• 0 Posts
  • 33 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Since you believe bullshit…

    https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html

    I was mistaken in that it was currently available. However, they’re planning on making it available for solely mental conditions in the future and have been pushing the eligibility date back for a few years. The fact remains they think this is a good idea and want to do it.

    Healthcare professionals wouldn’t agree to that…

    They’re already agreeing to killing their patients to begin with. Healthcare decisions are made based on cost constantly. The door is open, anything is possible now. And not only that, but there have been plenty of unethical medical practices in history that are no longer done, like the lobotomy.




  • A while ago the ethical question was raised about MAID in Canada on how they’re supposed to distinguish between “genuinely ill people making good use of the service” and “depressed people who have simply lost hope and are using MAID as a more formal way to kill themselves.” As far as I know, they really can’t. Not to mention the stories of people turning to MAID as an alternative to dealing with Canada’s broken healthcare system. A healthy society doesn’t encourage its members to kill themselves.


  • I don’t like it because, as a person with chronic mental illness, it’s legitimizing me committing suicide rather than learning to cope with my symptoms. I already think too much about how nice it’ll be to be dead and not having to worry about dealing with my symptoms. If one day I decided that my life was no longer bearable, what’s the practical difference between me making an attempt on my own life that allegedly needs to be urgently stopped, and me going through months of paperwork and evaluations to do the same thing? If suicide is wrong, if we shouldn’t use a permanent solution for a temporary problem, then why should we turn it into a medical procedure? It feels dystopian because the medical industry, in my case, would be throwing up its hands and saying “you know what, you’re right, you’re completely broken and there’s no possible way to fix you. Let’s just kill you instead.”



  • I would argue that what rights there are is inherently a moral argument. “Murder is not a right” is a moral statement, for example. The government doesn’t change what rights it thinks there are without some kind of moral basis for it. Even if it’s primarily done in the legal sense, we still generally act in the legal system based on a system of morality. Another example: “Compelling people to testify against themselves is wrong.” It would be really useful for the state if they could do that, but legally speaking, the US recognizes that there is a right against self-incrimination.

    Laws are written because someone, somewhere, found a moral fault in the law. It’s just that some people believe that the only morality is power, and thus anything they do is justified. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights: it’s meant to stop people from simply saying “the government needs this power so we’re going to give it that power.” It isn’t about creating rights, it’s about recognizing and protecting rights that have existed all along.


  • But if the government can decide what rights there are, then anything they do is morally correct, no? Unless you’re going to hold the government to a higher moral standard than themselves, in which case the government doesn’t actually grant rights; it can only protect or violate them. If we have a higher moral standard than the law, then human rights do not come from the government, they are defined by whatever that higher standard is.

    I think the Nazis were an insane and utterly contemptible political party that destroyed a struggling nation to slake their own thirst for power. But if the government decides what rights there are, then they can simply legislate out of existence the rights of anyone under their jurisdiction. Thus, anything the government does to them is justified.


  • And my point is that it isn’t the government that decides what rights are. You started this whole “can the government decide what rights are” discussion by dismissing out of hand the right of a person to defend themselves. I’d like for you to go up to a sexual assault victim, especially one who defended themselves with a gun, and tell them “um ackshually you didn’t have the right to defend yourself because guns are evil 🤓”. Or would you only do that after the Second Amendment is deleted from the Constitution?



  • I know it doesn’t lead to any particular right being set, but your argument that rights are set by the government still leads to the conclusion that, because the Nazis were in power, they had the right to decide that Jews, gay people, other ethnicities, etc. no longer had a right to life. It would also lead to the belief that the Nazis had the right to protect those people if they wanted to. It would open the door to whatever oppression, discrimination, protection, liberty, and whatever else the ever-fickle government decided. Nobody would be right to resist it because “the government sets the rights, therefore it’s okay”.