Suicide and Euthanasia

I was thinking of making a blog post for Rolling without limits but thought I'd touch on a topic that's been on my mind lately. With the very publicized suicide of Brittany Maynard, I can surmise that a lot of people are debating about suicide's complex ethics and moral implications.

Life and its complexities can, on many occasions get us down. Sometimes in our despair - we can also transmit these ideas. They then fester and grow. Imagine, how the idea of allowing suicide, may become distorted and misinterpreted across many cultures and nations.

"Brittany Maynard's gesture is in itself to be condemned, but what happened in her conscience is not for us to know,"

Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula

Brain cancer's symptoms according to eMedicineHealth:

• Altered mental status: changes in concentration, memory, attention, or alertness.
• Nausea, vomiting: especially early in the morning.
• Abnormalities in vision (for example, double vision, loss of peripheral vision)
• Difficulty with speech.

The prospect of not being in control, losing our mental focus and eventually, losing our own minds and bodies is staggering. More so, if you think about the emotional, moral and financial challenges the family has to undergo when she succumbs to the disease. 

The reddit community has one of the strongest aggregation of voices regarding the view supporting Brittany's right. This is the most upvoted comment.

Moral relativism

What one society or family may think about notions between right and wrong could be very different from what others think. But the belief in God and a supreme moral being does not accept that. It's either you adhere to whatever religious notions you adhere to or you accept the ever changing and arbitrary notions and beliefs of a secular world. 

My problem with morality by voting is that morality becomes a matter of what the majority thinks is right and wrong. A misinformed electorate is just as dangerous as a horde of irrational religious zealots. 

The unintended effects of publicizing suicide 

My qualms about this issue and Western society's tendency to dominate discussion, is that it tends to make everything it does in its own sphere of influence very public. It's like having a television with only one channel. While it's true that we have many options in our freedom to choose what to watch, there are just times that publicized events such as Brittany's suicide dominates even a democratized medium such as the Internet. 

Suicide has always been a complex matter but imagine how a lot of people who are in similar conditions would feel. Breakdown the complex idea of suicide in a simple manner and you have a mashup of a dangerous mix of ideas that could be received and read by different people in different cultures with different levels of understanding, circumstances and life conditions.

On the other hand, much of society is already messed up

When people see other people lobbing bombs and cutting off people's heads saying "God is great" in their own language, one cannot help but feel dumbfounded. Yet desensitization has already corrupted our hearts and minds. They are becoming the new norm in our morally relativistic world. Just imagine if these kinds of people dominate what we perceive to be morality. What if the ambits of moral civilization collapses and they win?

While that may not happen at all and is far from the realm of possibility, what could happen is that society would be so messed up about what is right and what is wrong.