Assisted Suicide and the Fallacy of the Slippery Slope Fallacy
Taking the easy way out
This Free Press article describes a nightmare, particularly for those who read it and recognize elements of the story in their own marriage/divorce.
The story describes the long and bitter custody battle between the mother and father over their three daughters. Normally, we would blame both sides. We would assume both are exaggerating for legal advantage and slandering the other party because that is normal in divorce proceedings. However, when you learn that the attorneys and counselors for the children took the father’s side in determining that the father should be awarded custody, that should be a clue that something was very wrong with the mother.
Then, when you find out that the mother chose assisted suicide rather than choosing to be there for the children, that is a definite “tell” that the mother was wearing the black hat in this dispute.
Several lessons can be gleaned from the story.
- Don’t marry a psychopath.
Of course, this is much easier said than done. Psychopaths have the training and habits that let them pass as normal as long as they are invested in passing as normal. Most people will give others — particularly those they loved enough to marry — the benefit of the doubt.
Also, it doesn’t help that the behavior of psychopaths is so far outside the norm that it becomes almost impossible to believe the stories of those behaviors. In this case, the story of the mother having the oldest daughter sleep on a mattress in the mother’s room makes most people think, “That can’t be true. No one would do that.” At least, we don’t jump to believe the story because it is so bizarre. The psychopath will use the bizarreness to deny the story, saying, “Come on, now. NOBODY would do that.”
Gaslighting is a chief weapon of the psychopath.
2. The mother who doesn’t stick around for her children is the parent who should lose custody.
Psychopaths are narcissists. They don’t care about the welfare of others. They care about their own welfare. They care about how they look to others. Naturally, when they no longer can benefit from a relationship, they cut ties and move on to another relationship they can exploit.
3. We started out with assisted suicide being justified by heart-tearing stories of people being kept alive while in horrible pain, which has now turned into something a psychopath can use for revenge.
The story ends with the mother choosing to end her life because of her allegedly abusive husband and a cancer diagnosis. She used her suicide to enlist internet mobs on her ex-husband to ruin his life and, incidentally, make the lives of her daughters — who are dependent on their father’s successful career as a patent litigator for things like a place to live, college, a start on life — far more precarious.
Psychopaths are evil.
But we learn in the story that the choice of suicide was not caused by an “abusive husband” since the mother was the abusive element in the family, and she did not choose suicide because of cancer.
She was given a doctor’s note to kill herself because of “existential misery.”
In other words, she didn’t like how her life had turned out.
Therefore, she was given the key to abandon her continuing responsibility to her children with maximum convenience and social prestige. She didn’t just kill herself alone and at home like some loser; she went to Switzerland for assisted suicide! How trendy!
TELL ME THAT THE SLIPPERY SLOPE IS A FALLACY.
Here is the piece on that element of the story.
Catherine’s suicide note claimed she could have “lasted. . . longer” if she had not been “re-diagnosed with cancer.” Brewer said Catherine told him she had cancer, but when I asked whether cancer was the reason she had decided to end her life, he said: “Absolutely not.”
“It was not something that troubled her, because she wasn’t planning to be around long enough for it to cause trouble,” he told me, adding that she wasn’t seeking treatment, because of her plans to die. “She was just concerned that she had been treated abominably by her husband.”
Caught in a brutal divorce, Catherine Kassenoff committed medically assisted suicide. Then the campaign to destroy her ex, Allan, led by TikToker Robbie Harvey, truly began.
Catherine’s case for assisted dying was “unusual,” Brewer explained, because there was “no serious psychiatric diagnosis involved.”“Catherine was functioning extremely well,” he said, “as evidenced by her ability to get all these documents out into the world before she actually departed from it,” he added — referencing her suicide note.
He called hers an “existential assisted suicide” — which is “when people feel that they have failed to achieve something very important or that something very important is being destroyed.”
He made “no actual medical diagnosis,” he clarified; Catherine’s case was one of “understandable misery.”
When assisted suicide was pitched to us, we were told that it was for people who were dying within days and in great pain. We were told that there would be doctors who would make that determination. We were told that we were monsters for keeping such people alive.
Twenty years later, we find psychopaths can use assisted suicide as a revenge strategy without pain and nowhere close to death.
This is literally an element of dystopian science fiction. When I say “literally,” I mean “as in literature.” In Harry Harrison’s Make Room, Make Room, which became the movie Soylent Green, the future dystopian New York — actually, it’s now in the past since it was set in 2022 — suicide chambers with images of nature are used to lure people into killing themselves and helping to alleviate overpopulation.
In Lord of the World by Robert Hughes Benson, written in 1907, euthanasia squads rush to scenes of traffic accidents to euthanize the injured.
I recently reviewed Generation Ship by Michael Mammay, a novel about a generation ship that has a policy of euthanizing passengers when they turn 80 to keep the population in line. This policy fuels popular discontent as the ship reaches its destination.
The dystopian society of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley trivializes death through “death conditioning” toddlers.
“Just returned,” explained Dr. Gaffney, while Bernard, whispering, made an appointment with the Head Mistress for that very evening, “from the Slough Crematorium. Death conditioning begins at eighteen months. Every tot spends two mornings a week in a Hospital for the Dying. All the best toys are kept there, and they get chocolate cream on death days. They learn to take dying as a matter of course.”
“Like any other physiological process,” put in the Head Mistress professionally.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 2316–2321). Kindle Edition.
What underlies this trivialization of death is the trivialization of people. When the Savage objects to having ice-cream eating toddlers watch the death of his mother as if it were a circus attraction, he makes a scene. The mental reaction of the attendant is significant as she wonders:
Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of where he was? of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry — as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that!
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 2960–2963). Kindle Edition.
Meaningless people come; meaningless people go. Who cares if they are the mother of three daughters who might conceivably love her and feel a deep, gaping wound in their soul by their total and utter abandonment?
We live in this dystopia, and we don’t even know it.
The thread that holds these dystopias together is the technocratic quick fix. Is the population too large? Are people injured in an accident? Have crowding on a ship? Does thinking about death harsh your mellow? Angry at your husband and the New York legal system? Don’t worry; we can make the whole thing disappear by killing someone.
The harder alternative is to do something about these problems. The harder alternative is to find another solution.
The technocratic solution of euthanasia is despair. It is giving up and conceding defeat. That is the easy solution.
The harder choice requires hope.
Is it the case that our society has abandoned hope? And where does that message come from?
