Category Archives: Euthanasia

Assisted dying and the failure of community — or how to be an idiot by following the rules

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I get so angry when people misrepresent assisted dying in the way that Giles Fraser does in his latest op-ed in the Guardian that I could scream! Why is it that something that is, for some people, a matter of urgent concern should be dismissed with lightweight and completely inapropos remarks from someone who simply misunderstands, and, from the look of things, will go on misunderstanding until the time comes for him to die. It’s a Christian (and generally religious) determination to look at irrelevant things and then suggest — for that is what he’s doing, after all — suggest that he’s been there, done that. He’s like a tourist who breezes through London in a day and then says he’s “done London,” as if you could do more than glance at one or two things of interest in the time allotted. But Giles Fraser is especially guilty, because, not only does he get it wrong; he hasn’t even begun to understand why people are asking for help to die. And he calls himself a loose canon! This is not loose. This is positively stupid.

He entitles his piece:

I want to be a burden on my family as I die, and for them to be a burden on me

Well, bully for him! That’s clear then, and his children will no doubt, when the time comes, appreciate the burden they have to bear. Of course, he may go out like a light, especially if he insists on flying so near the sun like this — or is it just the heat from his rhetoric simply melting the wax on his wings? But it’s all the usual stuff. Misdirection not to find directions out, but simply to mislead. The Anglican Church of Canada plays the same game, suggesting in its coy words that assisted dying represents a failure of community — which means, of course, abandonment, by those who can read between the lines. Here’s the key:

I do want to be a burden on my loved ones just as I want them to be a burden on me – it’s called looking after each other.

But it’s not called “looking after each other” if what the person who is suffering is asking for is help to die. It’s called coercion, then — which has a very different resonance — and if someone is being coerced into being a burden, then Fraser has simply has missed the point about what looking after each other is all about. Moreover — and this, coming from a priest, is inexcusable — it simply papers over the cracks with regard to how people die. Sometimes the burden, if Fraser really wants to know, is borne by those who are dying, and if those who are watching someone die in misery doesn’t notice this, then they are simply not watching closely enough!

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Margaret Somerville/Wanda Morris Debate Assisted Dying on HuffPo. So far, Margaret is Winning!

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Over at the Huffington Post there is a debate between Margaret Somerville, purported ethicist from McGill University in Montreal, and Wanda Morris, Executive Director of Dying with Dignity (Canada), the voice for choice at the end of life in Canada. Somerville, as is her wont, brings out all the usual suspects, none of which are really compelling, and all of which depend on two things, making you afraid of it, and claiming that it’s simply — it’s really that simple folks! — wrong to kill people. She forgets, of course, that people have been killing other people since the dawn of time, and will go on doing it. Certainly, many acts of killing are wrong and to be regretted and condemned, but merely saying that something is a matter of killing another human being is not enough all on its own to make it wrong.

Margaret’s biggest argument — the real big argument so far as Somerville is concerned — is that permitting the act of assisting someone in great suffering to die (she doesn’t like that euphemism, so we’ll come back to it) is changing something fundamental about the way in which we regard human life, and it will bring about untold changes in our society, and may — in fact she is sure that it will — change the way we regard killing others, so that legalising it in the case of those who choose to die in order to end their suffering will set society off on a slippery slope to disaster and depravity. She’s said this numerous times before, and she puts so much weight on it that it really constitutes her main argument against assisted dying (a ”sanitised” form of language that she deplores, but we will come back to that). Margaret’s problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that she is left asking a vague question about the future: “What long term effects might result from that?” She doesn’t know, but she has this in common with the pope: she believes firmly that this will usher in a “culture of death,” if it hasn’t already arrived, and that there will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth because we didn’t listen to Jeremiahs like her.

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Are there any religious experts? “Religion experts” on euthansia

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This post is now available in Polish translation over at Racjonalista. Thanks again go to Malgorzata.

