The Ethics of Euthanasia

Remove all ads!

I actually got to thinking of this because my dog was recently diagnosed with a terminal condition, and it started me thinking about why it is considered humane to kill an animal that is terminally ill and suffering, but it is a criminal act to allow a human to end his/her life if he/she is terminally ill and suffering. While I certainly don't intend for this to turn into a discussion of "Why is it OK for dogs, but bad for humans?" if you are so inclined feel free to discuss that. What I'm more interested in, are people's thoughts on the subject concerning humans. My personal stance is impossible to legislate, which I suppose makes it a strange viewpoint, but I feel if someone is terminally ill and is in constant, chronic pain, that they should be allowed to end their life. It is of course impossible to legislate such a law, because it is impossible to determine when an illness becomes terminal. For example, most cancers are treatable, but brain cancer is not. Are you considered terminal as soon as you are diagnosed with brain cancer, or does this happen only after you start to decline? I suppose a similar arguement can be made for AIDS.

Dicitonary.com gives this definition of euthanasia:

I found this definition strange because of the "suspension of extraordinary medical treatment" part. In the U.S. at least, it is a legal right to refuse medical treatment of any kind if it is your desire, yet I never considered that euthanasia, even if their refusal results in their death. For example, is someone goes into a coma after a traumatic head injury, and the family decides to stop life-support, I don't consider that euthanasia. For me, I usually considered it when a person who was of competent mind decides to end their own life (sometimes with the aid of a physician) due to a terminal illness.

Anyway, what are your thoughts?

 

It's not impossible at all to legislate such an "Assisted Suicide" law - the state of Oregon did it about 6 years ago (IIRC), by a large margin in a statewide ballot measure. Of course the national legislature has tried to stop Oregon from allowing this law to go into effect, but I don't think they've been successful yet.

Choice should hold at either end of life, IMO.

 

Pro-Choice.

Unfortunately, things get tricky when the subject in question is unable to express/make that choice because of illness, injuries, etc.

In that case, we should just sacrifice him/her to Bhaal!

 

In the end, eveyone is responsible of himself only. Gov should just give the doctors right to end someone's life, if...

#) ...Add proper description here, like being vegetable for the rest of the life, permanent insanity, painful and uncurable disease, et cetra.

Nowdays, if someone would like to end someone's suffering, s/he would be sentected to prison from murder.

*Add ugly word here, add church*

 

I would prefer a fast death than endless suffering. Of course this maybe shows that I'm weak and I don't have the inner strength to face life and its difficulties...

As far as the legislation is concerned, I don't think that the real problem is moral (only god decides when someone must die and other similar arguments) but rather where the abuse of a law, which allows euthanasia, would lead.

 

Why should we care about euthanasia? Shouldn't we worry first about youth in America?

Sorry, just thought I'd lead off with the only euthanasia joke I know. (Speaking of which, it's off-topic, but have you noticed that Americans have no jokes about euthanasia or abortion? We have lots of black humor about executions, plagues, muggings, slavery, concentration camps, and car accidents - but no jokes about soylent green or coat hangers. "Three young girls walk into an abortion clinc and..." Ugh. Hints at something hollow, non?)

Anyway, suicide is illegal for a reason - society invests scarce years and valuable resources in a citizen's upbringing and maintenance, so society deserves the last word on whether or not that contribution can be willfully vandalized - but enforcement penalties are more symbolic than anything. (What's the state going to do, refuse you burial?) But assisted suicide is illegal for a much stronger reason - that "assisting" suicide creates perverse social incentives that mess up the very reasons why society should value life.

Look at abortion, for example. There are plenty of reasonable individualist-liberty arguments to be made about the freedom to kill your fetus. But "choice" and "privacy" aren't the only defenses invoked. A more insidious analysis points out that a) most abortions are carried out by the poor, and b) most crime is committed by the poor, and c) therefore abortion lowers both poverty and the crimerate. Tada - thanks to abortion, our society is now safer and richer! It's scientifically irrefutable. 'Course, you could use the same principles to make the argument that we would be even safer and richer if we killed off the entire underclass...

Same for euthanasia. You can make the argument about self-conscious suicide by those with a terminal illness as a individualist-liberty right (though, if you think about it, since we all die EVENTUALLY, every one of us is living with a "terminal" illness). But utilitarianism soon whispers the obvious...that dying costs a lot more than living. So if we terminate the dying phase early, then we have more resources to invest in living - education! vacations! arts! entertainment! computer games! etc.! And there are a whole host of wasting diseases whose utilitarian turning point can be precisely identified with statistical analysis. Before this point, you are a benefit to society; past this point, you are a leech.

It's easy to suppose that euthanasia wouldn't go that far and would stay purely choice-driven - no one would be euthanized unless they personally requested it. Oh, but what's that? America already has a "pro-choice" ethical issue - except it focuses on ONE person's choice to kill or preserve ANOTHER person's life for reasons weighed only by the ONE person without input from the other. What makes us think that euthanasia wouldn't move in the same "pro-choice" direction?

