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ChristianKl comments on [Link] Death with Dignity by Scott Adams - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (92)
Legalizing euthanasia doesn't force any doctor to engage in it. It just removes punishment when a doctor engages in it.
In theory you are correct. In practice, the way similar issues have played out in the US is that regulators start applying reasoning like Jiro exhibited elsewhere in this thread.
No doctor is forced to operate his patients. A doctor might be forced to inform his patients that it's possible cure his illness by surgery.
There no need to argue for slippery slope, it's quite possible to write laws that allow doctors euthanasia but make clear that they are not forced to do so. Additionally you can also put other restriction on it like marketing bans.
Surgery requires a lot more skill then giving someone a lethal dose of something.
It's also possible to right laws that allow for gay "marriage", but don't force, say bakers, to bake cakes for gay weddings. The way things actually play out suggests this isn't actually possible in practice.
Also I have a question. Do you actually not want doctors forced to perform euthanasia or are you just trying to alley my concerns? If the latter, you are being disingenuous. If the former, why did you reply to me but not to Jiro?
"In one of a dozen or so countries where X was done, Y also happened" isn't even terribly strong evidence for "it's not possible in practice to do X without Y also happening", let alone "it's not possible in practice to do anything in some reference class including X without something in some reference class including Y also happening".
For another data point, there is at least one major European country where doctors are both allowed to perform abortions and allowed to refuse to perform abortions and the situation hasn't changed much in either direction for decades.
Performing abortions requires special skills. Thus it would make no sense to force doctors who aren't trained for the procedure to perform it.
Performing euthanasia (or, as in your other example, cooking kosher meals) doesn't? Baking cakes for gay weddings does?
(FWIW, I don't think that bakers should be forbidden by law from refusing to bake cakes for gay weddings.)
The fact is, I heard that in said major European country you sometimes get the same doctor refusing to perform abortions in public hospitals ostensibly for moral/religious reasons but who has no trouble whatsoever with them in their own private practice.
Not really, at least giving someone an overdose of pain meds requires a lot less skill then performing an abortion.
It doesn't. That's why the government is forcing bakers to do it.
I've just noticed that the great-great grandparent comment was explicitly about that one country, so I'm retracting the parent.
I don't want doctors to be forced to perform euthanasia in the sense of giving a dosis of a drug with the direct intention to kill.
There are cases where I think it could be argued that a doctor shouldn't be able to put a patient without that patients consent on life support. I can imagine forbidding a doctor from engaging in life lengthening actions without the consent of the patient even if the doctors feels a moral obligation to lengthen the patients life.
There are cases where not given a patient valium and morphium means that the patient is in huge pain. A obligation on the part of the doctor to give valium and morphium to the point where the patient doesn't suffer even when that shortens life is debatable.
When I look at your link it doesn't seem to be the case that this is about laws enabling gay marriage. It's about a law called the Oregon Equality Act of 2007 that prevent businesses to discriminate against gay people. Whether or not the government has a law recognizing gay marriage that law would prevent bakers who fall under the "Public accommodations" section from baking those cakes. Given that only in 2014 Oregon seems to have returned to legalized same-sex marriage. That gives 7 years without a government having legalized same-sex marriage where as far as my understanding goes a baker should be banned to refuse selling wedding cakes to gay couples.
Apart from that I don't think it makes sense to have special regulation about baking cakes that specifically speak about the freedom of bakers to choose whether or not to bake cakes for certain purposes.
Cake backing doesn't seem to me an activity that deserves special legislation. I do think that euthanasia is a subject that deserves issues based legislation.
A good example might be how we regulate prostitution in Germany. You can legally make a contract in Germany to engage in prostitution. If two people however make such a contract and then the prostitute decides they don't want to have sex with that person, there no way to enforce the contract and force the prostitute to have sex.
I think that euthanasia is in that class of activities that shouldn't be forbidden but that also shouldn't be able to be enforced.
