The divide which is drawn towards mercy killing for animals and people which dictates the legality of the former but not the latter is bizarre to me. Why? Surely a person driven to feeling suicidal – the pit of despair and hopelessness – is orders of magnitude worse than what pain an animal feels. We have a wider set of sensory experiences and a higher cognitive framework to our lives compared to animals. This has a wide gamut but for some there are worse experiences. The disability factor – which can be very high for serious mental health problem – embedded in prognosis associated with mental health labels is a prediction of a worse life with fewer good experiences and significant distress. This is worse for a human than a dog because we’re different
In short, our ‘specialness’ which underpins the sanctity of life principle but it can also underpin the factors which make our pain so much worse than for animals. We have a higher set of experiences and profound suffering. We have greater needs than animals too but since this isn’t realised mean people are unhappy with their lived. Sometimes this is what’s overtly given as a reason where assisted suicide is legal for all. It doesn’t encompass the awfulness which drives conscious beings to suicide. Suicide is a product of too much pain (I have so much) which drives people like me to want to die.
Sadly, there are no solutions either and tens of thousands of people try to kill themselves every year. They’re trying to escape a shit life and “shit” in ways an animal couldn’t feel. This higher capability is a source for sanctity of life but it also explains the difference of the manifestations of pain. Humans can hurt in profound ways which animals can’t but the sanctity of life principles allow a way out from the pain…but not for people? Our difference from animals is the source of wonder and happiness but it can also be a terrible ordeal which is worse than for animals.
It is a higher but more obvious mercy killing if people truly understood and appreciated the nature of suicides by the disabled as understandable escape from a worse life which won’t get better. It is a rational response and the severity and nature of the pain is different and worse than the physical pain suffered by animals which have mercy killing.
Life is sacred but not a shit life. Forcing someone to suffer a shit life without hope is awful. No conscious being should suffer so but there isn’t the required social and structural change in systems required to change this tragic fact of life. It’s not the disabled alone who choose not to live a poor life. The selfishness is in the circumstances that drive the tragedy and the tragedy is anyone at all is driven to no longer want to live their life.
Own up to the failure and have the decency to at least offer the suicidal a good death instead of a shit one on top of all the other shit which caused a higher-than-an-animal being to want to die. Don’t prolong the torture.
We do big ideas 