@themadviolinist
You write:
"It is a short road from accepting simple disability as a legitimate reason for ending one's life to applying pressure to the disabled to do so in pursuit
of savings, less bother for the temporarily able, who are often very good at ignoring the likelihood of their own eventual disability. I'm not certain
we want to give society permission to think that disability could be a state of being for which death is the only solution."
No, that's no more a counterargument against an unconditional right to die than fighting poverty is a strong argument against permitting abortion.
If someone due to individual circumstance no longer thinks life is worth living, he or she should not be deprived of his liberty just because his continued existence may aid the promotion of policies in support of the disabled.
That's like saying that abortion ought not be legal because terminating unwanted children may have detrimental consequences for fighting poverty or that genetic testing for children with Downes' Syndrome should not be permitted because these children are needed to promote happiness.
The fallacy in the argument that there is a short road from permitting disabled to die to pressuring them to die by cutting spending is that society can already make life unplesent for the weak simply by cutting welfare and masking its sindifference by supposedly neutral 'concerns' for fiscal responsibility.
Also in most countries, you don't have an unconditional and judicially enforceable right to healthcare or a minimal wage.
Your concern would make more sense if there was already a clearly established enforceable bargain between the individual and society stating that you don't have an unconditional right to decide to end your life, but society will in turn guarantee an absolute and nonnegotiable minimal wage and legal recourse in case of inaccessible establishments and services.
But such a bargain does not exist, and if society does not guarantee absolute accessibility and equal accomodation for the disabled, it has forfeited its 'right' to compel people to live with conditions that a majority would not find acceptable, or that at least my opinion.
And even if there was such a bargain, it would likely not guarantee absolute equality and accessibility in public accomodation.
It would likely be riddled with loopholes allowing establishments and the government itself to scale down its commitment to 'reasonable' rather than 'absolute' accommodation.
This is already the case with the American with Disabilities Act and other legislation.
"That's much easier than creating
acomodations, taking universal design principles into account, even funding disabled people to help us live in the main stream world. That's a dangerous
precedent to set."
This may be your preference, but why should political activism serving the collective preclude the individual's choice in this matter?
I mean if the individual finds the entire premise of equal acommodation unsatisfactory, either because the accommodation is only partial, or because he thinks that the disability movement is only a sham, should he legally speaking be kept on life support just for the greater good?
"As I get older, the notion of absolute rights comes into conflict for me with the notion that we have responsibilities to the society as a whole to help
those less fortunate, to allow each to maximize their own liberty, even at some expense to our own. It is all well to articulate an absolute liberty argument
about the right to die, or any other issue. (remember I am disposed to agree with this argument.) This liberty interest exists in tension with a societal
interest in promoting life, in choosing to develop medical, legal and design protocols to bring those of us with disabilities into the fold."
Sorry, but preserving or promoting life without regard for individual autonomy
is not even a valid interest in itself.
If that was so, why not keep everyone on artificial life support for as long as the heart could be kept beating.
People have a right to right to refuse medical treatment or to smoke, drink and expose themselves to danger
even when the behavior is likely to shorten their lives.
If restricting individual liberty is so easy, because promoting life is a legitimate interest, a lot of behavior can and perhaps should be restricted even when the directly injured party is only the individual itself.
Therefore the only tension I perceive in the right to die is between the individual's autonomy and a rather fascist or totalitarian desire to keep them around for social experimentation.
By social experimentation I mean policies which are purportedly imposed to 'help' the individual but are either not proven to work or are mere sham justifications for other agendas.
For example, bringing disabled into the fold is frankly not an aim I consider very compelling; if individuals want it, they should be free to pursue that with all their might, but universalizing that to a societal command to perpetuate life against individual choice smacks of totalitarian control.
And such state control even if we accept it may be legitimate in some situations does not translate into benefits for the individual.
I personally believe that liberty defined as the individual right to exercise autonomy over life or death is always better than the society telling him that you must not do this or that.
The only caveat is that this choice must not violate the tangible rights of others to whom the individual owes a duty.
Do I think that the individual owes any duty to society to live?
Not at all.
So what about his or her family?
Maybe but only insofar that he or she is still legally responsible for underage children.
Children under 18 who are still legally dependent on their parents are a wholly different subject.
" A world without
Stephen Hawking is certainly a lesser place. A world where Franklin Delano Roosevelt is dead rather than President may see a different outcome to World
War II. What would be lost to the world if everyone who thought they might want to die because things were hard was kicked through that door.
"
Yes, but the same could be said with regard to abortion. We don't know how many gifted individuals would have been born but for the legal availability of abortion.
I know it's not necessarily your own opinion, but just try to replace right to die with abortion and see if the speculation doesn't sound rather inhumane.
If the right to die can be restricted for the greater good of society, I hardly see no reason for not applying the same paternalistic logic to abortion -- which I by the way think ought to remain a human right.
And abortion unlike the right to die might plausibly be said to infringe the life of a party who is incapable of saying yes or no which can not be said for killing oneself.
m