It seems like, in some cases, throwing up our hands and saying "It's not my call" is a sort of moral abdication.
Imagine you find a teenage girl in a bathtub, bleeding out from a suicide attempt. Who would stand there and say, "Well, you know, it's her decision." Such indifference would be depraved; saving her would be praiseworthy.
A less dramatic case would be a juror asked to determine guilt under an unjust law. "Who am I to say whether a law is just?" Who would you be if you _didn't_?
I completely agree with you about the proper response in your hypothetical. But how far does this go? Suppose you save her, and once she's recovered, she expresses anger rather than gratitude toward you, and explains that now she intends to do it again. Maybe it would be praiseworthy to try to talk her out of it. But what if she is resistant to persuasion? Would it be praiseworthy to constrain her by force?
[Maybe in the case of a teenager - certainly of *your* teenager - it might. But for an adult?]
Perhaps it depends upon our assessment of the person's ability to make the call--and our assessment of how we would want our own decision respected in similar circumstances.
In the case of a suicidal teenager, I would almost certainly assume they were in distress and needed help. In the case of, say, Friedrich Nietzsche getting a terminal diagnosis and choosing "[t]o die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly," I wouldn't necessarily try to stop him, even if I am sympathetic to Kantian arguments against suicide. (On a side note, if I were a physician, I wouldn't _help_ him, either.)
That's the door through which the reactionary, anti-science hordes flooded the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party.
Can a liberal really think that physician-assisted suicide is a tragedy, that pornograpy is a symptom of moral decay, that vaccines are unsafe, or that the state should take no position when a gay couple walks into a business hoping to order a wedding cake, and the proprietor rejects their business for what amounts to an irrational reason?
With respect to that last one (and I say this as a gay guy who has personally faced significant discrimination), absolutely yes. We should not view the state as the final arbitrator of justice and the invocation of state force as the primary means to promote tolerance, diversity, and kindness. To do that is commit a new form of moral abdication of our individual moral responsibility to promote these things through persuasion, moral example, and civil engagement with those less tolerant in our society. It is also to fall for a different form of illiberalism: indifference to the use of state force and inability to cope with pluralism (for both good and ill) in society.
As for the first two, I think the answer is also yes. Whether you believe physician assisted suicide is morally praiseworthy should have little to do with whether you think there is a coercively-enforcable obligation to prevent it; ditto for pornography production and consumption. Pessimistic curmudgeons like me don't view it as a tragedy, but that doesn't make people with a more optimistic outlook on life who think the world would be a significantly more fulfilling place without the demand for physician-assisted suicide any less liberal. Perverts like me (I'm being fecitious, of course) see porn as a liberating fulfillment of people's repressed selves, but that doesn't make more prudish people who think civil society would be better off if we kept such parts of our selves closed off from the world any less liberal. People can have reasonable disagreements about such things depending on their overarching world view. All liberalism is about is not trying to force others into your world view, which would be quite cruel.
As for the concern that this openness to diversity causes reactionary populists to flood liberal institutions, I think that is a fair concern. But that's just the hard work of being a good radical liberal: remaining tolerant while keeping a watchful eye for abuses of the social norms of tolerance that keep society free.
I think this is where liberalism might just break down. (Luckily we are not in need of strict consistency because strict consistency is never going to be possible.) I think reasonable people are reasonably open to those who, on the brink of imminent death or decline, or in the throes of untreatable pain, choose to end their lives. This was how the Canadian system seemed to work until it got more lax. Here state sanction enhances options by not penalizing doctors if no other treatment is effective and this is seen as the best medical course of action. This is allowing the state to allow professionals to assist the patient in this choice, when all others are exhausted. And that reasonable people are so open, means that they see that these situations are the exceptions to a general rule, which is that people who are otherwise healthy and suicidal should not be encouraged and should be counseled against it, as with other self-destructive behaviors, even if, at some point in the process, you realize that there is nothing you are ever going to be able to do to prevent them from going through with it eventually. This option to counsel others to prevent self-harm was always within Mill's view. It's not illiberal to do so. It might, however, be illiberal to curtail this option. And that's what the state sanction seems to do, to some extent. But even if not strictly illiberal, it might, as I said, just be where liberalism breaks down.
You might have a better case if you were talking about private acts of suicide. Suicides might arguably have a right to end their lives, even when they shouldn't. And other people will say, maybe so, but I will intervene to convince them not to do so. Why should the state interfere with these private interactions? If it is something you would want to do when the person is taking matters into their own hands, why use state power to prevent such recourse when the act is sanctioned by the state, why use state power to sanction, normalize, aid, and effectively (on the margins) encourage suicide in those cases that diverge from the aforementioned medical dilemmas?
It seems like, in some cases, throwing up our hands and saying "It's not my call" is a sort of moral abdication.
