Good points!
It looks like it’s already available in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
FWIW depending on how long these have been available, this makes me think it’s less useful to pursue, since that would make it less neglected (albeit more tractable) and make me think that other countries are probably going to start adopting it soon anyway.
Thanks for the comment!
If EA decided to spearhead this movement, I fear it would risk permanently politicizing the entire EA movement, ruining a lot of great work that is getting done in other cause areas.
I agree with this strongly—I initially put at the end of this post that I think most of this work should be done outside of EA spaces for the sake of the movement’s reputation but deleted that part for reasons I can’t fully remember.
I’m picturing that in the USA this would become a significant culture-war issue at least 10% as big as the pro-life-vs-pro-choice wars over abortion rights. [...] (Maybe in some European countries this kind of law would be an easier sell?)
I also agree with this—I think if I were to pursue this as a project it would be a matter of going after low(er)-hanging fruits in the more liberal countries of Europe to normalize it a bit and then bringing it to bigger/more difficult countries. Similar to the approach that is currently being taken for approval voting, drug legalization, etc. I’m not sure if it would ever pass in the US, at least not in my lifetime, though if it were available to non-citizens elsewhere (also a big lift) that could be a way around that.
Finally, I would have a lot of questions about the exact theory of impact here and the exact pros/cons of enacting a MAID-style law in more places. From afar (I don’t know much about suicide methods), it seems like there are plenty of reasonably accessible ways that a determined person could end their life. So, for the most part, a MAID law wouldn’t be enabling the option of suicide for people who previously couldn’t possibly commit suicide in any way—it’s more like it would be doing some combination of 1. making suicide logistically easier / more convenient, and 2. making suicide more societally acceptable. This seems dicier to me, since I’d be worried about causing a lot of collateral damage / getting a lot of adverse selection—who exactly are the kinds of people who would suicide if it was marginally more societally acceptable, but wouldn’t suicide otherwise?
I think more research is needed on this, absolutely. One thing I also didn’t mention is that we discussed this in an ethics class I took for my master’s degree and I believe some author had speculated that the added bureaucracy of going through this sort of approval process might actually force people to reflect on their life in a way that they wouldn’t if they resorted to more accessible means. And there may be other psychological impacts of it that we don’t fully understand, e.g. it could also be opening up the conversation/gateway to more intensive treatment methods that people might otherwise be afraid to access for fear of being locked up in a psych ward.
Thanks! I share this concern to some extent. Anecdotally I’ve heard of a whole lot of stories of people who attempted or came near attempting to take their life and then are glad they didn’t later on. I think the opposite happens a lot too but doesn’t get shared as much because of the stigma around suicide. “Local suicidal man says he’d attempt again” just doesn’t make for a great news story.
This also rests on an assumption (that I haven’t decided that I agree with) that it’s worse for people to potentially miss out on a future possibility of a good life than it is for them to certainly suffer with whatever is so bad they think it makes life not worth living, if that makes sense. It feels somewhat paternalistic to me, but I can see the merits of it also.