 Welcome, everyone, to modern day debate. We are a neutral platform, welcoming everybody from all walks of life. If you're looking for more juicy debates, don't forget to like and subscribe, including tonight's debate of assisted suicide on trial, with both our interlocutors Kay and Kaz here to join us. And if you like what either of them have to say, both of our guest links are in the description below. And so with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Kaz for his 10 minute opening statement. The floor is all yours. All right. I wanna first wanna say thanks to James for setting up this debate. Thank you to Amy for moderating. Thank you Kay for accepting the challenge of being willing to discuss your ideas openly. I am Kaz of the Factationalist Network and I believe in facts. Firstly, I wanna say that this is not a debate about suicide in the broad sense. I am not here to advocate for suicide as a solution to life's problems. I myself have struggled and continue to struggle with depression. I have a past with suicidal ideation. I even have had to be hospitalized at one point because of it. I'm a combat veteran and every day 22 veterans commit suicide. I've lost many battle buddies to suicide. So I do not wish to make light of the matter. If you are going through it right now, please turn off the debate, call the National Suicide Hotline Prevention Hotline or if you're a veteran, go to the link for 22 until none. They should both be in the description. I am here as a suicide attempt survivor and today I'm relatively happy. So as shitty as it may seem right now, things do change. There always is a tomorrow until there isn't. Also, I am not here to argue for euthanasia. That is not something I agree with. All that being said, what I am here to advocate for is physician assisted suicide or PAS, specifically for the intractable suffering of the terminally ill. For the right to make the decision in advance to request that your doctor administer life-ceasing medication and to have that choice be honored when it is determined that no further medical intervention is viable and that the patient elects to forego the more unpleasant features of the dying process. My argument is, I think deductively valid and empirically sound. It's a modus ponens form, if P then Q. If freedom is to be prioritized, then physician assisted suicide should be allowed, Q. Freedom is to be prioritized. We know this to be true because the prioritization of individual freedom has led to the greatest moral developments in human history, emancipation, women's suffrage, civil rights movement, LGBTQIA, liberation, which entails that physician assisted suicide should be allowed because physician assisted suicide grants individuals freedom to tailor their final stages of life to their tastes. Therefore, physician assisted suicide should be allowed, Q. Key to this position is the feature of patient choice. I am not here to advocate for mercy killing. I wish to create a world in which human beings have the maximum customizability of life. To maximize freedom is my philosophical position that it is necessary component of perpetual survival, which is when life advances to a stage of inexorability. The specter of extinction is banished and death itself is sublimated into deferability. A society which does not seek to maximize its freedom of its constituents will not reach the stage, but rather a tumultuous decay as those constituents repeatedly struggle to unrestrain themselves. Now I know that Kay is a consistent life advocate and while I do not agree with her in many ways, I do respect her idealization of consistency. I think that I can persuade UK to agree with my position because of this. Death is a part of life. It is inevitable from the moment we are born. It is the final stage of life. So if we are to respect and revere life consistently, then so too must we respect and revere death to give ourselves the power to tailor our deathbeds to our tastes, to choose even down to the trimmings, our final moments, our final words, to plan and prepare for a death more beautiful isn't the right word, but more graceful, more elegant, one not to be so feared. And with that I yield my time. Thank you. You're muted. Thank you so very much. Have to at least once a stream, right? Thank you so very much, Kaz, for your opening statement. And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Kay for her 10 minute opening statement. Thank you. Again, I just wanna echo what Kaz said. Thank you again for having me back on. I appreciate everybody that does all of the ins and outs of these debates to get them set up and all of the background work. And I appreciate Kaz for reaching out to me to have this discussion. I'm very excited about where this discussion could take us. And again, to echo what Kaz says, I am also a suicide attempt survivor. So this is a very, very delicate issue that we're discussing. And I kinda wish that we had kind of taken the time to discuss behind the scenes what we actually mean by assisted suicide because it is such a charged term to use. I think that overwhelming Kaz and I are going to find that we agree with each other almost all the way up to the very, very edge of this debate. Being a consistent life ethic activist, I believe that all human life is inherently valuable from the beginning of life to natural death. With that being said, I do understand the arguments that are made whenever it comes to the idea of assisted suicide. And I just wanna kind of preface this discussion. And I see it more as a discussion than as a debate. I don't think that these incredibly hot topics, whatever we're discussing, the issue of life and death should be hammered out debates. I think that they should be healthy educational discussions between people. So I think that this discussion is going to be super, super beneficial. And I just wanted to point out that people on both sides of this conversation are coming from a place of compassion. As human beings, we don't wanna see other human beings suffering or in places where they are suffering or in pain. So there's no good guy, bad guy. We're not sitting here on opposite sides of the spectrum as enemies. We're both coming from a very, very similar place of compassion for our fellow human beings. And with that, I'm gonna kind of wrap up my opening statement pretty quickly so that we can have more of like a back and forth decision. Thank you very much, Kay, for your opening statement. And then with that, I'm going to hand it back over to both of you for 40 minutes of open dialogue. Okay, you know, I actually did contemplate sending you my entire opening statement beforehand, but I just, there were so many other downsides that I contemplated and I just was like, maybe this is not the right thing to do. Maybe we should have talked about it beforehand, but I don't know. But let's just get into it. So was there any part of my opening statement that you were just totally no, I don't agree with that at all? Well, you know, as a consistent life as a activist, I do firmly believe in, you know, life begins at fertilization and ends at natural death. And I'm very anti kind of getting in between that, you know, in between any, either of that and causing death for another human being. I do understand the arguments that you're making, though, whenever it comes down to a person that is terminally ill and doctors have come to the conclusion that there's absolutely nothing else that we can do for this human being, they are going to die. The best that we can do is to make them comfortable until they pass on. I do understand that. I do still struggle with the idea mainly, mainly because I do see maybe because of a healthy distrust of, you know, the medical system, especially whenever it comes to disabled people and the ableism that we see every day in our healthcare systems. I do see room for this being abused if we are to implement a system to where we're kind of allowing it to be up to doctor discretion where that line exactly is. So that would probably be my biggest pushback whenever it comes to conversations about assisted suicide. Like I said in my opening statement, it's a very, very charged phrase to use. And a lot of people don't really know how to differentiate, like what is the difference between assisted suicide, what's the difference between youth in Asia, what is assisted suicide at tale, so on and so forth. And the majority of my arguments against assisted suicide have less to do with people who are terminally ill and on the brink, you know, on their death bed and a doctor is assisting them in just making that final crossover into death. So you're mostly concerned with the slippery slope element of it, right? Yeah, yeah, that would probably be my biggest concern is with, you know, when we're allowing it up to the discretion of a fallible human being. You know, the human beings are not infallible. They're not, they're not like creatures, even doctors. What could this could possibly lead to? I mean, there's a currently or maybe it's already gone to trial. There's a trial going on in Belgium right now where, you know, three doctors kind of skirted the rules that are in place for allowing for assisted suicide to happen. And now they're going to court because of it, because the family believes that that was outside the parameters of what is legal in Belgium for assisted suicide. So it does concern me, particularly like I said, whatever it comes to ableism that we see in our healthcare system, whatever it comes to racism that we see in our healthcare system, whenever it comes to ageism that we see is incredibly rampant in the healthcare system, what this could potentially lead to if we were to legalize assisted suicide and then leave it up to the discretion of an individual doctor. Okay, so I'm gonna say this. I agree that there's room for abuse in this kind of system that we need to shore up our ends here and we need to write any kind of legislation or regulation that would govern this kind of situation very meticulously, very carefully that it needs to be debated very with both sides being heard thoroughly and that we should not just rush into it. And I also think that it's not a situation where people can just be grandfathered into it, so to speak. You can't just give people that haven't the cognitive ability right now. Like for instance, let's say that I, right now I have my full mental capacity, right? If I wish to sign an advanced directive saying that when I reach a certain point in time where I no longer have my mental capacity, I wish to have a life-ceasing medication administered to me and I'm evaluated by a psychologist and I'm not depressed right now, I'm not gonna kill myself or anything right now, but once I'm no longer able to, would you have any problem with that? That's what I wanna know. Honestly, no, I don't see the issue of that. I kind of see doing something like that is similar to his to signing like what is that called? I do not resist a DNR. Kind of like if I get to a point where you're having to implement life-saving care to bring me back and keep me here, just let me go on, let me go on peacefully. There's nothing else that you can do for me. Allow me to pass on with dignity and with peace. So I don't see a huge issue with that as long as whenever we're discussing implementing these within the United, within legislature that we are watching the language of these bills incredibly carefully and that we're making sure that it's not going to be used to the target disabled people, mentally ill people. That is a very, very huge thing. Currently, I think it's Canada and I believe the Netherlands, like