Excerpt:
The doctor who performed the Netherlands’ first case of euthanasia on a child under 12 did so with due care, the supervising committee concluded after investigating. The patient, a child of nearly 2 years who suffered from several severe medical conditions, died at the end of 2025.
Paliative care exists
you don’t know what palliative care means.
I do and I think they should, in fact, have given the kid a lifelong morphine drip.
That little undeveloped central nervous system might as well enjoy the ride down.
So just pump the severely disabled child full of morphine for years, until it dies or is old enough to beg for death?
Sounds like torture.
Sounds fucking awesome.
(And it wouldn’t have taken long by all accounts)
Sounds like euthanasia with extra steps.
Wow, brilliant. I’ll bet all the doctors in Europe never even considered that, in their rush to execute a 2 year old. If only they had consulted your genius. /S
It would be all the doctors in Netherlands. Others seemingly manage without execution of 2 year olds.
Define “manage”? Are you saying that another doctor would have cured the child?
All palliative care is, is making a person so high that they can’t feel it while they die slower.
It often involves removing feeding or water to speed the process up, when the body doesn’t want to die but is terminal.
I’ve seen it. My grandmother went through palliative care after a severe stroke. All it was was they stopped feeding her or giving her water so that she would die, and just jacked her up on morphine so she didn’t really feel it.
It’s not any more humane than euthanasia. It’s just more humane than the old school alternative of slow and painful death.
That’s not what Palliative Care is, or at least it’s not the only thing that it is. My Dad had palliative care when he got to the final stages of dementia, and it was the best thing we could have done. I will always recommend the form of care he got to anyone dealing with this particular issue.
Sure it is. Everyone should go out high as fuck on morphine.
They do that with euthanasia too. Just faster and more deliberate than getting high on morphine and dying slowly of dehydration.
I can confidently predict, then, that your solution to the Trolley Problem would be to not pull the lever.
The correct solution.
The solution that causes more death is the correct one?
The solution where you don’t kill someone is the correct one.
Lemme rephrase the trolley problem: you’re a surgeon. You have five people dying on the table, in need of an organ donor. A healthy young man with a broken leg shows up at the ER. Do you butcher him for parts to save the five dying people?
no, that is the incorrect answer,
to not pull the lever, the puller considers their culpability in the harm caused by their intervention. “morality is determined by the action.”
where as those who pull the lever decide on the morality by the amount of harm. “morality is determined by the results”
the ones who abstain on pulling the lever are not making a moral choice of the situation, they are preventing an action that can cause harm and assigning blame of the greater situations harm on someone else. a very self centered consideration.
Fair enough.
I definitely wouldn’t want to be a minority if you were in charge. Good of the many and all…
There was an old interactive guide I think of every time this comes up, democracy is already a problem for minorities, and even getting to a compromise may be hard
It’s kind of off-topic, though
Yeah this whole sub thread is off topic.
Trolley problem is interesting because there isn’t a cleanly correct answer, and both answers can lead to atrocities when applied at societal scale. It also leads to interesting questions about the value of a human life, which lead to thornier topics.
Utilitarian theory dictates that the lives of five people are worth more than the life of one. That could easily lead to tyranny of the majority, however.
if you want to alter the trolley problem go ahead and make your claim, but do not attempt to twist the trolley problem and assume my results. your straw man insinuation is dis-honest
I haven’t altered anything, nor have I insinuated anything.
I have, however, applied reductio ad absurdum.
you have no idea how organ donation works.
And you seem to struggle with hypothetical analogies. Sucks for both of us I guess.
Not even apples and oranges, more like apples and gas giant planets.
The healthy patient is most likely going to survive and thrive for many years.
The two year old was going to die within a decade; would never be able to walk or talk; couldn’t even learn to feed themselves.
I’m talking about the trolley problem?
What part of my comment confused you?
edit = never mind. I saw the other comments this person made. I will just ignore them.
I responded to the trolley problem comment, I made no comments on the article itself.
Five? It’s five million. There are five million people on the trolley tracks. The correct answer is to pull the lever and then run to try and save the one person on the other set of tracks. Any decent person would at least TRY to save everyone, even if they’ll fail.
Okay. Say you have five million people waiting on organ donation. Do you chop up the healthy young man with the broken leg to use his parts to save five million?
Your solution, while admirable, is not the trolley problem.
Well, if he’s just in there for a broken leg and he’s conscious, I think I’d ask him to volunteer. Is there a reason we can only use his organs and not mine?
Your scenario seems overly complicated when field surgeries already exist, where medics frequently have to make life-or-death decisions already via triage.
What about you? How do you save the five million patients?
You’re coming up with edge cases that sidestep the trolley problem very effectively.
Given the actual trolley problem, I said it before and I’ll say it again: I would not pull the lever.
Spoken from a place of profound ignorance