Excellent article. One particularly well-articulated excerpt:
mmm
Yeah, that’s a good bit.
I see a salient point in the Ross Douthat essay pointed to in the comments, although I draw precisely the opposite conclusion as he and commenter MG do.
Douthat sees this as a dangerous slippery slope, and says that Kevorkian, as well as Dignitas founder Ludwig Minelli, are murderers who belong(ed) in prison. (Indeed, Americans should be “proud” that our society would put them there.)
But I find the passage compelling in support of recognizing exactly the right that he disparages: the right of all of us to, if we choose and as best we’re able, set the terms for the single most certain and most personal event in our futures–regardless of what other people’s belief systems say about it. Douthat seems contemptuous of that difference of free choice; within the context of a single life, I can’t imagine anything more important.
This is not to say that we should have “suicide booth” expediency in assisting people to their deaths. As Ebert says, Kevorkian was probably too hasty in some cases (though I’d say that his zeal and his haste were the product of the twisted legal/social attitude this country has on the matter). People do get depressed, or just confused. There’s no need to help people act on impulses arising in brief bleak times, and there is a moral imperative to protect vulnerable old or sick folks from being pushed to decisions that are not really theirs. That was the basis for Terry Pratchett’s call for an “assisted death tribunal.”
But we don’t have the right to tell anyone that their own considered decision, for their own reasons, is not legitimate.
If the state won’t allow me to numb pain through the use of any drug I can get my hands on, and the state will not pay for me to have the best medical treatment possible, and the state will not allow me to commit suicide, then I say the state has to much control over my life. Since drugs are dangerous (I’m all for decriminalizing marijuana, but that’s it) and medical treatment is imperfect and expensive, then the state should at least concede us the right to die with dignity. At the very least.
Too many people voted for Bush in 2004 for me to believe that they can be trusted with, well … anything. Including their own death. They’re not smart enough to have dignity.
Seems a bit broad… Doesn’t that impugn the principles of self-determination, self-government, and democracy itself?
I agree that such things as constitutional limitations, divided government, and self-regulation are necessary. I don’t think anyone here (?) would argue for absolute democracy, where a simple majority vote determines everything.
Same with assisted suicide. I want to see safeguards in place. I want assurances against abuse. It will happen, inevitably, that kids will want to hasten their inheritances, or that mentally ill patients will be pressured to make life-ending decisions. There was a horrifying bit of video, released a decade or two ago, showing an elderly person being pressured to end his own life.
So…yes…let’s put in some heavy regulations and oversight and safeguards and reviews. (Alas, it might end up something like capital punishment, where it takes so damn long to go through the safeguards that the patient would die of natural causes before the approval process is finalized. Maybe we can avoid that, too…)
Scylla, Charybdis… How do you satisfy everyone?
Trinopus
Physician assisted suicide (or Death with Dignity) is permitted in some states. It has been in Oregon for nearly 15 years. The oversights and regulations are well thought out and not all that arduous, although I’m sure you could find people arguing to the contrary in both directions. Nonetheless, so far there hasn’t been a mad rush to use it. The numbers per year have been less than 100, per Oregon’s stats.
What I find interesting about the statutes that allow this practice is that (at least in one state), the statute stipulates that the cause of death be certified - that is, go into public record - as due to the terminal disease and the manner of death be certified as natural, rather than the cause of death be certified as a drug overdose and the manner of death suicide, as they would be in any other situation where someone intentionally ingests a lethal amount of drug for the express purpose of ending one’s life.
So the logic of the statute is that providing recourse in the medical system for terminally ill people to commit suicide safeguards their dignity, while entering their deaths into the public record as suicides undermines their dignity.
Well… France isn’t exactly a very religious nation, but there’s no way to have a statute voted that would allow assisted suicide. Politicians tasked about that answer along the line “I feel your pain, but…” Even though here has been a number of awful casers mediatized (there’s one currently, in fact), including one where the mother of the poor soul was found guilty, but the jury returned with a one year suspended sentence as punishment.
So, it isn’t solely a religious issue.
Well the state has no control over your life. A well tied bed sheet and a limb to throw it over will effectively end your life. It won’t be a nice death, but you’ll be dead. And how many people each day die in agony? How many people die in pain against their will?
Saying the state has control over this is wrong. They don’t. You have control over whether or not you die for the most part, unless your paralyzed somehow.
What you’re talking about is a convenient, nice, painless way to kill yourself.
Why? Because if we presented suicides with a head shot off, or hung from a tree limb that would be gross to most people. If we present these same people drifting off into slumber forever, that would see nice and peaceful.
The result was the same, but the methodology is different.
In the case against assisted suicide the primary argument is the slippery slope argument, not the religous argument. Furthermore, just because an argument is based on religion it does not mean that it can’t be binding on non-religous individuals. The arguments against slavery and for civil rights were originally religously based.
I tend to reject most slippery slope arguments, but in this case it is very compelling. Most of the people Kevorkian killed were not terminally ill and in some cases not physically ill at all, just depressed.
The disabled and depressed need help not to be killed.
That quote you provided does a good job of explaining my own personal conflict surrounding the issue. I hold free will as something absolutely vital to protect but free will can only exist in the context of life. And so, I consider suicide of any sort to be immoral, I don’t think that suicide of any type should be unlawful.
One might consider it merciful to end the life of one who is terminally ill and in extreme pain, but how does one balance that? Where do we draw that line where it is enough pain and the prognosis is poor enough that it is moral to allow that individual to end his life? I can probably concede a situation like, on a battlefield, where someone is mortally wounded and in excrutiating pain and perhaps has only minutes to live (say, he stepped on a landmine), shooting himself in the head. However, someone else might be diagnosed with cancer and given several years left and only be in relatively minor discomfort, I don’t think many people would morally agree with the decision of that person to end his life.
