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fubarobfusco comments on What is the most anti-altruistic way to spend a million dollars? - Less Wrong Discussion

-4 Post author: Punoxysm 24 March 2014 09:50PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 25 March 2014 04:08:41AM 8 points [-]

Given that advocating the right to "die with dignity" tends to have as a side effect people who are disabled (or would just be expensive to treat) being killed against their will, it is not clear that this is in fact negative.

You assert that it "tends" to have this effect. On what evidence?

If this were the case, we might expect to see people who feared this happening to them to be migrating out of places (such as Oregon) where assisted suicide is legal.

If the opposite were the case, we might expect to see people who feared being kept alive in a state of torment to be migrating to places (such as Oregon) where assisted suicide is legal.

Which do we see?

If assisted suicide enabled the killing of inconvenient terminal patients at the convenience of their doctors, relatives, or insurers, we might expect a relatively high number of terminal patients to "choose" assisted suicide. If it did not so, we might expect a relatively low rate. For this, we might specifically look in places where assisted suicide has been legal for many years, such as the Netherlands.

Which do we see?

Comment author: bbleeker 26 March 2014 01:34:46PM *  1 point [-]

Table 1 further shows that the frequency of ending of life without an explicit patient request decreased from 0.8% of all deaths in 1990 to 0.4% in 2005 (approximately 550 cases annually). Further analyses of the cases of ending of life without an explicit request show that these concern nearly always patients who are very close to death, are incompetent but with whom the hastening of death has been discussed earlier in the disease trajectory and/or with their relatives, and for whom opioids were used to end life

The number of patients killed without consent was cut in half after euthanasia was legalized, and these deaths continue to be overwhelmingly done with reasonable justification.

From: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/08/29/fake-euthanasia-statistics/

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