Yesterday I read out, for my daughter and her partner, the paragraph from Allison Pearson’s oped in the Telegraph on Tony Nicklinson’s right to die, where she expresses the opinion that, since his life is too horrible to live, he shouldn’t mind dying horribly in order to escape such a fate. The first comment I got was, “She’s a sociopath.” And so she is, or near enough that it makes very little difference. Here is the paragraph in question:
None of us would want to be shut up in the prison of ourselves with only a blinking eyelid to communicate with the world. Even so, I’m afraid I think that Tony Nicklinson’s desire to change the law of the land so he can be killed in the comfort of his home is wrong. Others suffer as he does – Professor Stephen Hawking comes to mind – but they make the best of the dreadful hand that fate has dealt them. Tony Nicklinson could refuse food, but his wife objects that starvation is a horrible way to die. Yet isn’t Tony Nicklinson’s argument that his life is too horrible to live?
It really doesn’t get much more unfeeling than this. As someone has pointed out, Stephen Hawking is a special case. First, he has a very unusual form of ALS. Most of them die fairly quickly in a few years. Some of them die as miserably as Diane Pretty (and see here as well) feared she would. But then Diane Pretty, like Tony Nicklinson, fought for her rights in court, and the legal ground has shifted considerably since Diane took her case to the High Court in Britain, and then to the European Court of Human Rights. Both of them turned her down, and she died as she feared she might. But, hey, what difference does that make? After all, her life was a misery. That’s why she wanted to die. So, why not go out miserably too? That’s the logic of the sociopathic journalist Allison Pearson.
Allison Pearson: A Smiling Face, a Sociopathic Journalist?
Tony Nicklinson’s pain is not hers. She can’t feel his frustration, though she is generous enough to say that “[n]one of us would want to be shut up in the prison of ourselves with only a blinking eyelid to communicate with the world.” But still, it would be wrong to help him escape that imprisonment, that imposed slavery. I bet Allison Pearson doesn’t approve of chattel slavery, that she would be horrified at the thought that the laws of Britain might classify a group of people as slaves who had no right, not even the possibility, of living their lives as they chose. And yet she seems quite calm and complacent about consigning Tony Nicklinson to that compelled living, unable to choose for himself, except, of course, that he could starve himself to death, since it would be an offence to force him to receive nourishment.
I first encountered this apparent sociopathalogy in the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, in a letter to me, in response to telling him that the last few straws of my faith had been blown away by the wind of his words opposing Lord Joffe’s assisted dying bill in the House of Lords, said that he was far more concerned about disabled people who believed that their lives would be endangered by assisted dying legislation. There’s not a shred of evidence that any such danger exists, but, in his letter, he clearly stated — well, let’s have the very words themselves. Speaking of those who vote on assisted dying legislation, he said (and I want you to notice the modal words he uses for each circumstance):
Those who vote have to balance the possibilities of acute suffering against what many see as a perfectly real and concrete risk to the vulnerable. [personal communication; my italics]
Whereas the truth of the matter is exactly the reverse of this, for the very real and acute pain of the suffering is being balanced against a possible risk to the vulnerable. We know about the pain and the suffering, and how intolerable it can become, because those who are suffering and dying are telling us that they want to be in control of their dying. So, in response to my concern that the church was demanding that people be forced to die a “natural” death, the archbishop thought a sufficient response was to express his concern about the possibility that the vulnerable might be put at risk. Yet this is only a scare tactic used by the church to convince legislators to vote against assisted dying legislation. It has no substance whatever — as becomes quite clear when the evidence from the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Oregon is studied impartially — and it is not the reason that the religious oppose assisted dying. There may indeed be some contentious points, and some apparent irregularities in the way that the law is applied in the Netherlands and Belgium, but the only reasonable conclusion is that no one is being victimised because of their vulnerability.