having dementia doesn't make you, it doesn't disqualify you from being eligible for assisted suicide. And then you have issues with abusive family members. Like whenever you don't have the full capacity to sign off on an assistance of death, it's just so easy for family members that don't want to take care of people that are terminally ill to abuse the system. And then we see terminally ill people being targeted that don't want that assistance. Yeah, I think that we have a lot more agreement than I would have thought we had. I really thought that you were gonna push back on me a lot, push back a lot harder than that. So yeah, I agree. If a person is not capable of consenting to it at some point in time in advance, then I would not advocate for life-ceasing medication to be administered. We would just have to make them comfortable or try to push science to a point where we can find a way to get some kind of real informed consent from them. I think that it's also important whenever talking about this that we also, whenever someone comes, whether or not they have to do it through a hospital or through their doctor and says, hey, I wanna sign off on this form. So if I ever am in a place where I, there is nothing else that you can do for me. I am on the brink of death and you're just, I want you to help me pass over there as painlessly with as much dignity, quietly as possible, that we understand what it is they're reasoning behind why they're signing this. And this kind of goes back to my issue with the ableism, not just within our healthcare system but within our society, because whenever you look at the statistics as to why patients are currently opting for assisted suicide in places where it's legal, there was a study done after the 2013 death with Dignity Act in Oregon. And it was something like 90% of patients cited just like not being able to engage in everyday activities anymore or I think it was like 50 or 60% of people cited being a burden on a family member. If there is something that we as a society can do to lessen the concerns of the patients that is seeking assisted suicide, I think that it should be the responsibility of society when we're talking about building the best society that we can. I think that it is the responsibility of society to try to eliminate the burdens leading people to want to have assisted suicide and maybe pull them back away from that in a culture that truly values the life of human beings and maybe try to prevent people from reaching a point where they feel like they need assisted suicide is also a really, really big discussion to have whenever talking about legalizing this on kind of like a national level. Yeah, I agree. A key feature has to be that the condition that they're seeking it for is intractable. It can't be something that we can treat that we can alleviate in some kind of way. I mean, dignity and the lack thereof is something that is valuable and that you'd have to consider but it can't be the main thing necessarily. I don't know, would you say that though if you had no hope of dignity left for your life would you consider that as a possible reason? Absolutely. I mean, I see stories about family members that had to watch their older family members go through things like hospice care. These people are an incredible amount of pain and they're literally just waiting to die and I don't think that it is unfair to say that I just want to pass on with dignity. I don't want to drag this out. I don't want to see my family hurt and suffer anymore watching me die. I do understand wanting that but again, whenever it comes down to even terminally ill people, I think that it's super, super important for them to be able to sit down with a professional and be like, this is why I want to do this making sure that they are of complete sound minds to be able to make that decision and they're doing it for no other reasons outside of like, I'm dying, I want to go, I want to pass on to whatever is after this with dignity. Well, you know, I really expected you to push back a little harder, I'm so sorry. My biggest issue with assisted suicide and whatever we talk about, the fact that I'm against assisted suicide, majority of my arguments really don't come down to terminally ill patients that are really just at death's doorstep and really just want that little bit of help passing through that door onto whatever it is that is on the other side of it. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I'm so sorry, one of us has to be a psycho around here. I guess neither of us can be crazy. No, I'm sorry, I don't come into debates with crazy people. And I had all of these notes, but majority of my notes are really just talking about people, the abuses that can happen within the system, whenever we're not setting clear cut parameters that whenever we're legalizing a physician assisted suicide, it's within incredibly small parameters of people that are very literally on the edge of dying naturally. Okay, so yeah, I agree that that's important. I just, yeah, no, I agree, no, yeah. I want to try to disagree with you in some kind of way, but you are right. I know, I know, this exact same thing happens the first time I was ever on modern day debate. The first time I was on modern day debate, I did it at Destiny and we were supposed to be debating COVID lockdowns and James kept having their like rummage through subjects to try to find something that we disagreed with so we have something to debate. No, it's just, I think that suicide in a vacuum as a philosophical construct by itself with no context, you really can't say it's bad or good necessarily, but then when you take it in reality with family, with the factors that lead up to the decision to make it, when you really consider it in any real context, you can't really condone it just because the person that's making that decision in any kind of real context, they're not usually making that decision of sound mind. And speaking from, we both have that experience, it's just, you're not thinking straight. Yeah, well, and whenever you look at the statistics how effective suicide prevention is in saving lives and how many people come out on the other side of suicide prevention, no longer being suicidal, no longer wanting to end their lives, that's a huge factor playing into the moral argument of whether or not we should allow suicide to happen, but those parameters don't really exist whenever somebody is facing death either way. Yeah, well, no, you wanna debate abortion. We can have a discussion about abortion. I am always geared to go whenever it comes to discussing abortion. Okay, well, oh no, what do you think, Amy? Are you okay with that? I can't hear you. You're still muted. I did it again. That might be better on the next modern day debate. I don't know. I know that you guys have differences there, though trying to think of maybe some questions to ask. Do we have any questions in chat, maybe? We just got our first question, but I don't know, let's see. We still have 30 more minutes of open conversation. Damn, damn, damn, damn. Two cordial. James said it would be cordial, and he was too right. I know. I just expected you to make a whole bunch of slippery slope balances and I don't know what I was thinking. I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Would you guys be able to, knowing what you know now, would you guys be able to steal man, the other man's position? Do you think you know what you're dealing with? Well, Kay's position is that if physician assisted suicide is to be allowed, it's only to be for the most narrow group of people that are on the brink of death that their natural life is close to an end and that it's pretty much an act of mercy. Is that about right? Yeah, that's, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. If we are going to allow it to happen that I believe that it should be very, very narrow parameters and that we should have a safety net in place to make sure that those parameters are enforced. I agree. And then vice versa. I feel like we have like pretty similar stances on this though. And then there you go. I'm trying to think what would be the better situation. We can move on into questions. If you guys don't, if you think you've explored it all. I apologize to the audience that we don't have more of a, James's audience knows by now not to come for like a knockdown drag out whenever I'm on here because it's just, I don't do that. Sorry. That's okay. Hey, we are having fun learning each other's view. Having better discussions and debates, that is what we are doing right now. Exactly. And all right, we'll move into some questions and some questions will probably generate some, some good dialogue. And all right, don't forget to tag me at Amy Newman. I am watching out in chat. I think sign's so Nav is as well and we will read your questions. Super chats of course, put your butt right up to the top of the line but we're starting. Mark Reed asks, what about terminal illness? What about it? What about terminal illness? I think that's probably like where I draw the line is if you are terminally ill and you want assistance in just kind of bridging the gap between being here, looking at death in the face and being on the other side of it, I think that that is a safe parameter to have whenever disgusting, like allowing for physician assistants to besides to become a legal thing. That's what we agree on. I mean, we both agree that when somebody is terminally ill when their pain and their suffering is intractable there's nothing, there's no point in trying to force them to continue living for somebody's vanity or somebody's self-serving need to keep them going and they want to go on and they have the right to make that choice. And then it becomes a matter of medically allowing them to go with dignity and respect to ease that suffering as quickly as possible. And that's just a matter of personal choice that's their right to make that choice. And that's where we can allow it at. That's where the area is that we can agree on. But as far as anything short of that, we're just, we can't make any kind of definitive arguments that would be say, yes, this is a good thing. And then we just, we can't agree on anything like that. And I don't think that we should necessarily. All right, Mark Reed said in another, trying to clarify, he was talking specifically of terminally ill young patients. I don't know, this might be a place where we might disagree because I think that whenever we're discussing physician assisted suicide, it should be only accessible for adults. I think that whenever it comes to children because they cannot legally consent until the age of 18 that nobody should be allowed to make that decision for them. And therefore I would cut it off with minors. Nobody can make the decision for them. Well, because they cannot, they're not legally allowed to consent under the law for medical care without the consent of a parent. I think that that kind of muddies the waters whenever it comes to making an informed decision about assisted suicide. And I do struggle with the idea of minors being able to make informed consent period because they're minors. So whatever we would be discussing about what the cutoff would be, whenever it comes to allowing for a minor to engage in physician assisted suicide, we would have to kind of be more of an arbitrary cutoff. Like where, at what point is a child responsible enough to make that decision for themselves? Now, the last I checked and I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the risk of giving birth is higher than the risk of having an abortion. Are you aware of that? I