Imagine you find a teenage girl in a bathtub, bleeding out from a suicide attempt. Who would stand there and say, "Well, you know, it's her decision." Such indifference would be depraved; saving her would be praiseworthy.
A less dramatic case would be a juror asked to determine guilt under an unjust law. "Who am I to say whether a law is just?" Who would you be if you _didn't_?
I completely agree with you about the proper response in your hypothetical. But how far does this go? Suppose you save her, and once she's recovered, she expresses anger rather than gratitude toward you, and explains that now she intends to do it again. Maybe it would be praiseworthy to try to talk her out of it. But what if she is resistant to persuasion? Would it be praiseworthy to constrain her by force?
[Maybe in the case of a teenager - certainly of *your* teenager - it might. But for an adult?]
Perhaps it depends upon our assessment of the person's ability to make the call--and our assessment of how we would want our own decision respected in similar circumstances.
In the case of a suicidal teenager, I would almost certainly assume they were in distress and needed help. In the case of, say, Friedrich Nietzsche getting a terminal diagnosis and choosing "[t]o die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly," I wouldn't necessarily try to stop him, even if I am sympathetic to Kantian arguments against suicide. (On a side note, if I were a physician, I wouldn't _help_ him, either.)
Yea, that last paragraph concerns me.
That's the door through which the reactionary, anti-science hordes flooded the libertarian movement and the Libertarian Party.
Can a liberal really think that physician-assisted suicide is a tragedy, that pornograpy is a symptom of moral decay, that vaccines are unsafe, or that the state should take no position when a gay couple walks into a business hoping to order a wedding cake, and the proprietor rejects their business for what amounts to an irrational reason?
I can't see it.
With respect to that last one (and I say this as a gay guy who has personally faced significant discrimination), absolutely yes. We should not view the state as the final arbitrator of justice and the invocation of state force as the primary means to promote tolerance, diversity, and kindness. To do that is commit a new form of moral abdication of our individual moral responsibility to promote these things through persuasion, moral example, and civil engagement with those less tolerant in our society. It is also to fall for a different form of illiberalism: indifference to the use of state force and inability to cope with pluralism (for both good and ill) in society.
As for the first two, I think the answer is also yes. Whether you believe physician assisted suicide is morally praiseworthy should have little to do with whether you think there is a coercively-enforcable obligation to prevent it; ditto for pornography production and consumption. Pessimistic curmudgeons like me don't view it as a tragedy, but that doesn't make people with a more optimistic outlook on life who think the world would be a significantly more fulfilling place without the demand for physician-assisted suicide any less liberal. Perverts like me (I'm being fecitious, of course) see porn as a liberating fulfillment of people's repressed selves, but that doesn't make more prudish people who think civil society would be better off if we kept such parts of our selves closed off from the world any less liberal. People can have reasonable disagreements about such things depending on their overarching world view. All liberalism is about is not trying to force others into your world view, which would be quite cruel.
As for the concern that this openness to diversity causes reactionary populists to flood liberal institutions, I think that is a fair concern. But that's just the hard work of being a good radical liberal: remaining tolerant while keeping a watchful eye for abuses of the social norms of tolerance that keep society free.
I think this is where liberalism might just break down. (Luckily we are not in need of strict consistency because strict consistency is never going to be possible.) I think reasonable people are reasonably open to those who, on the brink of imminent death or decline, or in the throes of untreatable pain, choose to end their lives. This was how the Canadian system seemed to work until it got more lax. Here state sanction enhances options by not penalizing doctors if no other treatment is effective and this is seen as the best medical course of action. This is allowing the state to allow professionals to assist the patient in this choice, when all others are exhausted. And that reasonable people are so open, means that they see that these situations are the exceptions to a general rule, which is that people who are otherwise healthy and suicidal should not be encouraged and should be counseled against it, as with other self-destructive behaviors, even if, at some point in the process, you realize that there is nothing you are ever going to be able to do to prevent them from going through with it eventually. This option to counsel others to prevent self-harm was always within Mill's view. It's not illiberal to do so. It might, however, be illiberal to curtail this option. And that's what the state sanction seems to do, to some extent. But even if not strictly illiberal, it might, as I said, just be where liberalism breaks down.
You might have a better case if you were talking about private acts of suicide. Suicides might arguably have a right to end their lives, even when they shouldn't. And other people will say, maybe so, but I will intervene to convince them not to do so. Why should the state interfere with these private interactions? If it is something you would want to do when the person is taking matters into their own hands, why use state power to prevent such recourse when the act is sanctioned by the state, why use state power to sanction, normalize, aid, and effectively (on the margins) encourage suicide in those cases that diverge from the aforementioned medical dilemmas?
This is an article about an abomination of "bioethics": https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-medical-aid-in-dying