The flippant bit of me wants to say "well, after watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull"... I should have known. Two words should have tipped me off: "Phantom Menace".
I digress, not the point of this thread.
Personally, I believe people should have a right to check out if they want. While I think I would approach the idea responsibly and compassionately, though, not everyone would. There are ethical concerns to take into account when you consider the idea of anyone willingly ending their life.
The first concern, of course, is sheer efficiency. When you get right down to it, there's no "logical" reason to bother treating an elderly person (or any person, for that matter, even if it's a child) who's going to spend the rest of their lives getting sicker and sicker and sicker. Sure, leave them alone if they can still manage, but if they come in and you're looking at something incapacitating, it's illogical to bother treating them. You could get a much better payout for your efforts elsewhere. There are healthier people who would benefit more from the time and resources you're investing on an ever-increasing basis in keeping someone alive who's locked in a downward spiral.
The trouble with that idea is it's both heartless and soul-less. Like it as not, humanity isn't really engaged in the business of efficiency. It's engaged in living, plain and simple, and there are quite a few people who worry that if you open the doors on euthanasia, you open the door on making the end of someone's life an arbitrary decision and you end up on that old "slippery slope".
Where some other things are concerned, it seems foolish to think we can't avoid sliding down it, but this one really would be a much easier slope to slide down than most people think because it begins not by abandoning our virtues but embracing one of them. You can begin with simple compassion.
For example, let's take a current standard a lot of people like: A person has the right to end their lives if they have a terminal illness, and two doctors sign off on it. Well, what's a terminal illness? Life is a terminal illness when you get right down to it. Every mother who gives birth has made sure another human being is going to die. It's just hoped they'll be able to live with their condition for quite some time before doing so.
So, what's a terminal illness? Is it something that you're 100% certain to die of? I don't know any doctors who deal in 100% unless someone's already dead. Maybe it's only something you're likely to die of, but how likely is that? Who sets the standard?
The easy answer is "the person with the illness and their doctors", but suppose you have one doctor who believes what you're suffering from is a terminal illness and another one doesn't. Suppose the other doctor simply won't sign off even though you have a terminal illness because they're morally opposed to you ending your own life. It certainly happens. Look at all the pharmacists who sued so they wouldn't have to dispense morning after pills or provide condoms to customers because they just don't believe in that sort of thing. My general take is "tough titties, if you don't like it, find a new line of work you hypocritical prick". It's a bit like a soldier throwing a fit because they found out they might have to actually go to war. In the end, though, you can't force people to do things like this. Then what do you do?
Send the person to a third doctor? A fourth if needed? Keep rotating them around until you find two doctors willing to sign the form? That casts a lot of doubt onto the subject, doesn't it? If it was really terminal, why wouldn't the first two doctors sign off on it? You can find two doctors somewhere who are willing to sign off on just about anything, so allowing people to do that makes the standard a lot less meaningful. Then, what do you do? Get rid of the second doctor in such cases and say one signature is enough? You've just gotten rid of one of the safety checks on the system by doing that, haven't you?
That leads you back to someone other than the patients and doctors involved setting a concrete standard and imposing it on them. It's only compassionate to give someone a way out rather than force them to keep suffering if they have doctors who refuse to help them. Why do you want them to have to suffer just because of someone else's misguided moral convictions?
Suddenly, death becomes a regulated trade. Someone has to sit down and say "this is worth dying to avoid, but this isn't". You have doctors who are willing to play that system and diagnose illnesses from which patients might not be suffering to accommodate their desire to commit suicide. You have others who will misdiagnose patients to prevent it, and still others who will make diagnoses more likely to push patients into choosing euthanization because it's efficient and they think they're ultimately doing the compassionate thing by pruning the branches selectively... you know, for the greater good. Let's face it, if there's one thing we're brilliant at besides completely bullshitting ourselves in the face of overwhelming evidence we're wrong, it's completely fucking everyone around us in pursuit of "the greater good". Cobblestones of choice for the road to Hell and all that...
Getting past that, though, there are quite a few illnesses guaranteed to kill you, but which have no time table whatsoever for doing so. Take Alzheimer's disease. Once you're diagnosed, there's no going back. We can control it. In some cases we can halt it where it is, but in the majority of cases, it's going to kill you. The trouble is, it could take months, or it could take two decades. No one really knows how long you're going to be stuck living with it as your brain slowly eats itself from the inside out and disassembles your personality piece by piece, unwinding you as if you were a broken watch spring.
Is it compassionate to let them die now, before it takes hold, or do you bank on the odds they're going to have a couple of decades left and can lead meaningful lives for several years yet? Come to it, what about people who reach the point where they can't make that decision any more. There is an argument to be made that by the time Alzheimer's is noticable, the person in question has already lost enough of their reasoning abilities to be impaired beyond the point of deciding adequately. If there wasn't some significant impairment, would anyone have noticed they were suffering from Alzheimer's in the first place?
Once there's nothing left but the suffering and the utter fear patients with advancing Alzheimer's have to deal with, do you keep them alive? They can no longer make the decision themselves, but surely if they COULD, they wouldn't want to keep going. Is it fair to force them to, or is the compassionate thing to make the decision for them?
If the compassionate decision is to end their suffering, where do you draw the line? At what point do you make that decision for them? Sure, on one end of the spectrum it's obvious the person should be able to decide for themselves, and on the other end of the spectrum it's obvious they can't. There's an enormous grey area in the middle, though, and the closer you get to the middle, the less and less you're going to find agreement about just which side of the line you're on.
That brings us to another concern: Family. The hope, of course, is that someone's family will want what's best for their ailing member. Then again, how often do you hear of people squabbling with one another like rats trying to hoard everything from a dead relative's estate for themselves?
It's not uncommon, just like it's not uncommon for people, especially people who are weak and may not be thinking clearly due to their illness, to go along with what their family wants them to do. What if you have a family sitting there thinking they just can't afford a protracted illness because it's going to consume more resources than they have? What if you have a family who just wants the miserable bastard out of the way so they can divvy up the spoils? Should we turn a blind eye as they pressure a sick family member to choose an early death?
None of that even gets us into the realm of "regular" suicide.
The matter is very complex, and becomes more complex all the time. We seem to have more technical prowess than wisdom or understanding of what we're doing. The unfortunate upshot to that situation is that human knowledge surpassed human wisdom the instant the first caveman picked up a rock and realized they could kill someone else with it, and the gap between the two has been widening ever since.
Some people are able to bridge the gap between the two, but there are untold numbers of them which don't even get close even with a lifetime's worth of practice and study. Coming up with a balanced solution and closing the holes human lives can fall through is a daunting undertaking to say the least, which is why the debate on the subject is so protracted.
I can set my own standards, and I think they're the right ones. Why is there even a debate? Everyone should just do what I say because it's so obvious I'm right about the subject you're just being stupid if you don't agree with me. Easy-peasy.
Unfortunately, there's a very good chance that isn't actually true. It may be nothing more than arrogance born from the "bullshitting ourselves in the face of overwhelming proof" and "fucking everyone else in the process because we're so damned sure we're the ones who are actually right" song and dance we so often perform. The question is, whose judgment is good enough that it should become the judgment for all people, and who's just fooling themselves into thinking it is?
And that endless diatribe is just off the top of my head (though I'm sure its sheer length has encouraged quite a few people to start believing in euthanasia). As I said, it's a complex issue, and likely one which will vex us for a long, long time.
