Assisted Dying

May 8, 2006

This week will see the re-introduction of a bill to legalize “assisted dying” (physician-assisted suicide (PAS)) in Britain. Over the weekend, the British papers were full of articles and op-eds on the topic. Writing for The Observer, Mary Warnock argues that PAS is necessary because palliative care is “imperfect,” and that legalization PAS will not be a “slippery slope” leading to euthanasia. In essence, she is arguing that we haven’t gotten palliative care right, but PAS we can get right.

Also in The Observer, David Williams gives first-person testimony to the fact that we will not get PAS right. Williams admits that if PAS had been an option when he was first diagnosed with cancer, he would have chosen it. However, he is now glad that it was not an option.

Perhaps the strongest article is by Danny Kruger in The Telegraph. He systematically shows how PAS is directly contrary to every historical tenet of bioethics. When we give up the foundations of our ethics, limitations become simply arbitrary. The bill is, in many ways, fundamentally flawed.

Lord Joffe’s Bill, for all its undoubted compassion, reveals a diminished idea of the value of humanity. The idea behind it is that people should die with “dignity” – as if the dignity of a man consists in serenity, in his health and (a vogue word, terrible in its import) his “happiness.”

. . .

Our approach to animal life is ruthlessly Darwinian. We breed selectively, and cull the old and infirm: we work to improve not the wellbeing of particular individuals but the quality of the stock.

But we are different: the value of human life lies not its utility, in the use or happiness it brings to the individual or to society. Human beings are intrinsically valuable, irrespective of their own strengths or attitudes.

. . .

Yet [Lord Joffe’s] Bill is not ethically neutral. It takes a stand, on a moral proposition that runs counter to 2,000 years of Western thought.