Yesterday, their Lordships made two key decisions:
- That there was a need to provide clarity concerning the conditions under which assisting a suicide might result in prosecution
- That the Human Rights Act provides us with a right to choose the manner and moment of our own deaths
My previous post on this provoked some fairly strong reactions. I presume that with yesterday's decision and the likelihood now that Parliament will need to legislate to change the law, readers will at least recognise that my interest in the topic is not simply an extravagance.
I want in this post to respond to some of the arguments offered against my position, and to advance the discussion in a couple of ways with specific reference to assisted suicide.
First, I want to emphasize - as I did in my previous post - that I have the greatest sympathy and pity for many of those in the difficult circumstances that drive them to suicide. But my pity for the dead is not going to save lives. Convincing people that suicide is wrong might save many people's lives. You should understand my case as a desperate argument, in full knowledge that I am in a small minority and that placing my head above the parapet attracts the greatest opprobrium (indeed, hatred), directed at trying to save a few people's lives. I know you hate me for it.
Many of you seem to imagine that pitying someone and calling her actions wrong cannot go together. Whyever not? Do you imagine that I suppose myself never immoral? Do you think I have never been tempted? What about cases such as the depressed woman who jumped off a bridge holding her two small children by the hand? I pity her in her suicide, and I suspect you do too. But none of you doubts that killing small children is wrong. What about the man whose wife left him who barricaded himself and his boys into the house and burnt it down? I pity him in his suicide, even if you don't, but neither of us doubts his actions were wrong.
I pity many a paedophile, many a murderer, many a rapist, and indeed I have stood up for them in ways I suspect you would criticise almost as much as you criticise my condemnation of suicide. Pity and moral criticism are in no way incompatible. Less than 50 years ago, suicide was considered so wrong that it was a criminal offence. And you should also note, perhaps, that although I am in a minority now, opposition to suicide has been common amongst philosophers through the ages, from Socrates to Anscombe. But now even to say I think suicide is wrong attracts the sort of opprobrium I would experience if I declared myself a racist. Disagree with me, if you want to. But do you really think my position - my desire to save lives and to emphasize the edifying possibility of suffering - is so unacceptable that I should not even express it?
Next, I want to say that I consider the case most commonly offered against legalising assisted suicide weak and contingent. The standard position appears to be that although suicide is not wrong, assisting suicide should be illegal. But that can't be right as a matter of principle. If suicide is not even wrong (let alone should be illegal), then there can't be anything wrong in principle with helping someone to do it. The argument for its being illegal must then depend on the claim that if we made assisting a suicide illegal we would be unable to prevent or prosecute some behaviours that are not assisting suicides (e.g. placing improper pressures upon people). And that is likely to be a claim that could not be sustained indefinitely. At some point someone will design some subset of assistance to suicide where we can be all but certain that it is the mere helping of what we consider not wrong - indeed, more than that, a right. Furthermore, if suicide is a human right, there must be a genuine question of whether it is worth tolerating the risk of the odd quasi-murder in order that people can be assisted in claiming their rights.
Next, some commenters say things along the lines of "I wouldn't let my cat suffer, but would put it out of its misery. Why should I do less for a person?" But people are not simply like other animals. Few of you would claim that in other contexts. You don't think it's okay to eat human flesh as you would eat animal flesh. You don't think it is okay to experiment upon people under the conditions you would experiment upon animals. You don't think it is okay to farm women for their milk or keep children as pets. And you should not think it is okay to kill someone simply to "put him out of his misery."
Others of you raise interesting "grey cases" such as the provision of excessive morphine to ease someone's final hours even at the expense of some shortening of life, or the sacrifice of Oates. As it happens, I don't regard the morphine case as assisted suicide at all, but there is little point in us discussing the "difficult case" if we don't even agree on the paradigm case. And we don't. Most of you think that there is a right to take one's own life, so that even those healthy German teenagers who entered a suicide pact as part of their Satanic death cult were surely not wrong to do what they did. Dignitas assists the suicide of people that are not terminally ill or in chronic pain or near death at all - such as for example in the recent case of Daniel James, a 23 year old former athelete. If there is a right to commit suicide, you don't have to be sick or in pain in order to be entitled to do it.
Graeme, in his typically attractive way, criticizes my argument about the value of a sunset, suggesting that it depends upon the idea that there is some current value to a potential future experience. But my claim was not that people should not kill themselves because they might see a sunset, see a kingfisher, attend their daughter's graduation, see their baby gurgle, watch the clever play, play the elegant cricket. My argument there (one of a number I offered, none of which (as it happens) was that "God says not to do it" - contrary to the claim of many commenters that my only argument was an appeal to religious authority) was that the suicide fails to recognise that life goes on without her, that her bravery in the face of suffering and death can itself be a gift to others, and that the world that continues without her is a magnificent, glorious, beautiful world that is in stark contrast to the suicide's focus on herself. Graeme - the argument is not about the value of what she will or might experience; rather, it is about the value of what she will never experience and should not need to in order to recognise it as valuable (and act accordingly).
Finally, some of you criticise me for declaring suicide wrong when I do not offer my name. But you would not say I should not use a pseudonym to say that it is wicked for a husband to beat his wife, and that her adultery is no excuse; you would not say I should not say that it is wicked to use rape as a tactic of war, and that past injustices are no excuse. If I said it were wicked for a teacher to abuse his power by sleeping with his school students, you might not be so sure that I was right, but you would not think it improper for me to say it. I note these things to try to persuade you that it is my conclusion, fundamentally, that you disagree with, not my presentation of it under a pseudonym. And I claim no authority for my case beyond the power of my arguments. No-one should be impressed by the fact that it is I who is offering them.
Update: Many of you assume that those of us opposing suicide must somehow lack relevant experience or empathy. So, although it verges on the mawkish, I shall share just three examples from my own experience (there are others):
Some years ago a troubled friend of mine, having a bad day, decided to throw himself from a fifth story window whilst myself and two others of his friends were there. He was quick, and managed to get himself out of the window, but I was quicker and caught his arm and held on and held on whilst he screamed and swore at me to let him go, until my other two friends pulled us back into the room and smothered him with hugs. He had no right to die, and I did not violate his rights by refusing to let him. (He lives, yet, decades later, and has children of his own.) I have known two girls who cut themselves and starved themselves near death. Friends stood over them and insisted that they ate. Those girls had no right to die (and they live now, decades later). I have known a woman who became depressed after having a child, who fantastied about smothering her baby and throwing herself in front of a lorry. She had to be drugged and was taken by doctors for her own safety. She had no right to die.
Many of you may want to say "But these aren't the sort of cases we're talking about." But you don't even agree with me about these paradigm cases. You tell me that we have no duty to live, that a right to die is part of a right to life, and it seems that the law agrees with you. But that applies to the cases I described, also. If you don't think the people I described were doing anything wrong - indeed, if you think I was the person doing something wrong violating my friend's "right to death" - we do not have even vaguely the common ground that allows us to come to an understanding of how to treat cases like the terminally ill.