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The Ottawa Citizen has an advice column which puts questions to so-called “religion experts,” who give answers on crucial issues facing individuals and society. There is a big problem with this, because religion experts are, almost by definition, not religion experts at all. What is there to be expert about? They might be experts in their own religion, but there is no such thing as a religion expert who is qualified to give religion’s answer to any question. A recent column in the Citizen’s “Ask the Religion Experts” column, for 31 January 2012 — thanks to Veronica Abbass for the link – asks the two questions: “Is euthanasia right? Would God want us to suffer?” And then the religion experts weigh in on the side of their favourite god. The nonsense that this makes of the questions should be clear right from the outset. We ask the experts their opinion, and all they can do is refer to the “experts” of their religion. According to Z, this is the way it is; according to Y, the truth is such-and-such, and so on. And, around the edges, a little lie or two will take you over the hump when reason fails.

The first one is perhaps the funniest. It’s by a Bahá’í scholar, Jack McLean. Seeing him described as a scholar reminds me of the day I took my M.Div. degree diploma and cut it to shreds. I no longer consider that to be a degree at all. It qualified me as an Anglican priest, but it no longer seems to me that there was anything to know, except, of course, historically, for the church does have a history (or perhaps I should say the churches have a history, for there is no point, during the whole history of Christianity, where there was an unquestioned unity within Christianity), but it is impossible to be a scholar of religion itself, for religion has no subject matter. The “theo” part of theology (the word ‘theology’ meaning, roughly, the logos of theos, or the reason, knowledge of god) is simply UA (on unauthorised absence), having departed his post, or, rather, never having been there in the first place, for all the confident pretence of religious believers, especially its officer class, to which, largely, the Ottawa Citizen has appealed for enlightenment upon a subject which has no object.

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On Letting Nature Take Its Course. Letting the Religious Justify Assisted Dying!

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The National Post gives a brief synopsis of the case heard by the Supreme Court in the matter of Cutherbertson et al. v. Rasouli, regarding the question of medical decision-making at the end of life. The questions before the court, according to the article, are these:

Who gets to decide when medical treatments are no longer worth pursuing and should be ended? The doctors? The patients? In the case of those who can’t speak for themselves, their surrogate decision makers?

Is discontinuing care when doctors deem all hope of recovery is gone the equivalent of allowing a patient to die — or hastening a death?

Despite what at least one commenter claimed, in response to my earlier post regarding this matter, in reference to a press release from the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the matter of religion and end-of-life decision making was a crucial concern in the case that was before the court. As the report says:

[Rasouli's wife] and his family insist their faith — they are Shia Muslims — requires them to do all they can to preserve Rasouli’s life.

They also claim that some of Mr. Rasouli’s movements indicate purpose. Although his condition has been upgraded from vegetative to minimally conscious, this appears more in the nature of a fond hope than an accurate account of Rasouli’s condition. Indeed, a question that ought to arise in a caring person’s mind is whether, being minimally conscious, Rasouli is capable of anything more than suffering.

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Sanctity of Life and its inviolability

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I have to admit that, before Scott McKenna proposed it, it seemed to me that you could not pry the sanctity and inviolability of life apart. As he says, quite clearly:

For me, sanctity of life does not necessarily equate with inviolability.   My argument is that God has given us moral responsibility.   We cannot ever say that God desires intolerable suffering of us and, in ending our life in such circumstances, we, as co-creators with God, are exercising compassion and God-given choice.   There are no ‘disastrous consequences’:  God is bigger than that.  It is precisely because God is compassionate that we have nothing to fear.    We have real moral choice:  we are not ‘sheep’.

This is, it needs to be said, contrary to what is normally meant by the sanctity of life, and, as for moral responsibility, religions have normally seen morality as a function of their belief in and loyalty to God, not something which can be separated from that belief or that commitment.