The next time I came upon this sociopathic tendency amongst opponents of assisted dying was when reading Ronald Lindsay’s book, Future Bioethics. As he says, people sometimes try to trivialise the problem by remarking on the short period that the dying suffer at the end:
Essentially, the argument is, “What’s the big deal? They’ll be dead soon anyway.” [59]
And then he quotes Yale Kamisar to the effect that allowing a person to suffer a little longer is surely not too great a price to pay for the sanctity of life (60). It is significant that a man with such opinions is said by Wikipedia to have “written extensively in the area of euthanasia.” (my italics) Nor are we surprised to hear that Neil Gorsuch, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals who wrote a book on assisted suicide and euthanasia, breezily suggested that those who request assistance in dying are making ”more of a lifestyle choice” (Lindsay, 60). No surprise, because the only way to deny that the suffering and the dying might have a right to assistance in dying is by making light of their predicament. But it is peculiar that, as a judge, Gorsuch could not see that, by regarding assisted dying as a lifestyle choice, he was placing it in that class of actions which invoke issues of freedom and human rights — yet he opposes the legalisation of assisted dying. Nevertheless, by expressing his view in this throw-away expression — “A lifestyle choice?”, Lisdsay asks, “Like taking up golf?” (60) — it is clear that he has no sense of the urgency and desperation that is being expressed, no appreciation of the depth of suffering involved, when people are dying or suffering from conditions which make life unbearable.
The same tendency turned up in Pope John Paul II’s (Pope Karol Józef Wojtyła) consideration of assisted dying in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). He gave it short shrift indeed. He thought it appropriate to say that, when people are asking in desperation for their dying to be hastened, they are not really asking for help to die at all; what they are really asking for is for someone else to hope for them when all hope is gone (§ 67). He was either unwilling or unable to see into the depth of that hopelessness, and respond with compassion. All he could do was to utter empty religious phrases about hope, as though someone else hoping in the presence of such hopelessness could transform the situation into one of holiness, could somehow sanctify that suffering.
Kids who torture and kill family pets, and go on to torture and kill human beings in horrific ways are called sociopaths. They cannot empathise. Asked what was most distinctive about the war criminals at Nuremberg, the psychologist Gustave Gilbert (during the war an intelligence officer in the US Army) suggested in his book, Nuremberg Diary, that it was their inability to empathise with their victims. In what way do the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope, Kamisar and Gorsuch, and other like-minded folk, differ from the sociopathic kid or the torturer of helpless human beings? True, they do not take pleasure from torturing others. It may even be true, as Eike-Henner Kluge says, that “empathy is a very unreliable foundation on which to base a theory prescribing who shall live and who shall die,” (The Practice of Death, 39) but that is not what is at issue here. The question is: Who shall have a right to decide when it is in their best interests to die? Who should be able to decide when their suffering has become unendurable? No one wants there to be a prescriptive theory about who shall live and who shall die. That is an entirely misleading idea, at least so far as competent adults go. But, at the very least, one does not expect — what seems in fact to be the case — that those in high places, who have some determinate say over whether or not assisted dying should be legalised, should so lack empathy for the suffering of those who claim that right, that they cannot see and acknowledge that suffering may be so egregiously destructive of person and personality as to deserve more compassion, to make them more reluctant to refuse them the right to die as and when they choose.
When the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to me, I heard his words as an attempt to tell me that Elizabeth’s suffering was somehow of less importance than the validity of his argument against the legalisation of assisted dying. There are theological reasons for opposing assisted dying. I understand that. I do not think the theological arguments are decisive, even in theology; and I certainly do not think they should supercede all other arguments that can be made in favour of assisted dying. Theology has no place in the public square. No doubt this is why he did not make theological arguments in his letter to me. But when he dismissed real suffering as a possibility, and elevated mere possibilities to the level of real and concrete risks: that displayed a sociopathic indifference to suffering that was breathtaking in its lack of compassion. It displayed clearly, like Allison Pearson’s unthinking cruelty, a near sociopathic indifference to suffering. The archbishop is not a sociopath, nor, I suspect, is Allison Pearson; but something interfered with their ability to express genuine compassion for those who are experiencing what, to them, are intolerable sufferings, or are likely to become so. Hitchens said that religion poisons everything. It certainly does poison the springs of human compassion. Mere zygotes become more important than the women who bear them; mere possibilities trump the most terrible suffering that human beings can endure. This is religion at work. Why should we be accommodating or kind to inhumanity so profound and so enduring?
Wiping away tears of grief and rage.
The only redeeming feature of that appalling article is the almost universal condemnation (at least in the first page when I looked at it) in the comments. The fact that she could segue straight into social & court chitchat without blinking tells much about her. It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could be so totally lacking in empathy.
Me too.
Have to agree with you Haggis — and with both you and Isabel. The only redeeming feature of the article is the negative responses it attracted. But it was grief and rage that I felt too, and why I just had to come back to it, though I had quoted the paragraph in yesterday’s post. The callousness, the lack of feeling, the failure of humanity: these are simply too blatant to ignore.
