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First-ever case of euthanasia on very young child, 2, was handled well (nltimes.nl)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/europe@feddit.org
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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.

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[+] -12 points 3 days ago (30 children)

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?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 days ago* (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago (6 children)

    Fair enough.

    I definitely wouldn't want to be a minority if you were in charge. Good of the many and all...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I haven't altered anything, nor have I insinuated anything.

    I have, however, applied reductio ad absurdum.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    You have altered it. If you kill the patient you are a murderer. If you switch the tracks you are minimizing the damage done by a person that tied a bunch of people to the tracks. They are not morally equivalent.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    I'm talking about the trolley problem?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (14 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (13 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago* (12 children)

    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?

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  • [–] -1 points 3 days ago* (11 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (10 children)

    It’s your choice how you’d do it, but at the end of the day, you doomed the 5 million to die, where simply pulling the lever, which was in front of you, a small convenient act, could have saved them.

    It’s intentionally tough a problem that has no real correct answers. Is your conscience, your personal ethical purity, worth 5 million other full human lives? Perhaps. But not many others see it that way.

    Technically you get to keep your hands clean, say you didn’t kill anyone, but really, you chose not to save 5 million people for that small privilege, which only impacts your own self, your own wellbeing, your own mental health. You save yourself from having to bear the consequences of acting, sacrificing 5 million others in the process. It’s entirely a selfish act that can be conveniently argued away, but only naively, by isolating the act of saving 5 million lives from the act of causing one death. The real question isn’t which is worth more, of the two tracks, but how highly you value your own convenience and the integrity of yourself against the lives of others. If you place your own mental wellbeing above that of another being, that’s one thing. Placing it above 5 million others that will never get to even have a mental health anymore, is a very high estimation of your own worth. But it’s valid. We see action by inaction every day, causing pain and suffering all over the world.

    This is different from the hospital analogy you keep bringing up. And not merely on a technicality. The premise is not the same at all.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago* (9 children)

    Well, the original trolley problem is five people. Not really sure why the guy that brought up the trolley problem decided to insist on five million. Not even sure how the trolley problem is relevant to the article, tbh, but I responded to the trolley problem.

    How is that hospital analogy different, apart from the method of execution? You either kill one person, or allow five to die through inaction in both cases. The reason I like the analogy is because it strikes at a much deeper aspect of human psychology--the method of killing matter as much as, if not more, than the act of killing.

    Nazis ran into this same dilemma: on the eastern front, they found that even the hardest SS Hitler lovers could only do 3-4 executions before they became psychologically incapable. That's why they came up with the gas trucks, but the screaming still bothered people, so they came up with the camps. Instead of pulling a trigger and washing the brains off your rifle at the end of the day, you just had to flip a switch.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (4 children)

    Not really sure why the guy that brought up the trolley problem decided to insist on five million.

    Would it make it easier for you to answer if I said eight billion? What would you do? One person on one set of tracks, the entire rest of the population of Earth on the other. Do you pull the lever then?

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  • [–] 0 points 2 days ago (3 children)

    Nope

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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Which is why I brought up the Trolley Problem in the first place. Saying that there's no scenario in which euthanasia can be considered is just like refusal to pull the lever in that neither decision is motivated by a desire to do good or be helpful, but only by a motivation to preserve one's own moral standing and nothing else.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    The amount of people on the other track is meaningful, true, but the point I made stands just as well with 5 people instead of 5 million. Latter just highlights the dissonance we all battle with within ourselves when sweating the dilemma. But it’s the same hyperbole the hospital analogy does, so in reality it’s the same in taking the original problem and stretching it out to absurd proportions to make the point.

    Even so, the doctor dilemma you present is a worthwhile one to get anxious about in its own right anyway, and I’m not saying it’s not. Just different. If the question was not that you are the doctor, but a person with a lever, pulling of which would send a nurse to take the otherwise healthy man to be cut up for parts to save the 5 others, then we’d be in the same realm. The trolley analogue of your dilemma would be that you are the conductor, perhaps, and as the conductor may choose to change tracks or not. Being an active party already in play is different than being a bystander forced in the situation without connection other than the action, or lack of one, to take.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

    Fair enough.

    I have some thoughts on the active/passive proposal you mentioned in your second paragraph, and I'm not sure whether I sit on the side of it being irrelevant or still equivalent. Possibly both. The choice is ultimately still the same, and I don't think it necessarily changes the moral calculus if you're a conductor/doctor/bystander.

    But my solution to the trolley problem is still to not flip the switch.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    Yeah it’s entirely valid, it’s intended to be a tough problem with different answers depending on who answers. I was just trying to elaborate on the other side of it since initially you seemed to imply there’s a “correct” answer which is yours, so I just gave my view on it with similar confidence to illustrate there isn’t one. All sides of it can be morally justified and since there isn’t any good choices there at all, by design, it’s kind of easy to lose sight of that.

    And yeah, essentially the dilemmas are of the same form, but I believe it’s meaningful whether one is “supposed” to be there making the choices vs. someone from outside the situation that isn’t normally expected to be making the choice. If the conductor that drives the train chooses not to pull the lever, it’s different from a bystander choosing not to. The latter can more easily justify not participating, the former simply can’t, because it’s their very job to make that choice, and the levers being a part of the framework within which they work day to day, should make inaction much more significant and unseemly. Same for the doctor making the choices, but on top of that, there are the extra layers of having made the doctor’s oath, which a bystander wouldn’t have made, and also the fact that a bystander can’t be expected to know the implications and details and applicability of “cutting to pieces” someone like mechanical spare parts, which I assume isn’t as easy as that and a doctor would know to calculate that into it, unlike a civilian.

    But I digress. Just wanted to illustrate that the choice not to act is not “correct” since by design there can not be a correct answer. But correct for you is valid. It seemed weird to talk about it as if it was objective so I got a bit sidetracked to throw my several handfuls of cents in.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    I agree. I do also have a tendency to speak with a certain absolutism.

    In my experience, scientific type folks (like me) tend to aim to speak with accuracy, which when it comes to science involves worda like "suggests", "supports", "probable", etc.

    Marketing type folks tend to speak in black and white. "Is" "will do", that type of thing.

    I think this is the fundamental messaging issue on the left, both in the liberal and in the left left sense. Right wing folks speak in certainties, which is a much stronger message to the layman when compared to words that, for lack of better term, hedge their bets on potential future evidence.

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