The Roman Catholic Church puts the point with its wonted bluntness. In its Declaration on Euthanasia it is quite clearly stated:

It is necessary to state firmly once more that nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or one suffering from an incurable disease, or a person who is dying. Furthermore, no one is permitted to ask for this act of killing, either for himself or herself or for another person entrusted to his or her care, nor can he or she consent to it, either explicitly or implicitly. nor can any authority legitimately recommend or permit such an action. For it is a question of the violation of the divine law, an offense against the dignity of the human person, a crime against life, and an attack on humanity. [my italics]

Of course, there is a qualification, bringing the principle of double effect into play, namely, that one may not intentionally bring about the death of an innocent human being. This expedient, however, is simply a band aid where a battle dressing is required. In her book The Sanctity of Life Doctrine in Medicine: A Critique, the Australian philosopher Helga Kuhse defines sanctity of life as follows:

It is absolutely prohibited either intentionally to kill a patient or intentionally to let a patient die, and to base decisions relating to the prolongation or shortening of human life on considerations of its quality or kind. [11; italics in original]

In  the light of these considerations, how can Scott McKenna claim that he supports the principle of the sanctity of life, and yet does not consider this principle absolute?

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The duty allotted by nature

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Many arguments regarding abortion or euthanasia (or assisted dying more generally) are based on supposed “laws of nature.” The status of such natural laws is not clear, but we are assured that they are, notwithstanding their nature as facts about the world, morally binding upon those to whom they apply. We saw this in action not so long ago when I addressed myself to Edward Feser’s book The Last Superstition. One of the things that struck me with such force about that book, and the response to my criticism of it — and here it is important to remember that the entire milieu of contemporary scholastic philosophy, basing itself on Aristotle and Aquinas, is related as like to unlike when it is used in philosophical discussion itself — is that there is a sense in which, for the modern scholastic, the arguments are already made and the conclusions are already reached, well before we begin, and there is nothing, beyond simple agreement, that can be accepted as the rational response to scholastic argumentation.

This is particularly clear in Robert George’s book, The Clash of Orthodoxies. When he is discussing Rawls’ theory of justice, he takes it for granted that the idea of justice as fairness is all very well where we do not know the truth, but where we do know it – as, he claims, we would know it if we accepted his argumentation, for this argumentation produces truth of such power and validity that it cannot be reasonably questioned by a rational person — any settlement made behind the “veil of ignorance” (or, as Rawls alternatively says, in the “original position”) is immediately called into question by any rational demonstration of the truth. George believes himself to have established, beyond reasonable doubt, that abortion, infanticide and euthanasia or assisted suicide (assisted dying) are contrary to the natural law, and therefore irrational and immoral. This, it would seem, immediately upsets the possibility of establishing an “original position” (even as a philosophical hermeneutic) from which political arrangements can be made which will assure the just (=fair) disposition of rights and privileges, wealth and opportunity that is consistent with the greatest benefit to the least well off person in society. For if justice, established in this way, must be subject to the truth (as understood by a subsection of the citizenry), any such contractual arrangements would be immediately called into question by the rational demonstration that something believed, behind the veil of ignorance, to be a matter of individual choice and determination, is, in actuality, not open to reasonable question.

The important point to notice here is that Rawls’ theory of justice was intended to overcome the ideological differences between different members of society, so that, for those, like George, who believe that their position is the only rational one, in terms of providing conclusive argument for the truth of its conclusions, there would be no hindrance to their believing themselves to have achieved truth, and to act in accordance with it, without at the same time requiring others to subordinate their own lives or reasoning to the conclusions reached by George and his fellow believers. When Rawls speaks of comprehensive world views existing side-by-side in the same society on the basis of contractual agreement not to impose views peculiar to themselves on others — thus preserving both peace and justice in society — he has in mind claims like those made by George, that their arguments offer conclusive demonstrations of the truth of their beliefs. In the kind of secular society for which Rawls’ theory of justice was intended as a means of achieving social peace and concord, as well as providing the greatest liberty for each citizen compatible with equal liberty for all, the move that George is making is simply illegitimate, for it is claiming moral certainty in a world where no such certainty exists.