am aware of that statistic. It's a little bit more complex than people kind of represented because as the pregnancy goes further, like late term abortions post viability, like the further you go on in pregnancy, the more dangerous the abortion procedure becomes. So whenever they're talking about abortion being safer, they're talking about abortion and the first trimester is safer than birth in the third trimester. So let's say it's the first trimester. Would you agree that a minor can consent to remaining pregnant? Yes. So do you think that it's okay for them to consent to risking their life and potentially dying in that situation? I think that whenever it comes to pregnancy, because of how I view pregnancy, I don't view pregnancy as one life over another. I see pregnancy as there are two lives involved and it's an incredibly complex situation and our goal should be to save as many lives as possible until we are unable to do so. Whenever it comes to a child deciding something so incredibly official that cannot be, well, once the child is dead, the child is dead. There's no coming back from that. I think that whenever we're discussing making it a legal precedent that a minor can consent, I worry about where we would draw that line. I like at what point is a minor able to consent to ending their own life? Well, it's just that the reason why I'm taking us down this line of questioning is just that the age is so arbitrary considering the pain and the suffering that the person may potentially go through. If somebody is going through some kind of disease process that will guarantee cause them an enormous amount of pain and suffering, then the fact that they're 17 years old and nine months versus 18 exactly is pretty arbitrary. So I just wonder if it's really worth it to say that the fact that they're 18 is the crux of it? I think that the only reason why I would draw the line at 18 because I think that drawing the line at 18 is like once you're 18 you're an illegal adult is already arbitrary. Like why do we draw that line there? The only reason why that line is there in our society is because they wanted 18 year old men to be able to go fight in our wars. So the idea that an 18 year old is an adult is incredibly stupid anyway. But that's where we've set it as a legal precedent in our society. I also worry whenever it comes to children, if we were to make it legal for a child to consent to having physician assisted suicide, we would have to, I feel like we would have to change up the laws that we have currently in place whenever it comes to requiring parent consent for a lot of things whenever it comes to minors. Like if a child can consent to having a doctor kill them, at what point do we say a child can no longer give informed consent and has to have the consent of a parent? Should we revoke that entirely and allow children to make all of their medical decisions? So if a, no, that won't work because you would be against it anyways. It's just so frustrating because at 18 years old, well, I guess they changed it now. You can't even buy cigarettes until you're 21 here. You can go to war at 18. You can die for your country here, but you can't buy cigarettes and you can't drink alcohol, but you can have sex and you can get pregnant and bring another person into life. So I mean, I guess it's a whole other discussion, but it's not even a debate. I can see your point. I can, I really can. But I think that when it comes to the fact that their life is coming to an end, that this is as informed as their consent could ever possibly get that we're kind of just ignoring, we're kind of putting off the fact that their death is impending, that their life, they're old for their time, their lifespan at this point. And so I would say that if they can comprehend the fact that they are dying and they can really grasp the idea and they can be evaluated by doctors and there can be some kind of criteria that's developed to evaluate that, something objective. I think that there might be a way that we could develop something that even you could agree, yes, this person understands the finality of it, that they are of some mind, they have informed consent and that, yes, I can sign off on this. I mean, I'm not saying that it would be easy and that it would be simple, but I just think that there is a possible future in which you would say maybe this 16-year-old should have the physician assisted suicide that they want. Yeah, and I can agree with that. I think that if way down the road, we're talking about making assisted suicide illegal in these very, very narrow, these very specific situations. If we were able to have people that are trained specifically in evaluating the sound mind of a child and whether or not they are of the ability to give complete informed consent, like understanding that they are dying and there is nothing else that the doctors can do for them. They've been down every road and the doctors have concluded that we can make them comfortable while they live out the rest of their lives and a professional that understands the ins and outs of the adolescent brain can say, they understand exactly what's going on. They understand exactly what is going to happen. They still want to move forward with this. I do believe that a parent should be able to pull that away from them and say that they're going to continue in their suffering, they're gonna continue in their pain whenever they are of complete sound mind and the ability to completely and informally give consent to moving that process on quicker. You're saying that the parent should be allowed to pull that consent away and say no. I don't believe that a parent should be able to pull that consent away and say that their child has to remain here, suffering for whatever time it takes for them to pass on naturally. Okay, yeah, I understand that. You know, the thought popped into my head of all the cases, you and I, neither of us are Christian, right? You're a pagan and I'm an atheist. And it occurred to me that there are all these cases that we always bring up of Christian parents who refuse to take life-saving measures for their child just because of they want to pray instead. And I'm not sure how that applies to this, but it's just this interesting juxtaposition that just popped into my head and I don't know why and I'm sorry for preying it up. The thing is, is that whenever you're talking about this incredibly complex issue and whenever you bring children into the discussion, it becomes like a hundred times more complex is the possibility of abuse going either way. You have parents that would prevent their child from accessing care that is going to help relieve their suffering, help relieve their pain that isn't going away until they die. These are, we're talking about terminally ill people, people that cannot be saved. You have parents that would try to force their child to remain in pain, to remain suffering simply because of their own emotional attachment to that child and not wanting to let that child pass on even though they're going to have to eventually. Yeah, it's kind of the same thing, isn't it? Yeah, you have to at that point really discuss the autonomy of the child and yes, they are a child, but they are dying. Whenever discussing assisted suicide, whenever you make the distinction between people that are not already dying and people that are dying and saying assisted suicide should be granted to the people that their only options are death now or death later, pain and suffering up until death later or allowing a licensed medical professional to allow them to relieve that suffering quicker. The discussion no longer becomes about life and death, it becomes about death and death and I don't think that reasonably people can come to this argument and say, I still am against it without admitting that they're playing entirely into their emotions with that. Like I don't like the idea of a doctor killing their patient, therefore I'm against allowing somebody that is going to die anyway to have an assistance in death at that point. No, I totally agree. And there's also an emotional component in agreeing with it too though because I have this idea in my head of being able to customize my death of being able to choose my last words, make sure that everything that I wanted to say to everyone is said and done, all the boxes are checked and then just checking out gracefully and just making sure everything is tied up nice and neat which nobody in the history of humanity has ever been able to do. And I just think that that's an amazing thing that would be a great advancement for us. Well, an ideal utopia world where we haven't been able to stop death from happening but we have this utopia of peace that is the ideal world that we are striving for. So many people suffer and die and just so much pain and suffering. Ideally you wanna be able to move on from this life having said everything that you need to say, say goodbye to everybody that you need to say, make sure that all of your affairs are in order and pass on peacefully and painlessly. It's kind of the ideal death in a perfect world. Everybody would pass on that way. Yeah, yeah, totally. We are in agreement. That was a great question, Mark. You're listening, you're still listening. Can we get any more, Amy? Absolutely. Send in love, in fact, to Mark for that question and Don ask how to do it. How to do it? Well, I am not a medical professional and unfortunately I have not done enough research into assisted suicide to know exactly like what exactly does that doctors use to do it? I believe that it is medication. From the limited research that I did, I do believe that it is just like, it's a medication cocktail. You take it and you pass on peacefully. Yeah, I think that's pretty much the best way we can answer. I'm not a pharmacist either. Heroin, I believe is a very happy way to go. Yeah, there was actually, I read a story whenever researching for this about a couple that actually chose to die via assisted suicide together, took the medication together, went to sleep together, did not wake up. And I think that that's kind of beautiful. And in a perfect world, that is exactly how I would pass on with my husband. That's the best we can answer, I think. Question from Donna or more of a comment. In some cases, suicide is the result of a rational thought. That's true, but how do you tell? How do you know from the outside looking at? I mean, there may be a criteria to evaluate that at some point. And when I see that, I would probably be okay with that. But at this point in time, I can't abide by that right now. Yeah, and the idea of rational versus irrational thought, there are quite a few suicide attempts that are for rational thought. I mean, there's nothing irrational about looking at where your life is, not being able to see it as anything better than wanting to just exit stage left. I was in a very, very similar situation whenever I attempted suicide myself. It wasn't some heated, overly emotional lapse in judgment. It was something that I put a lot of thought into leading up to it. But that doesn't change the fact that after I got help and talked out all of my problems with licensed therapists that I don't now value, that I didn't value my life. My life was exactly the same coming out of therapy, but just having a different outlook on life allowed me to see a better future for myself to strive towards instead of just choosing to end it at that point. So I don't think that just strictly saying that it was a rational chain of thought that led someone to attempt suicide, that we should say we should not also step in on rational thought to