But this is exactly why I think it does support a right to suicide, because though free will depends on life to have meaning, not having the right to choose to end that life fundamentally undermines free will. That life must be a choice, else life and free will have no meaning. And though most of us choose life as a default decision, it is precisely those moments when we actively choose it that gives life its meaning. And though we have that choice to end it, like so many other choices we do have and should have, it doesn’t mean it is inherent that it is right to make that choice.
The argument against assisted suicide isn’t religious any more than the argument against murder is. Yes, there’s a religious argument against murder, but I think that most secularists and atheists still agree that murder should be prohibited. Ultimately, what a prohibition against murder amounts to is “you shouldn’t kill people”. The argument against euthanasia is just a logical consequence of that: “And you’re a person, too, so you shouldn’t kill yourself.”.
From spark240’s cite.
It seems fairly obvious (to me) that we ought to have a right to suicide, and that it’s not limited to the terminally ill.
From a basic natural rights perspective, we obviously have the right to stop eating or drinking, stop moving, and just let ourselves die. And almost all of us have the easy natural ability to jump off of somewhere high or walk in front of a freight train.
The difference between the able-bodied and the terminally ill isn’t one of rights, it’s one of opportunity. We have to start talking about rights once people need someone else to help them, because they’re too weak or incapacitated to do what they desire.
nm
Surely those of you who are so certain that no one should be allowed to choose her or his own death have never been in horrible pain – the same intense pain that would make you choose the release of death if you knew that the pain would be unending.
Why do you think that you have the right to make that choice for someone else?
As for taking one’s own life, there are people far too incapacitated to know where they are or who they are to be able to hang themselves or electrocute themselves. All they are sometimes is a screaming consciousness of pain. Do I know for sure what is in their minds? No. But I’ve known those who showed no signs of any kind of connections to life outside their bodies. And the screaming could be awful.
But what about killing in self defense? Or defense of someone else? Or capital punishment? Or an enemy combatant in war? While undoubtedly there are people who would equate killing in some or all of these circumstances with premeditated cold blooded “murder”, most people (I imagine) have a more nuanced and less black and white view of killing other people: Yes, it is generally very wrong, but then there are those situations……
The PAS/DWD “movement” seems to be trying to establish a similarly nuanced and less black and white (although far more circumspect) way of looking at suicide. Yes, it is generally very wrong, but then there are those (very few, well defined, documented medical and psychological criteria-meeting) situations……
Indeed, most people probably have no problem not using the word “murder” to refer to killing someone in self defense or, perhaps less so, killing an enemy combatant in war. When it comes to killing oneself, however, the circumstances don’t seem to count at all, at least not as far as what it is called. There’s just that one word. That one concept. That one all encompassing judgment - that it is always “wrong” (or, at best, too dangerous to provide recourse for it for specifically defined terminally ill people in the medical system, as opposed to providing recourse in the legal and political systems for killing specifically defined - and sometimes less so - other people). It seems taboos against killing oneself are far more entrenched than taboos against killing other people.
For those who fear the “slippery slope” or the sociophilosophical fallout of sanctioning a very limited so-called “right to suicide,” do you find any reassurance in the fact that PAS/DWD has been on the books and used, albeit sparsely, for at least 15 years in Oregon, and so far there doesn’t seem to have been any widespread ill effect in the Beaver State? Indeed, that some people may not even realize there are US states with PAS/DWD statutes would seem to offer testimony to its, at least as yet, sociophilosophical benignity and unslippery slope.
I have no moral objection to assisted suicide.
But what I am concerned about is that once it becomes a "normal"party of society that social pressures will be put more and more on the elderly to end their lives as they’ve “had a good run”, or they shouldn’t be so selfish as their assets could be put to better use by younger people, or they can’t really have much quality of life because they’re OLD.
I suspect that in the U.K. at least, there is an unofficial policy already in place; of not doing absaloutely everything to help elderly patients recover from certain illnesses and indeed allowing them to die through inaction.( rather then injecting them with fatal drug doses. )
The young glibly say that they won’t want to live when they’re beyond a certain age, in the comfortable ignorance that the future is a different country with no bearing on them.
Until of course they become old themselves.
This is so true, and I’ve never heard it put quite like that. It seeems like even compassionate people aren’t very likely to make concessions for suicide, regardless of the reason. They always pull out the 'ol “permanent solution to a temporary problem” as if even considering killing yourself is irrational and impulsive. But it’s never that simple, is it?
My mother took 3 weeks to die in horrible agony from terminal bowel cancer. She wanted to die the whole time, and all the doctors and nurses could do is larger and larger doses of Opiates.
Fuck yes I support assisted suicide rights. Christian’s can fuck right off out of my right to choose my own time and place if I am ever in the same situation.
Any doubts I had as to the need to legalize (or at least decriminalize) PAS were removed after reading, How We Die by Sherwin B. Nuland.
@coremelt: I feel your pain. I share your outrage. I went through something similar to what you did. I just wanted to mention, though, that not everyone who is adamantly opposed to PAS is a Christian.
without Christian opposition I believe I would be legal. We briefly had legal pas i’n one state of Australia. Overturned by our Christian minority within months. You know if YOU don’t believe in pas then you can choose to suffer in agony until your end. Fine. But how dare you tell me I have to suffer or watch a loved one suffer because of your retarded medieval moral system.