Yeah: thought I'd stick with the upbeat themes.
I've been reading a fair bit about euthanasia and end-of-life ethics and also about life extending enhancements. Two sides of the mortality coin.
Today it's the dying part, tomorrow the not dying.
In the UK, disability activists have blocked legislation allowing assisted suicide for people who are terminally ill and at the end of life. The reason for the legislation is to allow people who cannot commit suicide themselves to have the same capacity to end their own life as people who do not have mobility restrictions. It seems a call for fairness - recognising that with equal moral status should come equal ability to act on the desire.
But the activists see this legislation as disturbing because, in their view, it will make it morally permissible to kill disabled people. Now, people in this condition of restricted mobility, might regard themselves not as members of a disabled community but as people brought to a desperate state by a painful degenerative disease. They - and those who do regard themselves as members of the disabled community - may wish to end suffering at this certain point, through their own autonomy and retaining their dignity and unlike an abled bodied person are denied the opportunity.
When polled, disabled people voted in favour of the legislation, but the activists, who did not want to see disabled people further discriminated against by being 'allowed to be killed' and who viewed this as a potential slippery slope leading to Nazi-style killing of the imperfect, got their way.
This seems to me very wrong.
In support, though, various people who had become disabled as adults said how glad they were. They said that when first impaired they were depressed, and had this been an option, they'd have taken it (note: they couldn't have as they were not terminally ill or at the end of life) and now that they had adjusted to their impairment and were happy, they were so glad not to have missed out on life.
But here's the thing: if I die now, I do not miss out on anything. There is no 'I' to miss anything, because I am dead. This is a false argument. Alive me now can think, I don't want to miss out on the next few years with their occasional and rare bursts of pleasure. If I am dead, though, I have not missed anything. My identity dies with me, so is not harmed by the lack of future goods. Only alive me could be harmed - but I am not alive.
What's the big deal about death??
Dying is the nightmare - which is the suffering that legislation could have eased.
Of course, some people's death might cause great grief to their loved ones. But if a person is suffering inordinately, it seems very selfish of the loved ones to wish to extend suffering for their pleasure. I hate the argument that suicides are selfish - here's somewhere where I agree with rights talk: no one has the right to make me live or stay alive. I might have duties that would encourage me to continue for the sake of my loved ones (if I had any), but at a certain point the salience of my suffering could count for more than these duties.
In addition, as argued by philosopher John Hardwig, a person may have a duty to die. If their prolonged death is causing emotional and financial suffering to their loved ones, it could, all things considered, be better that they died. In a state with limited health resources, I think their may also be a social duty. But then, I'm stating an extreme.
Assisted suicide can be seen as the way in which a person who would have chosen suicide by their own means (taking pills, say) is granted the ability to do that when they cannot perform the act themselves
Euthanasia is slightly different and comes in various flavours - voluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary and active and passive.
Voluntary is when the patient has chose to die; non-voluntary is when they may be in a coma or a very sick infant and involuntary is just murder.
Active is injecting a drug, say; passive is removal of life support. There is much philosophical debate about whether acts and omissions have the same moral weight. A famous argument by James Rachels suggests not:
Smith will inherit a fortune if his 6 year old cousin dies.
One evening Smith sneaks into the bathroom where the child is having his bath and drowns the boy.
Smith then arranges the evidence so that it looks like an accident.
Jones will inherit a fortune if his 6 year old cousin dies.
One evening Jones sneaks into the bathroom where the child is having his bath.
As he enters the bathroom he sees the boy fall over, hit his head on the side of the bath, and slide face-down under the water.
Jones is delighted; he doesn't rescue the child but stands by the bath, and watches as the child drowns.
But there is a contrasting case:
Robinson (let us say) does not give £100 to a charity which is helping to combat starvation in a poor country. As a result one person dies of starvation who would have lived had Robinson sent the money. Davies, on the other hand, does send £100 but also sends a poisoned food parcel for use by a charity distributing food donations. The overall and intended result is that one person is killed from the poisoned food parcel and another person's life is saved by the £100 donation. Taken overall the omission to send money by Robinson, and the acts of sending the poison and giving money to charity by Davies lead to the same overall consequences in terms of number of lives lost. Robinson has let a person die through failure to act, Davies has killed a person. And in this case there seems an enormous moral difference. Robinson is like most of us; Davies is a vile murderer.
Personally, I think that in the case of euthanasia, the moral weight is the same in active and passive cases. But the latter is allowable while the former troubles people - again it's the slippery slope thing: won't doctors just kill everyone? Actually doctors don't like killing people and in the Netherlands and Oregon where there has been active euthanasia for years, there has been no rise in death rates.
There is a further complication in the case of doctors, which I find very slippery - though this is what happened to my mother and I appreciated it. If a patient is experiencing considerable pain at the end of life, the doctor can give high enough doses of morphine in the intention of easing pain but which she knows will in all likelihood kill the patient. This is not euthanasia at all - it relies on the doctrine of double effects. Because the doctor's intention is to ease pain, though she foresees death, she is not killing. That does not seem to me to grant any free-pass.
However, in all these cases - of voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide - I actually see moral virtue: the main concern is ending unbearable suffering. It seems to me that the removal of harm is a greater moral imperative than the granting of pleasure and that the ending of suffering is a greater good than 'killing' is a harm.
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