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| Sir James said the approved care plan was "not a matter for congratulation" |
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My response
I would not normally have read this article, but having decided to write one more blog post responding to the news as an example, I came across this when I was browsing the "Health" section of the BBC News with my morning coffee. Similar to my earlier post on abortion rights in India, or the lack of legal abortion rights in India, there seemed to me a connection between this very sad story and our reading of Steven Law's "Carving the Roast Beast", and that was enough reason to choose it. It is also a relatively short article, although it still took me some time to write a summary I was happy with.
In order to protect the young woman, a lot of detail is missing, I suspect suppressed by order of the courts, although the article does not say that. I was wondering exactly what crime the young woman had been found guilty of, and whether there was any reason other than being under 18 that her case was being dealt with by the family courts part of the legal system. But those questions remain unanswered by the article.
I do think that when the state arrests people and puts them in prison, it has a moral obligation to ensure that the situation is decent. In Thailand, for example, not nearly enough money is spend to provide decent accommodation for the excessively large number of people who are crowded into Thai prisons designed for much smaller prison populations, and this is morally wrong. It is reasonable for a society to protect itself from harm by putting criminals in prison, but they must be kept in reasonable comfort and at the very least have enough space to live, not packed in like pigs or chickens on a CP industrial farm designed to maximise profit from suffering. I think human beings must be respected as human beings whatever crime they have committed, and many crimes, such as drug possession, cannot justify any prison sentence.
The lack of space causing morally wrong suffering is clearly not the case in the English system described in the article. On the contrary, the young woman has received a very substantial share of the expensive resources available, which has harmed the care provided to other people in custody. But I wonder whether the state has an obligation to keep people alive at great expense when they want to die, as this young woman apparently does: it is costing a lot of money and human resources to force her to live against her apparently consistent wish to die. A complicating factor is that she is only 17, but if she knows her own mind, why shouldn't she be allowed to die as she wishes, or even helped to do that in a more painless way than she seems to have already tried?
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My question for readers
What do you think? Should people who want to die be allowed to end their own lives, including with active assistance from doctors or other medical professionals if they ask for it?
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- Judge approves suicidal girl care plan. (2017, August 7). BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40855771
I'm happy with my summary of the article. It is 109 words and only two sentences, both of which are desirable qualities in a summary. We expect a summary to use complex grammar to connect the ideas we thought important enough to include in our summary, and shorter is better.
ReplyDeleteFollowing our discussion about such phrases this morning, I notice that my third response paragraph begins with the words "I do think that". I don't want to change this because the reason I said "I do think" is that I did not want to write the essay the following idea needs to provide strong support. If my readers, you, disagree with my idea that "when the state arrests people and puts them in prison, it has a moral obligation to ensure that the situation is decent," you are welcome to write a comment explaining why, and I will respond to that. But for this blog post, it was enough to say that this is what I think.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, people should be allowed to die as they wish; however, It will be hard to convince society to think in the same way as I have thought.
ReplyDeleteEven if we, human beings, individually born, It quit difficult that we can decide whatever we wish. This because we also are a social creature. We have friends and relatives who might think that our decision is wrong. Deciding to die is very critical, it means there will have no choice left for us anymore.
Morally, it is still controversial that who might be the person to decide that people can end their own lives. I have heard that in some states in The U.S. they allow people to end their lives. My father's friend decided to do this. And yes, of course, my friend did not let him do that.
It quite clear that even I think it can be individually decided to end their own lives, but there are also other factors that we have to consider thoroughly.
Even though I am a Buddhist, I think that people can choose to end their life in term of illness, for example, persons who have a critical stage of cancer. Clearly, they must really suffer from the disease, moreover, there is no cure for them except death. So why cannot they choose to die, to be in peace so that they will not feel pain anymore?
ReplyDeleteMy favourite piece of wisdom from the Buddha is his Kalama Sutta (กาลามสูตร), in which he very sensibly says that we should not believe things are right merely because some authority, such as a teacher, a government official, or a monk, including the Buddha himself, has said it. I think he wanted his followers in later centuries to improve on his ideas and correct his mistakes. Similarly, although I very much enjoy Plato and Aristotle, I know that they got a lot of things seriously wrong: we should expect to do better than our ancestors of centuries or millennia ago, and I think the Buddha would agree with this, so I think it's healthy for Buddhists to disagree with what he said.
DeleteIn my opinion, committing suicide is something severe and shocking. It's not good to kill yourself, but also very hard to thwart if ones is willing to do. If mentioning Buddhism(like Pa says), it's morally wrong. It's easy to commit suicide if they can ask doctor to cut their life with least pain. Then I'm sure that there'll be rising number of people who want to do this. I think that what a huge reason that stop people from this is "it's painful."
ReplyDeleteOf course, in some case, it might be no choice for them and no use to live anymore, but many others might want to do but with not really good reason and they might have many other good choice beside committing suicide. Therefore, instead of making them easy to do, giving them a premium advice is really good idea. Because human life is priceless, if there's some choice, they should be advised.
To sum up, life is valuable, so I really believe that there's still choice for anyone(better than killing themselves). Convincing them to fight their struggle life must be better than helping them split their lives.
I wonder what Law would say about this? He seems to assume that killing is always a bad thing. Do his cited sources think that?
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