotes:
(*1) In my country (Italy) assited suicide is illegal and we happened to have a few cases of people going to Switzerland for the service. Marco Cappato helped people travel to the clinic and subsequently challenged the Italian law by self-reporting for some specific crimes which such law mentions.
(*2) This might be a whole other topic, but I always wondered how ethics and laws choose thresholds for various classifications.
(*3) I just use "sometimes" because I didn't research any known precise statistics.
* How is civilization dealing with the flaws of the legal system?
There have been many cases of people unjustly sentenced to prison or even with death penalty. It's clear to me that often there can't be a total certainty that the defendant was really responsible for the crime. Conversely sometimes it's obvious that the defendent is guilty, but by a glitch of the law it happens to be walking free.