try to prevent suicide from happening. And I also just, it's a very, very delicate hypothetical to say that something is rational choice to commit suicide because while you may feel that you're making a rational choice at the moment, you don't know all the factors. There are tons of factors, including the future, including the current situation that you're in. You don't know everything about what's going on around you at the time. Also, you're subject to confirmation bias within yourself. You are incapable of evaluating your own psychological mind frame at any given point. You need a third party who is educated and trained to evaluate that kind of thing to be able to give you that kind of confirmation to let you know, yeah, you're making a rational decision. And I'm pretty sure for 99.9% of anybody who's ever had the thought I should commit suicide, it probably wasn't rational. And I'm actually enjoying the dialogue that these questions are stimulating. So guys, keep on sending them in for both of our awesome analogators, Kaz and Kay. We are gonna go with a question from Mark Reed. Rise Haberman was a teenager with a terminal illness that decided to die. Did he have a right to decide to die? If he was terminally ill, and like I said, whenever it comes down to the discussion of choosing death now or choosing death later, I think that people should be perfectly within their right and be absolved of any judgment to say, I would rather die now with dignity, peacefully surrounded by the people that I love, as opposed to weeks, months, even years down the line after immense pain and suffering. I think that everybody should have the right to make that decision. Well, I think the key to that question was that he was a teenager. I think that was why he was asking you. Well, you know, I do struggle with the idea of underage people making these long-term decisions. But like I said, the conversation really does come down to death now and death later. And as a teenager, I don't think that he was, it's not like we were talking about a small child that we know for sure that they don't have the mental capacity to understand ideas like death. For a teenager that was terminally ill, facing death, probably in pain and suffering, I don't think that it's a ridiculous thing to say that he had the right to choose how his death played out. Fair enough. Comment from Kimo, life is a terminal condition. That's very fatalistic. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a, it's kind of a very doomer way to look at life too. Yeah, everybody is going to die, at least the ones that are alive today. I am not of the opinion that life has to continue being that way personally. I think that, call me a scientismist, whatever you want to call that. But I think that eventually science will advance to the point where life, death will become an option. That's just my opinion. And hopefully I'll be proven right someday. And I think that every death is an opportunity for us to learn more about the dying process and get a little bit closer to that point, which is what I call perpetual survival. This is the thing I keep mentioning in all my opening statements. So that's what I'm advocating for. That's what I debate for, is what my channel is all about. It's what I'm here to try to promote is for people to come up with ideas and work towards that kind of the future. Because I don't believe that death is inevitable. Don't think that extinction is inevitable. I think that we are smarter than we think we are. I'm just waiting for a vampire to come by and bite me and give me the key to our mortality. Comment from Korg? I don't think this is a assisted suicide, but a right to die. A right to leave the party whenever you want. Yeah, I think that we could probably draw that distinction. Like I said, kind of in my opening statement, whenever we're discussing the idea of assisted suicide, like such an incredibly charged phrase, you kind of feel the need to make a distinction between a right to die, assisted suicide, euthanasia, what all these differences mean. I prefer whenever talking about this, like I've mentioned it multiple times in discussing this. It's just I prefer to think of it as an assistance of death. It's a doctor assisting you through the process of death, making it faster, making it more peaceful, making it less painful. I'll say this. Because I know so many people who have committed suicide because of my own struggles with suicide and because I made it through that for the most part, I don't advocate for suicide in any kind of positive way. I'm not gonna sit here and say anything to promote that in any kind of way. Like I said before, in a vacuum as a philosophical construct, I think that suicide is a neutral concept. I don't think it's bad or good, but when you take into consideration all the other factors of life, it's probably not a rational decision. If you're that determined to do it, and that happens, I'm not going to talk down on you. I don't think that a person who does it is a bad person or that they've committed some kind of atrocity. I'm not going to judge that person. I don't have any ill will towards my friends that are no longer with us. That's just a choice that they made. And I feel bad for that. I mourn them and I miss them. But sometimes I feel guilty for not being there for them. I make a point of reaching out to the ones that are still there and trying to be there for them. Just doing the best that I can not to fail anybody else because when you do commit suicide, there are people that will notice and there are people that will wonder what they could have done differently. It's hard on the people that you leave behind. So I mean, it's your life, it's your choice. I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life, but just know you are, all of you are important. Thank you so very much and we're gonna, I'm going to put it in the frame of a question. They were saying maybe, but are there some additional differing views when defining the strict parameters for assisted suicide? Can you read that again? I'm sorry. It was, I guess, he's saying maybe there are some additional differing views when defining the strict parameters for assisted suicide. I'm sure there are. We talked about one. Did she go? Uh-oh. We may have lost Kay. She might be back. We had a differing view as far as like if the person was a minor or not, that was one parameter that we were discussing. The severity of the terminal illness, whether or not, how to evaluate their soundness of mind comes to mind. Yeah, I hope she comes back. Yes, I'm looking and waiting for her to return. I'm sympathetic. I have had a good old blue screen of death before and so trying to find one because those two look kind of like four kids. Maybe she just needs to work. Yes, from Corey Clark, then is it really helping them? We have to evaluate cost slash effectiveness better. We can't just help everyone. I'm not really sure how to take that. Is it really helping that we have to evaluate cost effectiveness? We can't help everyone. I'm not really sure how to take that. And what I'll do is I might ask one or two questions that I think are even aimed at her and then give her a chance. We'll get your side and then her side. Bodily Sovereignty is a first order right and requires people to have the right to choose when they want to end their life from Lewis. Well, what you do with your body is your business but what you want somebody else to do is something else entirely and what you're asking a medical professional to do and the ethics that they have to abide by and so on are other matters entirely. So there have to be some kind of restrictions, some kind of regulations, some kind of thought that goes into that. It can't just be whoever wants it gets it. They just, it can't be that way. There has to be some ethical considerations to be considered. There has to be because other than that then we're just talking about angels of mercy killing whoever they feel like killing and that's insane. Question from a Twitch user. There was a question for me against euthanasia. What about situations where an infant or cognitively compromised individual were diagnosed with a fatal and painful disease? An infant with a cognitively compromised infant with a fatal disease is a difficult situation. And while my heart breaks for that kind of situation, I can't in good, we can just, it's not suicide. The child is cognitively compromised. They can't choose the medication. So you can't call it suicide. The key word is suicide, which means the person has to make the choice to do it. So any infant or anybody who's cognitively disabled before the choice is made, they're not committing suicide. That's a killing, whether it's acceptable or not is another matter, but you can't call it the suicide. And I can't advocate for that because give me a moral argument and then we can take it apart. And all right, I'm going to ask this back for UK because I think this is, I think you guys might have a separation or difference here. What about situations where an infant or cognitively compromised individual were diagnosed with a fatal and painful disease in the context of euthanasia? Can you guys hear me? Yeah, absolutely. I'm so sorry about that. My voice is completely dumped me off the call. Can you hear us now though? I can hear you now. That sounds good. And so I think there were one or two questions I think were more aimed towards you. So you might have a difference of opinion here. So question from Twitch being against euthanasia. What about situations where an infant or cognitively compromised individual were diagnosed with a fatal and painful disease? That's a little bit more complicated. Being someone that is anti-abortion and I oppose particularly late term abortions because I see them more as mercy killings as to where I believe that it would be more beneficial for a child to be born and taken care of by their parents and pass on peacefully as opposed to being killed in utero. So whenever talking about infants on this side of the womb that are also terminally ill, I don't pass judgment on parents that would rather allow their infant to be assisted in death and not go through the pain and suffering of passing on naturally, but I'm also a parent and I think that I would struggle greatly if I were to give birth to a terminally ill child, not taking every possible moment that I have with that child to love and care for them as they pass on. Thank you so very much, Kay. And a question from Sunday Worship. I think I'm gonna add in the word aware here. Is Kay aware that the word when exists separate from the word whenever? Yes, I'm not understanding the question though. I am not sure. I'll, good old browser crashed, but give me just one second and I'll have a whole bunch more questions. In fact, if you would like, keep on sending us in those questions because I think they're generating a good discussion and good showing of differences. Give me just one second, guys. You doing all right there, Kaz? Yeah, I'm fine, thank you. Maybe we should get some of these people who are more for the broader range of things to debate you and I in a tag team. Yeah, if everybody in chat, like this is my first time discussing assisted suicide. It's the first conversation I've ever had on assisted suicide, so it's very, very interesting. Yeah, I couldn't find any on YouTube to even begin to give an idea of where this would go. I've listened to, I think, one debate where they were discussing the idea of euthanasia and making euthanasia legal for all of these different situations, but that's a different conversation because neither one of