Doghead's Cosmic Bar

If you don't believe there's a difference between people and animal, you should really become a vegetarian.
Monkeys (don't know exactly which kind(s)) have a DNA which is 99% similar to the human DNA, and this makes me think that they should be treated more like humans.

No matter if you're dealing with a human or an animal, they should be treated humanely. Industrial farms, chicken batteries etc. should therefore be illegal.

Humans also take extraordinary measures to stay alive at all costs, without even considering the quality of life they'll be having. There's total vegetables sitting around drooling all over themselves, with less intelligent thoughts than most animals, but somebody loves them so they keep on living anyway. What kind of love is that, to force your family member to sit on and on in a chair without understanding anything that happens to them, or ever having any hope of doing so?

Sometimes I think animals have it easy. Even though we eat them.

Perhaps we are the ones who are less intelligent, afterall, if we are stupid enough to destroy the world in which we live in such a 'ghastly' manner, we must have no brains at all. Why cant we all live like wild animals and roam the lands once again?

I'm not sure whether people are better than animals; I was, I suppose, playing Devil's Advocate, sorry!

I can sense the topic of euthanasia arising. I personally think it should be legalised, provided it is controlled very carefully. I heard about discussions of a sort of will, where one can say they want to be killed if they reach a certain vegetative state and cannot express their wishes to die then. I don't know any more details than that, though.

Euthanasia is anothering that has been legalized in Holland lately. It's still really dificult if the person in question isn't able to state the wish to die himself. This autumn there was the first celeb-authanasia case, btw.

What's scary about authanasia is for a lot op people connected with religion. If you take your own, or someone elses life, this might result in e.g. eternity in hell. Some people also think that the soul is not yet ready to leave the body, and that the person will be forever trapped in his dead body.

It's called a "living will" although since I'm not old I don't really know much about it. Personally, if the situation ever comes up, I'd prefer not to hang on with life support if it's determined that I have a very small chance of surviving with my brainpower intact. I don't want to be a vegetable, and I don't want to make huge medical expenses that my family can't afford, just so they can have a very slim hope of me surviving mentally intact.

Exactly. One of my greatest fears is mental problems - I would much rather die than be a vegetable. Although, of course, I can understand the religious point of view and accept that some may feel it is only God's right to give and take life.
I know that the Eskimos have a tradition that, when their people become too old to be of any use to the tribe (ie they cannot hunt or help with anything), they float them away on an iceberg to die peacefully of hypothermia. I'm told it's not a bad way to go - you gradually fall asleep and just don't wake up.

I'd much rather live out the rest of my life physically injured than mentally incapacitated. Of course that's easy to say now...I don't know what it's like to live with missing arms or legs and yet still be able to think clearly and understand how bad it sucks.

Yes, it must be incredibly frustrating to be mentally alert but unable to do anything for yourself. Think Stephen Hawking, for a start. But then he adds a whole new angle to our argument - yes, he is physically incapacitated but few people would agree he should be 'put to sleep' as it were. So where do we draw the line?

I guess everyone has different levels of torture they'd be willing to endure in order to keep living. To a sports figure, being paralyzed might break his heart, whereas I probably wouldn't care too much since I never do anything requiring much physical effort anyway. The worst part for me would be having to have someone bathe me and help me in the bathroom, or wearing Depends or something.

It should definitely be a personal choice. There's no way to make a blanket law that'll be acceptable to everyone in every situation. (Look at religious ppl who believe medical treatment is wrong, and all the hooplah when they refuse to immunize their kids or their kids die from a treatable disease. This is the perfect example of trying to treat everyone the same and only ending up causing lots of misunderstanding and hatred and sensational news coverage.)

If Hawking would be in constant pain and would want to die, he should have the right to. Killing people because they have disabilities is something Hitler did during the war. The most important capacity of a human is the mental one.

Imagine being absolutely incapable of moving or even blinking your eyes. I think living like that, laying on a hospital bed, would be hell. You couldn't even express your wishes to the outside world, and the people surrounding you would maybe have no idea that you're actually 100% aware of everything that's happening. Too me that would be a living hell.

I agree. I've always been a strong supporter of situation ethics because there are very few moral codes which apply to everyone in every situation. For every moral statement you make, you can almost always come up with a situation that contradicts it.