I agree that the laws in question are different, I would argue that the passing of those laws aren't independent events.
Except that's just what we have here. If say the KKK asks for a cake that depicts a black being lynched the baker is likely to refuse and is likely to be able to get away with refusing. What the law, as interpreted in practice, says is that baking a gay wedding cake is something that bakers specifically cannot refuse to do.
The laws share a similar motivation and as such aren't independent but here the core question is whether the government can forbid private businesses that operate publically from discriminating based on sexual orientation.
In a partisan environment where everyone is mindkilled most people have likely the same opinion on that question as the question about gay marriage but that doesn't make them the same question.
If I get treated differently at the door of a nightclub because of my gender, I don't think that's basis for suing the nightclub. On the other hand I expect to be treated by the government in a way that doesn't discriminate based on gender.
By muddling those issues together, you prevent rational political discourse.
No. The law doesn't speak about baking cakes.
Laws as supposed to be written as simple as possible.
Writing a law that says (among others): "Public businesses aren't allowed to discriminate against homosexuals. The expectation are bakers that are asked to bake cakes for homosexual weddings."
That's crappy law making. If laws get written that way their complexity rises. Baking cakes for homosexual weddings isn't important enough to be written about in a law. On the other hand euthanasia is.
In case you think I'm arguing irrelevant technicality, the fact that most people don't understand that simple laws are good is on of the core reasons why we have so much complicated bureaucracy.
Nobody cares about low bureaucracy when debating how to solve ideological charged issues :(
The issues are already muddied, I'm merely acting on the basis of this fact.
Except that's not how the law is being applied. A law against discrimination against gays would forbid bakers from kicking out patrons who happen to be gay. (Granted "anti-discrimination" isn't exactly a coherent concept to begin with.)
This is similar to the difference between forbidding restaurants from putting up signs saying "no Jews allowed" and requiring all restaurants to serve kosher meals.
It is a "targeted concept". This is a term I came up with as I don't know of any better. People who defined the legal murder did not have any idea of who could be the typical murderer and who the different victim. It was not targeted for special people or special motivations, it was solely about the act. Discrimination is a targeted concept, it is targeted for the kind of behavior that arises from sentiments like racism. It does not have a really coherent definition because the kind of definition they would like to give it, "don't do any actions motivated by racism, sexism etc." is not appropriate in law. Note that targetedness is not inherently a right-wing critique. For example a Marxist could also try to argue that theft is a similar targeted concept because it is aimed at specific kind of situations, poor people stealing from each other or the rich, and not targeted on rich people stealing surplus value from workers. This is a bit of an artificial example though. The textbook targeted concept is Lèse-majesté, an inherently righty one. So it depends.
I don't think the idea is that laws specifically need to prevent people from being forced to make wedding cake. Rather, wedding cakes are a single example of the more general idea "lwas have to prevent people from being forced to do things in general". Each individual item in that category isn't important by itself, but cumulatively they are important.
So, how does this apply to your comment here?
Doctors are an unusual case because doctors have a legal monopoly over prescribing drugs. If the available doctors refuse to prescribe a drug, nobody else can do it instead without violating the law. There usually aren't legal monopolies over cake-baking.
That's why the wedding cake example doesn't make sense in this context. You need special laws to regulate euthanasia.
The law that forces here is the Oregon Equality Act. It prevents businesses from discriminating. It's not a law that legislates gay marriage that's the issue.
If you want to have effective laws than you have to target the right law. If you try to fix things at the wrong spot you add additional complexity.
When it comes to doctors there are laws about malpractice that do force doctors to do certain things. I think malpractice laws do have a right to exist but they shouldn't be too restrictive on what doctors can do. I think euthanasia laws should be written in a way that doesn't make it malpractice to avoid applying euthanasia.
A law which says that a gay marriage has to be treated like a straight marriage in one particular way is a gay marriage law. The law is just being made piecemeal and not labelled with "Gay Marriage Law" in the title, but it's still a gay marriage law.