Thanks for your views. Let me clarify, about the subject of right to die am wholly with you, and you'd be preaching to the converted. Suffering brought me around. We want to determine if healthies are justified in their pro-life stand and the fairness in the suicidal viewing them as irrational.
You say the right to self determination is fundamental. Do you consider the right to suicide as "self determination"? If yes you will find we are therefore denied a basic right. The state will say humans are necessary for the overall good and therefore legal euthenasia or just suicide is a slippery rope. This is simplistic and irrational to the suicidal but consider the animals. We need them for food, principally (besides extraction of labor for transport or sport, their skin or fur, etc). So we deprive them of the right to live (abattoirs). Can humans do away with animal foods without a significant health or economic disruption? Vegans grapple with this. You find the animal right to live directly contradicts the human right to live. Ergo, our right to ctb contradicts the collective societal right to our input. You are burdened to prove you are unfit to live and there goes your right. I think this is the legal rationale. Recall you placed animal rights over the human right to die, so you cannot accept the animal is good for food yet you are no good to society.
Rights bestow obligation. You have a right to education, and are equally required to get an education. Schooling is not optional in many countries. The caveat of being unfit - terminal illness, say - is a precedent in all progressive jurisdictions that allow assisted suicide. Now, a pro-lifer's motivation may be religion or faith. This is the political base we need to convert - rebut faith with logic - tough luck! For the case of animal rights the zealous anti-vegans would likely be the meat industry. I imagine vegans are disposed to support assisted suicide and other extra-progressive ideals.
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A measure of the "irrational" I suggest look at how many people support or agree to an ideal? You could say veganism is irrational, could you? I noted the liberal (Dems) in a place like California are vehemently against suicide yet allow assisted suicide with caveats. It tells you how many miles we have to cover to a basic right to "no-fault" suicide.
The prerogative to commit suicide follows from the principle of self ownership. What the state feels about the responsibilities of individuals to the group, I think, is subordinate to the individual's prerogative to do with her-/himself as she/he sees fit so long as no immediate danger befalls others. Responsibilities to society could rest on parents who make a decision to create life, but I do not agree that they necessarily rest on the child-free individual. Most critically, to me, at least, there is no natural reason anyone has to accept the position that she/he must stay alive. And there is so far no universally convincing philosophical argument one must, either. Hence, despite the significant anti-suicide public health efforts in the US and abroad, suicide incidence has been increasing year after year.
I also, with respect, largely reject the reasoning that we "need" animals for food. This may be true in remaining pre-industrial cultures. Where something is a legitimate survival need, the objectivity of need supersedes philosophical considerations. In the increasingly global post-industrial society, the biomedical, ecological, economic, and other research literatures do not support the conclusion animals are a hard survival need for humanity. We continue to use them because we enjoy the products of their exploitation. So just as the imperatives of the state don't have to impose any natural claim on the self-ownership (and determinism) of the individual, humans' desires don't impose any natural claim on other animals. In both cases, control results not from any
a priori philosophy but instead from mere relative power.
Might makes right in practice.
"Can humans do away with animal foods without a significant health or economic disruption?" I think it's clear how I'd respond to this rhetorical. Interestingly, changing the species and circumstances (say
Homo sapiens and slavery...) makes analogous questions to most (at least ostensibly) offensive. Value judgments. Yet, in the future, powerful people might choose to reinstate slavery. So it seems to me we aren't really asking a question of what we "can" do, but instead what we want to do.
"You find the animal right to live directly contradicts the human right to live.
Ergo..." A logical contradiction requires a truth value to a claim. I'm not aware of any moral truths, only perspectives and consistent arguments. That humans and non-human animals coexist argues there isn't a logical contradiction in the two ... coexisting. But many of the choices human populations make, devoid of a hard survival need, cause immense suffering to many other species. And that is inconsistent, at least to me, with principles so many of us tout as "good." These are value judgments--not arguments of logic. It's clear others feel differently.
I think one of the problematic concepts here is that of "right." Rights can be legal entitlements or perceived entitlements. But even the former aren't objective, other than the wording of the law--which is still interpretable. Rights may "bestow [other legal] obligations," but unless there's a natural reason someone
must act a certain way, those obligations are matters of faith. We breach legal obligations and contracts all the time, even with the blessing of the government. "Rights" and "obligations" seem to me merely cultural and individual perspectives. Until recently, a patient was
obliged to satisfy a criterion of imminent physiological
terminal-ness to warrant professional medical intervention to end her/his life. This is no longer true everywhere. And there's no necessary reason it must remain true anywhere (else). Ideas have changed. "Unfit" (and its synonyms) is a matter of opinion without an objective criterion. I think cultures will keep evolving in their appreciation of the criteria they consider sufficient for euthanasia access.
We'll doubtlessly be arguing for a while yet about if and when people should be entitled professional medical help dying. And many people who don't need animals to survive will likely continue using them because they want to and are able to. But I don't feel either of these issues imposes any natural or philosophical obligations on people to stay alive. We clearly can kill ourselves. To me the real question is whether the state is justified in stopping people who want to die from dying. The state is able to do this at least some times. But it neither is able to nor (it seems) wants to provide people even what international research shows to be significantly associated with better mental health. I'm
not saying the state is malevolent. But none of us can guarantee anyone else's life satisfaction. Passing laws requiring people to stay alive based on mere ideas isn't going to stop suffering people who are able to acquire the means to die from committing suicide. Either the state continues to make suicide difficult, which research shows can exacerbate suicidal ideation and
per-capita depression and suicide rates seem to bear this out, or the state can grant citizens far more autonomy to decide when and how we die. For reasons I've shared elsewhere, I think it's irrational to force people to stay alive without being able to provide some universally corroborable and agreeable reason they/we must stay alive. And I don't think that reason exists--at least I've never read anything coming close to it.
I don't want to spew my ideas (more) all over this thread. I respect others' prerogatives to reason how they want to about their own lives' ends and only ask that the rest of us be extended the same courtesy. We may not get that, of course. Hence, sites like this one. Cheers.
