Call for vaccine opt-out penalty

[Singh.Simran]

I think personality and person are different, and a change in personality does not change who you are but what you are.

So you as a person under one personality can order yourself killed under a different set of circumstances...

As for the amnesiac, it's more because even though you've remapped your memory you're still capable of decision and conscious thought so you can deny the directive any which way... any of these directives would only apply when you basically lose humanhood anyway.

I think froma pure utilitarian pov it could be best earlier thn that, i.e. when quality of life reaches a certain point but you're still human and still can think, and i personally think you should have the right of suicide at that point, because that is a basic human right, but docs could only assist - doctors injecting due toa past directive without it being suicide can in many cases be useful but is just too open to abuse, too open to people changing their minds and being unable to tell/unlistened to...etc

[469er]

Originally Posted by Singh.Simran

I think personality and person are different, and a change in personality does not change who you are but what you are. So you as a person under one personality can order yourself killed under a different set of circumstances...

Still tricky, though, in that no one can entirely accurately predict what they will want under circumstances which don't yet prevail.

To give a personal example, my father always said that he would commit suicide if he had a debilitating diagnosis. I am pretty sure he would have gone through with it if he had had, say, a cancer diagnosis with a bad prognosis. He wanted badly not to be dependent on anyone, and so it was ironic that he eventually developed dementia, which (a) crept up on him too stealthily for him to make that decision and (b) totally destroyed his independence eventually.

However, his last years were in some respects very happy. He had been quite socially unconfident for most of his life, but forgot this along with much else as his condition deteriorated, and developed new aspects to his personality even as he was losing some of the old ones - it was not wholly a negative experience. He was also very freed from many of the social contraints that people of his age and class tend to have internalised, and started to speak his mind in a way that was really quite liberating to hear.

This is not to say that dementia is not a very debilitating and distressing condition. Obviously, I would have spared him it if I could, but probably not via euthanasia or assisted suicide - which is contrary to what I would have said before it all happened. Knowing him well, this gives me room for doubt that the post-diagnosis him would actually have wanted what the pre-diagnosis him would probably have signed up for.

Of course, we'll never know, which is the real problem...