Should people who are depressed and suicidal be able to seek euthanasia?

[DC Al Fine]

is there some overlap with the abortion issue here?  Many people support/defend abortion with the "but women are going to get abortions anyway" as a reason.  Doesn't that work here for the same reasons?  People are still going to do suicide even if its illegal....we know this, because it's how it is now.

Well first off that's a stupid argument. The existence of crime isn't an argument against criminal codes. I really wish someone would take this to its logical conclusion and apply it to wife beating or child abuse...

Also, people's decisions aren't set in stone. That is, the decision to kill oneself or get an abortion is influenced by the circumstances one is in. Our mental health and palliative care systems are rather inadequate as are our supports for young mothers. It seems a bit perverse to legalize certain forms of killing while also exacerbating them through inadequate healthcare and financial aid.

[DC Al Fine]

Well first off that's a stupid argument.

agreed

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agreed when it comes to harming others, it should always be against the law to harm people that don't want to be harmed* and it's a bad argument to say "well, a small fraction of men are going to rape, what's the point of making it illegal?"....but is it that bad when it's about self harm?  People are going to get high, sometimes in ways "normal society" doesn't approve of.  I think it's wrong to punish those people for choosing to alter their brain in ways your aunt Ruth doesn't approve of.  People were going to have gay sex 50 years ago, risking everything to do it.  People should be free to do whatever they want to do (as long as it't not harming anybody else).  That includes DMT, butt sex, bacon and suicide (now that's a fun, final weekend!  Better than rotting away in an old folks home surrounded by smelly old people, ignored by your children.).



*but then how far do we take that?  Parents of fat kids (with the obvious caveat that excludes the TINY percentage of fat people that are fat for medical reasons) are certainly harming them, do we punish them?  how?

Normally when arguing this with a social liberal, I'd just point out the obvious hypocrisy of opposing social conservatism on those grounds but then supporting seatbelt laws and a host of economic regulations. However you are a consistent libertarian so we can get to the meat of the issue:

There is a tendency in liberalism (both economic and social) to atmomize people in a way that doesn't really reflect how people  actually live. I dispute a lot of liberal claims of "they aren't hurting anyone but themselves". The distinction between harming only oneself and harming others is rather artificial when applied to real life situations.

Examples of this include divorce and drug abuse. Two parents can consent to a divorce but the act can still dramatically impact their children. Likewise I have yet to hear of a heroin user who didn't harm others in an attempt to feed their habit.

So if actions that only hurt oneself are a lot rarer than what libertarians make it out to be, should the state criminalize every vice? No. The state should weigh a variety of factors when considering banning or regulating vice including: how much it harms the user, how much it harms others, how endemic the vice is to a culture,  how much regulation would impose on citizens etc etc.

To use your example, making kids fat is bad, but the harm is relatively small, the infringement on parental rights is large and the potential for a government abusing their powers to take kids away is excessive, so I wouldn't favour regulating children's weight.

[DC Al Fine]

Also, anyone who opposes this while supporting capital punishment is automatically a very illogical person.

... because?

Basically, by opposing this while supporting capital punishment, you are having these 2 beliefs at the same time:

1. The government should be allowed to forcefully kill people when they want to live.
2. The government should be allowed to force people to live when they want to kill themselves.

Which is a set of positions that supporters would have to have mutually exclusive belief systems to support.

There's nothing contradictory here. Different things are different.

Yes there are contradictory things here. Similar things are similar.

One of the two examples hasn't murdered anyone you see. That's a substantial difference.