us support that. Exactly, but what are you gonna do? But it sounds like we have a lot of euthanasia, pro-euthanasias in the chat, so. Yeah, yeah. It's actually, whenever I got more involved in consistent life ethic activism, I was actually really surprised to discover how many people were pro-euthanasia. I feel like a lot of people that are pro-euthanasia, though, haven't really done a lot of study on it. It's like, oh, if people wanna die, they should have the right to die. It's way more complex than that. Well, the thing about it is the right and the legality and the practical application are all just different things entirely and you can't conflate any of those together. So, I mean, do you have the right to die? Sure, maybe, but how that actually gets implemented? It's a totally separate thing and should we condone it as a matter of law? I don't know, you know? Fully agree. Got anything for us yet, Amy? I am, my browser crashed and now it's not letting me reopen it. So, I'm just trying to get the document. In fact, Sideshow Nav, if you could just discord me back that link, that would be great. One time when I was moderating my entire computer crashed on me and I had to reset my whole computer. Got a lot of technology. It's supposed to make your life easier, they said. I know how it is, painful. But yeah, this subject is very touchy. Not fully understand that. There are people that I know that struggle with these thoughts on a regular basis and when I reach out to them, they don't really, they're not forthcoming. They don't wanna ask for help. And you know how it is, when somebody asks you, do you need help or do you wanna help? You don't really wanna seem weak or you wanna put off a front and be perceived a certain kind of way. And it's just like, you're caught in this catch 22 where you know you need help, but you can't ask for it. And it just makes everything so much more complicated, the dynamics that we have with all the people that we know. And even if they're people that you know, struggle with the same kind of thing, you know? It's one of those things where I think that a huge issue whenever it comes to suicide prevention and just like how we discuss mental health as a whole in our society is like, I think that society needs to take a responsibility for how it makes people feel whenever they have these struggles and their inability to feel like they can come forward and ask for help or thinking that they're going to be perceived as weak for asking for help. We need to change our culture and how we approach these very, very sensitive topics because people should be able to feel like they have the safe place to come forward even publicly on a social media platform to say, hey, I'm really struggling and I need help. Yeah, it was very important for me to make it very clear that this was not about suicide in general. I was not going to be pro-suicide regardless of the philosophical construct because people are struggling every day. And I wanted to make sure that people had access to the phone number and the description. So if anybody's watching this and they're getting triggered if they're feeling any kind of way, please call that number. You know, just reach out to somebody because people care. There are people who care. Regardless if you think that they don't because you do matter, everybody matters. And all right, same similar subject. What if the infant had a condition such as Tay-Shax? Tay-Shax. I'm not familiar with what all that condition entails. I don't feel comfortable giving an answer to something that I'm not fully informed and fully researched up on. Regardless of the condition of the infant regardless of the thing I do. It does not have any cognitive ability. They don't have any communication skills. They can't describe to the doctor any kind of desires for death. So they can't commit suicide in any sense. Not physician-assisted, not traditional. There's no suicide for an infant. It's just not possible. It's a logical contradiction. Yeah, it would be parents choosing death for the child that cannot and it doesn't have the mental capacity to give informed consent. And whenever it comes down to this subject we've discussed it multiple times informed consent. It's truly, truly key. So we put them on a morphine drip. We give them the maximum dosage possible and just let them be in a blissful state until they pass on. Yeah, on that note I do have somebody that I've met through my pro-life activism who gave birth to a terminally ill child and she shared her story openly. She shares beautiful pictures of the brief moments that she was able to spend just holding her daughter loving her as she passed on. It's a heartbreaking but yet beautiful thing that a parent is able to do for a child that unfortunately was just not long for this world. And also there's another aspect of this that we rarely ever think about or talk about but if we go off and just kill every baby that has any kind of terminal condition when are we ever gonna gather the data that we need to learn how these conditions take place in the first place to prevent them so they don't happen in the first place? We need that data. We need it. All of us need that data. So I mean, we can't just disregard that opportunity. We can't. And also like a side note, whenever we're just talking about allowing people who are terminally ill to make the decision for themselves, how they want their death to play out and choosing to have that be with the help of a licensed physician assisting them. It's important whenever we're having this conversation about making this a legality that we also are very, very cautious about not allowing the conversation about, hey, a terminally ill person should be able to make this decision for themselves, not letting that conversation kind of branch over into ableism where we're talking about, well, obviously that little bit of life that they have left is not worth living is they're gonna die anyway. That's an incredibly slippery slope into a very ableist viewpoint about terminally ill people. That is the great point. Question from Brother John. How do you measure maturity? It's not about maturity necessarily. It's about the ability to comprehend the ramifications to be able to understand what death is and its finality, which I guess is a problem for people who don't necessarily believe that it is final. So, no, no. Yeah, that's a whole different philosophical conversation that I am not getting into. Question, kind of comment really from Kyle from Canada. WTF is assisted suicidal. I'm gonna assume this means suicide. What is assisted suicide? Assisted suicide is when you receive life-ceasing medication to help you end your life. There we go. And a question from Corey Clark. Then is it really helping him? We have to evaluate cost slash effectiveness better. We can't just help everyone. I'm trying to find his last question for some more context. That's kind of mostly what he said the last time. Is it really helping them to do what? Help is relative to the goal. And whatever it comes to cost effectiveness, I don't think that we should be bringing that into the conversation at all. This is about genuinely helping people that are dying whenever we're talking about whether or not it's cost effective to allow them to continue to suffer and be in pain or assist them into death. I think that that opens up doors for having conversations about putting value on human life that should not be there. So I prefer not to discuss whether or not it's cost effective or not to allow people to have assisted suicide. Yeah, I agree. Before we even talk about the dynamics of cost effect, we need to determine what is the right thing to do. And if you would guys would like, we do have super chats available. Super chat sends your question right to the front of the list. $2 super chat from Endo. What's wrong with youth in Asia? What did they do? I mean, I guess we can answer the question even though it kind of sounds like a troll question. My biggest issue with youth in Asia is that whenever we're discussing youth in Asia, we're not just talking about people that are facing death. It's no longer a conversation about choosing death now or choosing death later. It's about perfectly healthy people that are choosing to die because of how their life has turned out for them. A lot of people that are choosing youth in Asia are doing so for outside reasons, like being a burden on a family. A lot of disabled people opt for euthanasia in other countries. Whenever you're talking about people that are choosing euthanasia, you're talking about people that, much like suicide prevention, if we were able to address the concerns that they have that are leading them to want to be euthanized, you're potentially saving lives. And that's not a conversation that you're having whenever you're talking about assisted suicide. It's my understanding that euthanasia is, when somebody is killed for whatever reason, medical reason to lighten the burden on the medical system to alleviate this suffering maybe at the request of a family member because for whatever reason, it's when they're medically killed. Isn't that your understanding as well? Yeah, and euthanasia is overwhelmingly and has a very, very long history of being weaponized against the disabled, against the mentally ill for race reasons, against elderly people to kind of weed out people that are considered a burden on society. So for that reason also, I'm very, very anti-euthanasia. I'm against it just because it has no respect for freedom and choice. I'm very much in the camp of people need to have the ability to make choices for themselves, that we need to preserve that at all costs, that maximizing freedom is where we get suffrage, where we get emancipation, where we get LGBTQ liberation, where we get the civil rights movement, all these great things that make people more free. That's where the goodness comes from, choices. You can't have goodness without freedom of choice. $5 Super Chat from Bubble Gum Gun. What about Chinese and North Koreans jumping off buildings to escape their government, not all suicides about bad health slash morals, but tax evasion politics? Well, in regards to China and North Korea, I think the answer shouldn't be like, they're committing, they're jumping off buildings to get away from their abusive governments. So we should therefore, like that's not an argument in favor of suicide or euthanasia, it's an argument of their government suck and something needs to be done about their sucky governments that don't have any value for human life or human rights. I mean, I get what you're saying that there's a justification there. Like I'm not going to condemn them as people for their choice because they're suffering from some kind of oppression, but there's obviously a much better world that could be where that suicide is preventable, where there are other options available. And the fact that we condone that kind of system every day when we go to Walmart, when we purchase things from China, when we allow them to dictate terms to us in terms of economics and we allow them to spread that kind of ideology and create that kind of crippling oppression all over the world, then we all kind of share in that responsibility. So we all kind of need to take accountability for that too because I mean, America is, I'm not saying America is off the hook. I'm not like, you know, be some kind of crazy nationalist here. We have our problems too. We need to take the stick out of our own eye first also. But at the same time, let's call it for like it is and recognize that that ideology is not good either. We have $5 super chat