Eric’s reply to that letter from the archbishop is here
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2009/reply-to-the-archbishop-of-canterbury/
True, they do not take pleasure from torturing others.
For me, a person indifferent about the suffering of others produces outcomes that are indistinquishable from those of a sadist.
Eric,
But when he dismissed real suffering as a possibility, and elevated mere possibilities to the level of real and concrete risks: that displayed a sociopathic indifference to suffering that was breathtaking in its lack of compassion.
Exactly right; simply breathtaking, a monstrous abomination. And as you suggested in your post, as I did in my comment on the Telegraph article itself, so much of it is predicated on theological “reasons” that should have, must have, absolutely no louder voice in law that any other hypothesis which is entirely unsupported by real tangible evidence. As Lord Justice Laws said (I see from Ophelia Benson’s post that you did an article on it over a year ago which I have not yet had a chance to read):
… the conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society.
… The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic.
An incredibly cogent and relevant observation which those seeking to deny or hinder assisted dying would do well to reflect seriously and deeply on. It would seem to be a worthwhile premise for the proponents of it to be carrying into battle.
Although, as you suggested in your article on Baggini’s “attention deficit disorder” and which I had intended to comment on (I tend to be sympathetic to his idea although not his execution of it), the religious tend to have their own definitions and understanding of what reason really is. For instance, Edward Feser and, apparently, the Archbishop of Canterbury seem to rely heavily on the premise, the hypothesis, that suffering in this life is going be redeemed – proportionally it would seem – with greater bliss in heaven – like Feser’s analogy with a child “suffering” through piano lessons but later reaping the benefits. Hence, by their very twisted “logic”, curtailing or circumscribing suffering in this life is tantamount to limiting bliss in the next.
Unfortunately, because of their entirely willful blindness and self-deception – and ignorance about the nature and limitations of reason, they fail to realize that all they really have is a hypothesis if not little more than a wild-eyed conjecture or delusion. Something I noticed with a paper by Polkinghorne – who really should know better – on the Faraday Institute site which you referred to.
Which raises some questions about reason itself which might bear some elucidation or evaluation by all concerned. Personally, it seems to me that, generally speaking, we all use reason and, essentially or largely, the concomitant “scientific method”; it’s just that we start from very different premises, frequently not realizing that they are, until “proven” to be the case, entirely or largely hypothetical – the religious seem particularly unclear on the concept. But it seems that those hypotheses are “acquired” largely, in the non-religious anyway, by a process of intuition or gestalt or induction – revelation for the religious, which is, apparently, somewhat of a serious philosophical conundrum which many of us, particularly the religious, blithely, if not criminally, proceed in entire ignorance of.
Me too.
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I think you’ve quoted this before, but I hadn’t been sufficiently attentive to his calculated indifference. Using the words the possibilities of acute suffering in correspondence with you is a thought that never should have occurred to him. And it would not have had he not felt obligated to defend a conclusion.
Eric, I don’t follow the Anglican Church very closely – do you think there is any possibility that Archbishop Williams’s successor will be any less callous and conservative on this issue?
But this is characteristic of all ideologies: they all devalue actual human experience by placing a priority on achieving abstract, intangible goals that — through some axiomatic but unproven connection — will somehow make life better, in spite of all the actual evidence to the contrary. Thus the circular reasoning associated with any ideology becomes a protection, not only against thought, but against feeling: people have to suffer and die so the Cause can triumph, so that people won’t have to suffer and die…
Religion is only the most obvious and vulnerable of the ideologies that are undermining the work of reason. Environmentalism, right wing politics, left wing politics, all reward their supporters by offering them liberation from thought and from empathy.
Jon:
Yes, that’s true, but there is a difference. Communism, for instance, was assumed to require a period of dictatorship before achieving the perfect worker’s state, and no one has ever said that revolution, though it may indeed produce something better — and indeed often does — is necessarily a peaceful affair. But Christianity promises something more — love and compassion. And it is in that promise that it so often fails. The Roman Catholic Church speaks of gay people as gravely disordered, and then goes on to say that they must be treated with respect! Christians say that God is love, and recognise the problem that pain and suffering pose for that belief, but nevertheless enforce the rule that no one has a right to take life (except in war and capital punishment), and therefore not only impose that rule on believers, but on everyone, thus magnifying the amount of suffering in the world.