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Ezekiel Emmanuel is wrong about assisted dying

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In the New York Times this morning Ezekiel Emmanuel has a short op-ed piece entitled “Four Myths about Doctor-Assisted Suicide“. Ezekiel Emmanuel, in case you didn’t know, is the brother of Rahm Emmanuel, former White House Chief of Staff and now Mayor of Chicago. His brother Ezekiel has been writing negative things about assisted suicide for years, and takes this opportunity — so close to the election — to keep playing his game of denial (based, I believe, largely on a misreading of the historical evidence regarding the reasons for the contemporary interest in assisted dying), because the question is being debated in New Jersey and is on the ballot in Massachusetts in the upcoming election.

So, what are the four myths about assisted suicide that Emmanuel seeks to disclose, and how valid are the points he is seeking to make? The first one has to do with pain. This is predictable, for the truth is that pain is not the only or the main reason why people seek assisted dying. Indeed, most people who opt for assisted dying have other things on their mind. This is now well-known. Emmanuel says that they are depressed, but that is not the point. Of course, when you are dying or are suffering from seriously chronic degenerative conditions, or severe disability (such as Tony Nicklinson), there is every chance that you won’t be in the best frame of mind, but to speak of depression at this point is scarcely relevant. Some opponents of assisted dying think that depression is a good reason not to provide help to die for those so afflicted, but this is a ridiculous requirement if, in fact, the decision is made in circumstances where one might reasonably be depressed, and, indeed, people who suffer from pathological forms of depression over many years, and who have had enough of life lived under a dark cloud, are reasonable candidates for assistance to die, if that is what they choose. Depression itself is not necessarily an impediment to reasonable or autonomous choice.

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When Darkness Falls

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Spring and Fall:

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

In his book, The Choice of Hercules, A. C. Grayling includes a very necessary chapter entitled “When Darkness Falls” (Chapter 3), in which he discusses, as he must, times when we are sick or dying or grieving, for life is not always summer afternoon. Indeed, as Grayling says,

[t]o live is to contract for loss. Only if you die before the deaths of people you care about, and never separate from any of them because of a quarrel or because they move away or abroad — in short: only if every one of the thousands of exit doors that take people out of each other’s lives stay shut until our own opens out of all of theirs, will you not know loss of this kind. [53-54]

Or, as Richard Robinson said in his book, An Atheist’s Values, the

chief argument for the legitimacy of suicide is that life is a trap. We have not asked for it, and it can be terrible. [57]

When I saw the sun, this morning, shining on the trees in Maplewood cemetery where Elizabeth’s ashes are buried, it brought to mind Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, the chapter from Grayling’s book and Robinson’s rather trenchant remark.

And this reminded me of Jerry Coyne’s comment on the Paul Wallace’s piece in HuffPo: “The Real Problem with Atheism.” And what is the real problem? That atheism is too optimistic. As he says:

Contemporary atheism is optimistic. Given its wall-to-wall phalanx of writers hell-bent on mocking everything that smells of religion, it may seem that this label is ill-applied. Yet under its bluster and iconoclasm atheism is full of good cheer and high spirits. Anyone who knows an actual atheist knows this.

And what, one would like to ask, is wrong with being full of good cheer and high spirits? But the claim is ridiculous: Where do the religious come up with their zany ideas?! Atheism is a lot of things, but it is definitely not full of good cheer and high spirits. For atheism, after all, is an “ism,” a word, the name for a point of view, a Weltanschauung, if you like, sometimes accepted by people who find that they never could or no longer can believe in a god or gods. Not all atheists are comfortable with this word, because it is simply a negative term, which makes it seem as though nonbelief in gods is dependent upon belief in gods, or, further, as though atheists have nothing besides the negation of religious belief in common, as though it is all about negation. And it isn’t.

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Andrew Brown gets it wrong again?! What do you call someone who gets it wrong more often than he gets it right?