from Ozen. Is there a moral difference between assisted suicide and the death penalty? One is a choice. Yes. Did he say one is a choice? That was the ending. It was a question, then a statement. He answered the question. Yeah, he did because and with assisted suicide, you are choosing death for yourself. With the death penalty, the government is choosing death for you. They are completely separate issues. And we know for a fact that the death penalty results in us inadvertently killing innocent people a certain percentage of the time. And that alone is an argument for not having the death penalty. We just should not be killing innocent people ever. Even if that means having to pay to lock up guilty people a whole lot. It actually costs less to house someone in prison for life than it does to kill them. I haven't seen that step, but I'm gonna take your word for it. And $5 super chat from Thomas Rewart. No question, but thank you so very much. If you wanna send a question in, feel free to. I think we read this earlier by wanna get K's side. Bodily sovereignty is a first order right and requires people to have the right to choose when they want to end their life. Yes, but like I said earlier, whenever we're talking about the effectiveness of suicide prevention, just because someone has made the decision whether they see it as rational or irrational in a moment or over a span of time that they no longer wanna be here. If we as a society can come alongside them, help them with their mental health, help them in the situations that they're in, help them with whatever is driving them to end their own life. I do believe that we as a society, if we want to create the ideal, if we want to strive towards the ideal society of building a better culture, a culture that truly values, we value our fellow human beings. I do believe that it is the responsibility of society to try to prevent death if it all possible to do so. Somebody that is dead set on committing suicide, unfortunately, no matter how much help you offer them or how much assistance you give them, once they have hard cut made the decision, there's absolutely nothing that you can do to stop them unless you walk them in a padded cell for the rest of their life. We're not advocating for talking down or looking down on people that have ultimately made that decision for themselves and are going to do what it is they believe is best for them. But whenever you see an overwhelming amount of people that have attempted suicide and have gotten that assistance and help with their circumstances, with their mental health, coming out of the other side valuing their life and seeing life in a new way and going on to live happy, healthy lives, I think that whenever you see the outcomes of that, there's no real justification for saying that we should not be stepping in as a society to try to prevent death if we can. Comment from Rudy Questing. Some people just don't want to exist. They can be stuffed with the day to day. What would you say to the person knowing they just don't want to exist? I would say that even if you are in a moment or a situation or extenuating circumstances where you feel like you don't want to be here anymore, I would implore you to think about how things can change in an instant and your circumstances now may not be your circumstances in the future and your life is here. Your life here is valuable, you are valuable, you are cared about, you are loved, and if somebody in the audience is in that situation where they feel like they just don't want to be here anymore because of whatever mitigating circumstances, I just want to encourage them that it does get better. Even if right now you can't see it, there is so much life out there to live. There are so many interactions to be made, so many connections to be made with other human beings. Don't limit yourself to the experiences that you're having right now in this moment. I would, well, first of all, the chances that I'd run into somebody who would simply and only just not want to exist with no other justification or reasoning, I don't think that that is a real thing. I highly doubt that. I think in reality, practically speaking, they have a reason that they don't want to exist. There's something bad, there's something that's happening to them. There's a reason why they don't want to exist, and I would ask them why, and I'll explore that with them and get to the reason that they don't want to exist and offer them another perspective on it. And if I really honestly can't offer anything, then I'd get them some kind of professional help. And then if professional help really can't do anything for them, then that is life. But there's probably something that can't be done for them. Because whatever bad thing that is happening to them, there's bad things happening to a lot of people. And there are children being abused right now. There are people with no one to look out for them. There's all kinds of horrible things happening in this world right now. And we need as many hands on deck as possible to address those things. So find something, find someone that you know is in need. Do something that you know for a fact is good. And dedicate yourself to that. And then derive pleasure from that. And then you will not be miserable anymore. Because you will have a concrete purpose in life. It doesn't have to be some existential ethereal thing out there. It can be a person who didn't have a father or a mother. It could be a homeless shelter that was missing a cook or a cleaner or something. It's simple little things. We just need as many people as possible, doing as much good as possible. And then the world probably won't be so goddamn shitty. Question from Lewis. More of a comment. Opposing a person's right to their own bodily sovereignty, which would necessarily include choosing when to end your life, is morally bankrupt. That's not what we're doing. No, yeah, I agree. That's not the argument that's being made. We're not trying to take away your right. We are giving you an alternative. Thomas's super chat has come in for $5. Those cost-effectiveness discussions are what the health insurance companies have. It even has a name. Actucural Science, A-C-T-U-A-R-I-A-L. The health insurance company has decided your fate more than you realize. Fuck health insurance companies. That's the system that we definitely need to address and fix. If we can do that together, we can definitely work on that together, all of us. We can vote smarter. We can... What is the term? I'm having a brain fart, never mind. We can caucus. That's the word I was looking up. And thank you so very much, guys. Keep on sending those super chats if you would like to get yours blasted to the front of the line. We're sending love to both Kaz and Kay here as they're spending time with us today. $5 super chat from Mark Reed. Both Kay and Kaz, if someone was quadriplegic, not terminal, and needed assistance to breathe and wanted to die, would you support pulling the plug? No. In that instance, I would not support pulling the plug. I would support reaching out to this person, giving them, like Kaz said, giving them an alternative, giving them a different outlook on their life. I think that so many people in these disability situations, regardless of the severity of that disability, have such outlooks on their lives because of stereotypes that are perpetuated currently in our society towards disabled people. Despite all of the advancements and all the progress we've made with marginalized groups in our society, we are still living in an incredibly ableist culture. And so I think that you would see a lot less disabled people kind of looking to assisted suicide and things like that. If we created a culture that was more loving and accepting and caring towards people with disabilities. I'm gonna slightly disagree with you on that one. To the degree that if I can be confident that they have been mentally evaluated, that they are of sound mind and that there have been reasonable measures taken to alleviate their mental suffering, I would support their choice. I would definitely want a lot of measures taken though to try to help them come out of that feeling first. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this all here before, but I have a son with a physical disability, he's not a quadriplegic or anything. But one thing that I struggle with is avoiding projecting what I would feel if I was him onto him and trying not to put myself into that position too much because I am not him and I can't feel what he feels. And a lot of us, I don't know what the correct term is for people without any kind of- Able-bodied. Able-bodied, even that sounds, I don't know, icky. But we don't know what people who with disabilities feel and what kind of quality of life they have. And it's not for us to judge them or to try to infer whatever they feel. It's for them to tell us. So like I said, I want freedom of choice. I want freedom for everyone that includes people who are quadriplegic. So if they are of sound mind and measures have been taken to try to give them a happy life and it's just not gonna work, then it's their life. I would support it. So we got two comments because they got piggyback off one another. From Lewis, if you actually did care about people, you'd support their right to choose when they want to end their life. So I think he was clarifying from his last, but I'll add on even since again. But if the assisting doctor can sense to helping a person who wants to end their own life, then there's no ethical wrong there. Can you read it one more time? Sure, and maybe we should take it one at a time. If you actually did care about people, you'd support their right to choose when they want to end their life. Okay, so the right is a little bit separate from the assisted suicide piece because assisting somebody and killing themselves is a little different from them actually killing themselves entirely. Yeah, and it still circles back to my argument about how whenever you see so many people coming off of suicide attempts, no longer wanting to end their own life, I don't think that there's a moral argument against people trying to prevent death. If somebody has hell bent on committing suicide, no matter how much help you give them, they're going to do what they're going to do. But just like with anything that is detrimental or potentially fatal, as human beings that care about each other, we step in and try to prevent that from happening. It's almost human nature to do so. And so the end of that or a second comment really is, but if the assisting doctor can sense to helping a person who wants to end their own life, then there's no ethical wrong there. So that's just obviously incorrect, just because that's like saying, if the murderer consents to murdering, then there's nothing wrong. A doctor can be a murderer. So just the fact that they consented to taking somebody's life because they wanted it doesn't necessarily mean that there was nothing wrong. And just because the person wanted to die doesn't mean just because they expressed that they wanted to die, does not mean that they actually indeed wanted to die. They could have been under the influence. They could have been pressured. There's all kinds of other things. There has to be a regulation involved in order to make sure that this thing is actually being done properly. So it's just a person has a right to die. A person has a right to do it with dignity, but there just has to be a strict rigorous framework to make sure that it's not being abused and there just has to be parameters. $2 Super Chat from Bubble Gum Gun. My body, my