Another Matt. I’m not sure regarding options for a replacement for Rowan. It ususally alternates between an Anglo-catholic and an evangelical. So we had Runcie (mildly high church, Guards regiment type), and then Carey (very low church); then followed Rowan (Anglo-catholic), so the likelihood is that the next ABC will be an evangelical, and therefore more conservative. This would be in tune with the Church of England in any case, and certainly with the communion in the Global South. The liberals are being left high and dry. There’s no place for them, I’m afraid, except in a few church provinces in North America, but there have been rumblings of discontent here for some time, and a number of parishes have already gone over to the new Catholic ordinariate. There’s not much place for religion to go but downmarket now, and as it does so it will circle the wagons, and try to face down the “militant secularism” they see ranged against it.
Ken — absolute right! It should never have occurred to him, and yet those are the terms in which he cast his response to me. It was not a very pastoral response, and certainly not one that made me think better of him. Indeed, my response (linked by Ophelia above) is not only fairly detailed; it provides a much more careful delineation of what is going on in demand for assisted dying, and why the church’s position should not be allowed to stand. I do not think he has taken any of it to heart.
Jon Jermey (#10),
But this is characteristic of all ideologies: they all devalue actual human experience by placing a priority on achieving abstract, intangible goals …
I think that is largely or essentially correct – the problematic nature of all “isms”, although, as always, there are still a few devils in amongst the details of even that “meta”-statement. For one thing, one might suggest that even atheism or secular humanism or feminism is equally prone or susceptible to the somewhat inherent or intrinsic if not fatal flaw of group-think. Which tends, by its very nature, to devalue the individual “human experience” – seems that the conflict between the individual and the group is somewhat of a longstanding philosophical and social conundrum going back at least to the time of the ancient Greeks. But apropos of that “flaw”, Edward Feser has an interesting quote on the topic in the context of the forthcoming Reason Rally:
One of the symptoms of groupthink is the members’ persistence in conveying to each other the cliché and oversimplified images of political enemies embodied in long-standing ideological stereotypes…
When a group of people who respect each other’s opinions arrive at a unanimous view, each member is likely to feel that the belief must be true. This reliance on consensual validation tends to replace individual critical thinking and reality-testing.
Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Second edition
And feminism seems to provide an interesting case in point. Don’t know if you have been following these blogs, or sites as the case may be, but Pharyngula, Man Boobz [MB] and A Voice for Men [AVfM], along with a great many others, have all been nattering, somewhat acrimoniously, away at the topic. While I tend to be very supportive of feminism in general and think there’s some justification for MB’s question whether there are any “truly honest MRAs [Men’s Rights Activists] out there”, it also seems there’s more than a few justifications for some of the positions espoused by the AVfM – notably the highly questionable extremes of feminism which R. Joseph Hoffmann made reference to. Seems that dogma of all sorts is a rather pernicious and prevalent problem tending to cause people – some of whom have given indications of knowing better – to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
Sometimes I think that there’s less a problem with group-think itself than with the fact, ably illustrated with the fable – part of fairly ancient Sufi traditions at least – of the blind men and the elephant, that each group frequently really only has a handle on a few facts which they then extrapolate, in blind leaps of faith, to assertions as to the nature and existence of a whole slough of others. Really very bad karma and, genuflecting towards Eric’s post on Baggini’s commendable if somewhat misguided attempts to base a necessary dialog on “reason”, not really conducive to doing anything more than adding to the proverbial “sound and fury”.
“There’s not a shred of evidence that any such danger exists…”:
http://alexschadenberg.blogspot.ca/2012/03/euthanasia-prevention-coalition-epc.html
CMAJ (May 2010) Flanders, Belgium: 32% = 0 requests + 0 consents
BMJ (Oct 2010) Flanders, Belgium: 52.8% = reported
Flounders, Belgium 2010 euthanasia MURDERS = 80%
This was only in one place, where it is LEGALIZED. My advice to you:
Stop running-off at the mouth, about things you know nothing about.
Ironsides, this is not what the “not a shred of evidence” refers to. The claim is that vulnerable people are at risk. The data from the Netherlands and Beligum do not show that the vulnerable are at risk. So, when you have evidence that the vulnerable are at risk in those places, present it, but don’t play games with stats that are irrelevant to the purpose. Alex Schadenberg is one of those who are most guilty of the misuse of statistics.
I shall address Schadenberg and his special religious pleading tomorrow — since he has “graced” the pages of the National Post today, with his usual misleading patter.