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I was thinking of writing something this morning on assisted dying and changing values — because a new British poll has come up with some surprising results — and then I came upon Andrew Brown’s take on assisted dying, and my decision was made for me (which will please Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne immensely!). Everytime Andrew Brown takes aim at something he’s almost sure to get it wrong — though once in awhile, as if by accident, he seems to make sense – but this time the goes so far over the edge that one has to wonder whether he wasn’t under the influence of some mind-altering drug. Perhaps it was just his usual hubris, but, if so, he was feeling particularly expansive when he wrote this piece in the Guardian: Assisted dying: who’s to decide when a life is not worth living? I could give him the answer to his question in a few words, but experience shows that people like Brown just won’t listen. They’ve already made up their minds. They know the score. And we should only listen to them, apparently, because they certainly don’t listen to anyone else.

That’s what’s so galling about this issue. People are not listening. Brown didn’t listen to Tony Nicklinson, who he thinks was “relatively healthy.” Listen:

In conjunction with other recent surveys, it shows that more people are in favour of the law allowing the killing of relatively healthy patients like Tony Nicklinson than of those who are terminally ill.

What does “relatively healthy” mean, I wonder? If this man was relatively healthy, then what does one have to do to be counted sick? This is the picture accompanying Brown’s article:

I don’t ask the question in a way that suggests that there is an obvious answer to the question whether Tony Nicklinson is sick enough to be permitted to receive help in dying. Because that decision belonged to none other than Tony Nicklinson himself. And he made it!! I’m asking the question in such a way as to put the question to Brown: How miserable does someone have to be before they should be allowed to ask for such help? We know Tony Nicklinson’s answer. Why doesn’t Brown see that Tony Nicklinson was not only making a perfectly reasonable decision; but that it is an intolerably cruel thing to force someone like Tony Nicklinson to go on living when life has become for them a burden to great to bear? Why doesn’t Brown’s humanity kick in?

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Let’s get some perspective, shall we?!

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My last few posts have been about assisted dying — which should come as no surprise to anyone, since this is the ostensible subject of this blog. As I say in the masthead: “Arguing for the right to die and against the religious obstruction of that right.” One thing that annoys me almost as much as religious opponents of assisted dying are those secularists/humanists/atheists who simply seem unable to get it right. These are the people who are not dependent upon religious doctrine to tell them what is right and wrong; these are also people who, in general, are supposed to check and double-check their sources and their arguments, because when you haven’t got doctrine to reassure you, you really do have a responsibility to think a bit more closely about the things that concern you. You may not always get it right, of course — that’s a danger we all face — but we should get it right more often than not, if we really have taken the trouble to think about something, try our best to discover the best evidence or reasoning for what we believe, and then take care, when speaking or writing about it, that we avoid the worst effects of self-deception, emotional loading, and special pleading.

Now, just to be clear about this, if there were conclusive evidence that legalising assisted dying would be impossible without resulting in massive risk to the so-called vulnerable, the mentally and physically challenged who live amongst us, whether because of accident of birth, illness, mishap or age, then I would be the first to say that legalising assisted dying is something we should not undertake for fear of the inevitable consequences of doing so. The trouble is, there is no evidence that this is the case, despite the best efforts of those who have no respect for evidence at all to show us that it is. Recently, José Pereira, in the journal Current Oncology (accessible here), argued in detail that the laws in Belgium and the Netherlands are simply unable to protect the most vulnerable in those countries, and that thousands of people are being killed there involuntarily every year. I was faced with the fact of this paper’s existence in an interview I did for CTV’s W5 programme last year. Victor Malarek gave it to me cold, and, since I hadn’t seen the paper, and did not know how cogent the arguments being used were, I had very little to say about it, though I did point out that opponents of assisted dying regularly make such claims and that so far they have been shown to be entirely bogus, so that I would not myself lend much credence to them without a very serious background check. (The producers chose to edit these comments out, so that no expression of doubt was permitted to dampen the force of Pereira’s claims.) After the interview I located the paper, and wrote a more serious assessment, though it still had no effect on the outcome; and, in the end, no objections to Pereira’s claims were voiced in the programme, and the result, though it appeared to give more time to supporters of assisted dying, gave Pereira and his fears the last word, and represented them as “expert testimony” in such a way as to constitute bad journalism if not out and out prevarication.

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