choice. Oh, I'm not even going to start down that rabbit hole. Sounds good. We're moving right along. From Sunday worship, what if a cure is found for an extremely painful terminal disease but it is vastly expensive? Do the guests think poor people would still have the right to assisted suicide in that case? I'm very much of the opinion that if you can help a human being, you should do everything within your power to do so. I know that's a little bit more complicated whenever talking about expensive medicines in a capitalist society, but to me, if we were to find cures for these terminal illnesses and you had poor people that could not afford it and are instead opting for assisted suicide, that leads into a discussion about socialized medicine to make sure that everybody that needs access to life-saving care has access to life-saving care because at that point, it doesn't matter what the treatment is, it's life-saving care. Yeah. It was interesting. I anticipated running to a question similar to that, but I thought it was going to go that, what if the cure is found for terminal illness the day after somebody commits physician assisted suicide? That's where I thought it was going to. The answer to that would be, you can't really make a decision based on potential information that you don't have at the time, but she didn't go there. What are you going to do? From nuts and bolts, what if help has been repeatedly ineffective in the past? Whenever it comes to suicide, they've gotten help, they've gotten treatment and have reverted back into being suicidal. As someone that has been involved in post-suicide attempt treatments and has meant that they're going to be able to go through these treatments and met people that have been in and out of these treatments, I think as long as they are coming out of treatment, they're making progress. You don't get released from treatment unless you're making progress. So as long as progress is being made, if they're reverting back, that just means that they need more help. But like I said, ultimately whenever a person makes that decision, of complete sound, mind and body, that they just do not want to be here anymore, there is nothing that you can do to stop it. And eventually it is going to happen. But if we want to have a culture that values human life and has people caring about other human beings, we offer that assistance for as long as we can offer that assistance. I think that I said in my opening statement that one of the key features is an intractability that is not able to be treated. So in this hypothetical scenario, if this person has been treated multiple times, there would have to be some kind of established criteria to determine that this person's condition is intractable. And I don't know what that would look like. I don't know that there truly is an intractability. I don't know what that would look like. I don't know that there truly is an intractable depression that leads to suicide. But let's just assume for charity speaking that there is, then at some point I would be okay saying, yes, this person who's crippling depression and suicidal ideation may qualify them for after all the boxes have been checked and we make sure that we've done everything that we can, that they may be qualified for physician assisted suicide. But that's my position. Question from John Yu. The problem is, can we trust our own choices when things are on the down and the world looks bleak? Maybe or maybe things will get more bearable. And that's really the argument that it comes down to whenever discussing suicide. The reality is, is that overwhelmingly no, we can't really trust our own decisions to make such a final decision for ourselves whenever we are in the midst of incredibly hard circumstances or we're struggling with things like depression or mental health issues. And I think that that kind of really rounds back to what me and Kaz had been saying in regards to the discussion about not assisted suicide but suicide as a concept. Yes, I agree, totally. From Tyler. So both are arguing today's reality should be determined by what could be. That's the slippery slope Kay has been invoking. Whenever you're making a decision so incredibly final as no longer wanting to exist, I think that it is important to look forward to what your circumstances could look like on the other side of a depressive episode or on the other side of outside forces causing your life to be worse than it could possibly be. Whenever you're deciding that you no longer want to exist within these circumstances, therefore you're going to cease to exist entirely. I think that it is an important factor and an overwhelmingly helpful factor in combating suicidal thoughts to think about what your circumstances could potentially be and it gives people that are struggling with suicidal thoughts a goal and something to kind of strive towards which has been statistically proven to be incredibly beneficial for multiple mental health issues. Follow-up question from Tyler. What about the percent that don't? The percent that don't what? So his original question was so both are arguing today's reality should be determined by what could be that's the slippery slope K has been invoking and he followed that up with what about the percent that don't? The percent of people that are suicidal that don't benefit from, I'm guessing people that don't benefit that are suicidal that don't benefit from people trying to help them. Yeah, I think that I've kind of answered that multiple times. Somebody that is determined and has made the final decision that they want to end their life is going to do so regardless of how much help you offer them. So for the percentage of people that do not benefit from people around them reaching out and trying to help prevent them from killing themselves, the percentage that don't unfortunately they continue to go on and take their own life. But at least the people around them have the ability to know that they did everything that they could to try to prevent that from being the reality. You're muted. You're muted. Is it possible, question from Twitch, is it possible for a healthy mind to make the choice to end itself or is it a desire to, or is the desire to die proof the mind cannot make a rational decision? Hypothetically, show me a practical example. Yeah. That's a, that's something that really it's kind of a very open-ended question. It's like a whole separate discussion in and of itself. Just like saying, is it possible that, never mind. Comment from Tyler. This is the crux of their disagreement. Push this. Okay. So today is anti because of existential utopia. You guys can differ on the reasons why and where it's wrong. All right. I think we kind of gone over it. Like that's kind of what we went over at the very, very beginning of this conversation. And we kind of came to a very, very similar conclusion. We're kind of both pro to a certain degree in anti to a certain degree. It's just, we're kind of at a point of agreement and concession here that I don't know what he's talking about. What existential, what did he say? Existential utopia. Existential utopia. I really don't know what he's talking about. I think that he's referring to how I keep referencing trying to build a better society. And I think that a society that is not trying to progress forward, like, of course, humans are not, they're not infallible. We're never going to reach what would be referred to as a utopia, but a society that is an attempting to progress and move forward and better itself is just automatically going to go backwards. If we're not moving forward, we are going to start moving backwards. And I prefer to live in a society that is trying to progress to make life better for as many human beings as possible. I think all moral systems use some version of a best of all possible worlds as the measure of their moral system. Like even like Tom Jump uses the everybody gets their own universe type thing. So like, I don't know which one you're using necessarily. I don't think you explained yours. Mine is the perpetual survival concept. It's not that different in Christians use heaven, you know, so like, we're all using a best of all possible world scenario to measure morality is just how specific is it, how real is it? Is it something that can actually be obtained? Is it based on something in reality? And so existential utopia isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's not really a valid criticism of a moral concept is just a matter of how well is it defined? And is it logically consistent? So with Tyler's next two comments and then two comments after that, those will be the last of the questions. So now is your chance. If you have a question to ask Kaz Kay or both of them, send them in. And Tyler Katz. There's another point of disagreement. Where is the line of responsible attempts to dissuade them? That's a great question. I don't know. I'm in a very similar boat and I think that it goes from person to person for me personally. If I knew that I had someone in my life that was struggling with suicide, I would, I would attempt to reach out to them and attempt to help them until there was no ability for me to do so anymore. I'd say we do some statistical analysis of how many time, what, what percentage of the time we actually are successful and arbitrarily pick the bottom percentage to cut off and say we get 98%, 2% or, I'm not sure, 80, 20, something like that, some kind of thinking like that where we say, we save as many as we can, do our best. Didn't hear you. Comment from Tyler Katz. It's always, it's that funny game. I don't want you guys to hear the clickity-clackity. There's a moral implication anytime you remove someone else's agency. Yes, which is why I want freedom of choice. And I don't advocate for euthanasia because it's got to be somebody's agent. Some agent has to decide I want to end my life before medication can be given to them. Yeah, and I think that, you know, his comment is more in regards to the idea of suicide as a whole. We're not entirely removing agency from someone whenever we try to prevent them from killing themselves. It is an attempt to understand whether or not they are of sound mind whenever making that decision. Because someone not of sound mind cannot make informed consent to committing that act. So whenever discussing agency in regards to suicide prevention, we're not removing their agency by ensuring that they have made informed consent to end their own life. I would ask Tyler, like, does he think that somebody suffering from a schizophrenic episode? I shouldn't say that. Some kind of psychological break, right? I'm not going to specify the disease process, but some kind of psychological break is able to give informed consent to sign a contract. If they are able, if they're not able to do that, if you can get somebody out of a contract based on the fact that they're having a manic episode of some kind, then can they really consent to suicide? I don't think so. So I mean, that's kind of what we're dealing with here. While somebody may have physical autonomy over their body and they can literally do anything they want to their body because you can't really stop them, the idea of us as a society condoning a doctor to provide a medication to somebody who's not in the right state of mind or may not be in the right state of mind, we have a probability judgment to make here. That's the question, like, how do we know? Now, if you can establish beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt that this person is in the right state of mind when they decide, yes, I want to commit suicide, then by all means. But the problem is in practice, in the real world, that's just not how it works. $2 Super Chat from Bubble Gum Gun. For both, what would break you to commit Sudoku? Thank you, Bubble Gum Gum. $5 Super Chat from Mark Reed. Thanks to Kay and Kaz, Amy and the Mudd. Send in so much love, Mark. I want to give respect to Kaz for sharing the traumatic events in his life. Much love, buddy. Thank you. Thank you so very much, Mark. And all right, we are coming down to the last few questions from Jesse Cool. In our capitalist society where private insurance exists, how can we sufficiently guarantee that cost doesn't play a large role in someone's decision? I don't think we can. I think that we have to change a lot of things before we can even begin to talk about in mass allowing things like this. I don't know. I think Kay, you looked into the stats on Portland. I wrote a paper about this in college, actually, so I should know more about this, but I did not look over this because I didn't want to go into a slippery slope fallacy and talk about what is, I want to talk about what should be. There is physician assisted suicide in America right now in at least two states. There probably is more now. So, but yeah, like I said, I don't think that we can actually guarantee that we can try with carefully written legislation and heavily debated topics. But I'll let Kay answer the rest of that. Yeah, I think that Kaz and I really agree on this. As someone that is kind of more center left politically, I struggle with a lot of aspects of capitalism. Healthcare being like the main one. Our healthcare system is not set up to care about human beings. It's a profit system with people profiting off of other people suffering and to me that is horrifyingly awful. I'm not an expert on economics. I'm not an expert on different healthcare systems, but there is a lot of work to be done, not just on this issue, but just as healthcare entirely to create a system where we're actually valuing human beings and wanting human beings to be healthy and get the care that they need. Good question though. Yes, thank you so very much. And then $5 Super Chat from Anthony. Great civil debate guys. Good job moderating Amy. Thank you so very much. Miss Juicy James tonight though. Woohoo. That's right. Send in love out to James. Jesus loves you all. God bless. Hit the like and subscribe button. Do it. Woohoo. Thank you so very much. Thank you Anthony. And I think we only have one or two more questions left and then we're going to let these guys do closing statements and send love to everyone out there. But from Rory, most people who kill themselves so, I think that's do so after decades of suffering, it's not a trust ourselves in the moment. It's not a moment. I think that even though people go through very long periods of life in depression in hard circumstances, I don't think that it's wrong to say that we should still continue to try to reach out to them, to try to get them help, to try to help them ourselves, to try to address the issues that they're facing in their life that is making them and causing them suffering. I would be interested to see if the majority of people who take their own lives do it after decades of suffering. What exactly were those circumstances that were causing that suffering and was anything done to try to remove the suffering before suicide took place? Yeah, I don't know that I have much to add to that. Yeah, just move on. Send in love to both of you guys. And all right, I think this is the last question of the night. Unless something comes in, you can word it that way, but intervening in somebody's doing voluntarily is removing their agency no matter how you frame it. Let me read that one more time. You can word it that way, but intervening in something somebody's doing voluntarily is removing their agency no matter how you frame it. The key thing there is the word voluntarily because if they are not of sound mind at the moment, if they are having a mental health crisis, if there are extenuating circumstances leading to that moment, then they're not doing it voluntarily. And the whole purpose of like wellness checks on people that are having suicidal problems, putting people that have attempted suicide in mental health facilities so that they can get help. It's an evaluation on whether or not that act was truly done voluntarily if they were of sound mind to do so. So this goes more into discussions of mental health and whether or not we are truly removing somebody's agency whenever in these incredibly complex circumstances. I think that you're proposing a very broad ethic there and you're not really considering the implications of it. So you're saying anytime anyone does anything voluntarily, no one is to intervene. So think about that for a second. Anyone doing anything. So you're saying that if a little child is putting a fork into an electrical outlet, you can't intervene, right? You're saying that if somebody's voluntarily walking in the dark and they're about to walk into an impaling spike, you can't stop them. Or whatever fantastical idea. There's so many different scenarios in which that's obviously incorrect that I really think that you need to just stop and think about refining that ethic a little bit more and then maybe we can address it a little bit more carefully. And all right. Question. It looks like two just coming in. Farron Salas isn't hospice. Just everyone waiting around for someone to die seems a bit, no idea what is trying to be said with frown emoji here. Sad, maybe? Yeah, hospice is incredibly sad. And that's why we were, these are the circumstances that we were having this discussions around in the first place whenever somebody is at death store and they're having the option of death now or death later. There is a moral discussion to have about whether or not they should have the right to determine when exactly their death happens because it's happening either way and how that death plays out for them and their loved ones. So I know a lot of hospice nurses because I was a nurse before my mental issues got the better of me. And they have told me a lot of stories about a lot of situations like that. And while, yes, it's very sad, it can also be much more beautiful than the alternative. But that is also part of why I advocate for what I'm advocating here for because it could be more elegant than even that. But in those situations, not often, I wouldn't say usually, but often those patients are not able to give informed consent or sometimes they would be. But we're talking about people with dementia. And yeah, so it's a very sad thing. But hospice does a great service to a lot of people. And those nurses do a lot of hard work and they're to be applauded for what they do. From Kimo, the Soviet Union had a pragmatic approach to this. It was illegal to murder yourself because it was a destruction of state property. Well, I think that's silly. Yeah, not a huge fan of considering people to be state property. I don't think that it's practical to consider somebody a criminal when they attempt suicide or actually commit suicide is no help to anyone. It's not going to make anybody's life better to give them a criminal record if they try and fail to commit suicide. It's certainly not going to, like I said, it's not going to make their life better. So why would you do that? Why wouldn't you try to give them some kind of assistance? If anything, it might give you an opportunity, I guess, to use the state's force to give them resources. I don't know. There should be some kind of maybe forced enrollment in, well, I don't know about force to see this thing. Like a lot of our audience was saying autonomy or whatever. But yeah, I think that giving somebody a criminal record because of a suicide attempt is just ridiculous. That's all I can say about that right now. Stick says nothing I said was talking about whether or not one ought to intervene. It was purely about whether or not we're acknowledging that it is removing agency. So his previous comment was you could word it that way, but intervening in something someone's doing voluntarily is removing their agency, no matter how you frame it. And so now he's saying nothing I said was talking about whether or not one ought to intervene. It was purely about whether or not we're acknowledging that it is removing agency. Okay, so then we agree that there are some situations in which it is appropriate to remove agency. From chemo, in what way is the death of an infant more significant than an adult? Potential. And all right, I think that's going to finish up all of the questions we had. I want to send a lot of love to both Kaz and Kay. We're going to give both them closing statements. And then we're going to say goodbye, everyone. It's been fun. But Kaz, you started us off. So I'm going to hand it right back to you for your 10 minute closing statement. I don't have 10 minute closing statement. I'm just going to say it was a great talk in UK. Thank you so much, Amy for hosting and moderate and you did a great job. Thank you, James again, if you ever watch this for giving us this chance to have this conversation. This went a lot better than I thought it was going to after we got stuck. And again, if you are going through anything right now, please call that hotline number. If you're a veteran, please go to that website. You're not alone. There's lots of people struggling, but you do matter. Somebody out there needs you. Somebody who never met could use your help right now. So please, I know you may feel like life not worth living like you don't matter, but you could. You definitely fucking could. So it's all about a choice. Make the choice to matter if you want to please. And that's all I had to say. All right, I'll just go ahead and jump in. Yes, I was going to say, thank you so very much, Kaz. And with that, the floor is all yours for your closing statement. Well, I think that this discussion was awesome. I very much enjoyed myself. Thank you, Kaz for reaching out and offering to have this discussion with me because it went great. Amy, thank you. You did such a great job moderating today and shout out to James for always doing an awesome job setting these up. I think that this was an incredibly productive discussion. It was my first time disgusting assisted suicide. And it was really interesting to see the different opinions and perspectives of people that were joining in chat. Thank you for super active chat everybody. And I think I'll just close out with just reminding everybody like check on your friends and your family and your loved ones, especially now with everything that's been going on at the last several years. We kind of come to like an all time peak in just it's really hard to exist in the space right now. So make sure that you're reaching out to your friends and your family and your loved ones. So reminding people around you that they are loved and cared about because it's so super important for people to know that right now. Exactly. Thank you so very much and all right. I want to thank everyone out there for joining us on modern day debate. We're a neutral platform welcoming everybody from all walks of life. If you're looking for more juicy debates in the future, don't forget to like and subscribe, including tonight's debate of assisted suicide on trial. I want to thank our two interlocutors, Kay and Kaz for joining us tonight. And if you liked what either of our guests said, both of their links are in the description below. With that, I am Amy Newman with modern day debate. And we hope you continue having great conversations, discussions and debates. Good night, everyone. Peace.