 

@ GM

So where do you stand? My gut feeling is that you are against it, yet you admit that there is a calculable, statistical data point that when reached would suggests that a person is no longer a benefit to society, and is now leeching off of it.

I agree with Shura that the person we are talking about would have to make the choice for themselves. However, there are already laws on the books that if a person is in an incapacitated state, the decision of care falls on a family member. Usually a spouse, but depending on whether or not you are married, it could theoretically fall to your parents or children. So that's really not the issue.

We're talking about a person who is in pain every day, probably has difficulty getting around, is in sound mind, and knows his/her condition is going to slowly deteriorate over time, and medicine will never help him/her. Does that person have the right to die? Or, and I guess this is really what I'm getting at, if that person is YOU, would you want that right. It's hard to answer that question, as I'm not in such a state right now, but my gut feeling is I would at least like it as a right, and an option open to me if I should get to that point at some time.

 

A delayed elaboration on my earlier post...

Oregon's assisted suicide law allows people with terminal diagnoses to choose to end their lives. The patient must have at least two independent diagnoses of a terminal condition (IIRC, with a short expected lifespan) and must pass a psychiatric assessment. At that point,the patient can receive a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs. That's the only involvement the physician has in the process - the drugs are self-administered. There's a whole element of reporting involved as well, so the state can track how often the option is being used. So far, not terribly.

@Grey: I just don't buy the argument that there's a conspiracy to improve society by getting people to terminate life at either end of the spectrum. Honestly, I don't think that most people in the situation of either terminal illness or unwanted pregnancy really care about the impact of their choices on anyone outside of their immediate personal circle. It's a decision that affects the individual foremost, and those people s/he chooses to include. Let it be that way. We (meaning society) need to be more aware of when things really aren't out business, and keep our noses out of those situations unless we're directly invited.

 

As I wrote, "you could use the same principles to make the argument that we would be even safer and richer if we killed off the entire underclass". There is indeed a calculable, statistical data point that you can use to measure anyone. Trick is: who decides what variables we measure? and how do we determine measurements? and do we affect other variables when we act on the one?

Here's a specific example. Let's say that it costs one million dollars to coast some poor suffering soul into eternity in their last year of life. One million dollars could pay for the educations of ten poor underclass youths at a prestigious Ivy League university. So it's an easy balance, no? Isn't it worth it to forfeit someone's final, unlovely year in order to pull these ten youths out of poverty?

Oh, but wait...those same underclass youths are statistically likely to be criminals. Let's suppose that independent of that free Ivy League education, half would be criminals and half would be law-abiding welfarists. Total up the costs of a lifetime of welfare, incarceration, judicial work, policing, crime, social workers, malinvested charity, etc., and we come to the arbitrary figure of, oh, ten million dollars. Just think - if we terminated these ten leeches, we could pay for a hundred Ivy League educations!

Oh, but wait...probably those one hundred kids attending Ivy League schools are going to be a li'l hardened, knowing that their education is paid for by the deaths of ten anonymous leeches. That probably poisons their lives at some moral level. Same, one step back, with those that benefit from cutting off Grandpa a bit early.

That's the problem with a utilitarian calculation. The datapoint DOES exist. The difficulty is identifying it, since we seem to measure values differently - what's really worth more, one hundred Ivy League educations for good American kids, or the lives of ten leeches? - and then figuring out how to act on that information without poisoning the people you're supposed to benefit.

Abortion is a perfect example of utilitarian death. There are all sorts of benefits from aborting a kid. The aborter escapes the trap of single parenthood, which statistically is the best way to mire someone in lifelong poverty; the kid isn't born into an unloving and/or poor family; socially-acceptable abortion opens up all sorts of fun avenues, like casual sex, which would otherwise be prohibitively risky; most abortions are done on poor women, and most crime is performed by kids of poor, single-parent homes, so abortion lowers poverty and the crimerate; and restrictions on abortion require that the state intrude on an excruciatingly personal area. So many benefits! All it costs is the termination of a li'l kid that has yet to provide ANYTHING to society. You can't get much more worthless than that.

Oh, wait, you can...you can be a positive COST to society. That's what our dying seniors are. If abortion is a social benefit, isn't euthanasia even better?

So it's true that today euthanasia is sold as strictly a personal decision for only the most extreme cases. But why naively trust to that when we have existing examples? Abortion is the choice of ONE person to terminate ANOTHER person. As a society, we've already accepted the principle that it's OK for one person to terminate another without their express consent. And those societies that have embraced widespread euthanasia - like, say, Nazi Germany - did not take very long to recognize that euthanasia offers all kinds of social benefits when ONE person decides to terminate ANOTHER, according to precisely scientific criteria.

I guess all I'm saying (forgive the long post) is that given the American experience with abortion, I wouldn't dare approve legally of euthanasia. But if you already support the abortion calculus, then there is no reason to oppose euthanasia - either by one's own choice or another's. What's a little death between friends?

 

Both euthanasia and abortion are legal in the Netherlands, and that's fine with me. Everyone should have a choice.

 

Yes, Pac man, "everyone should have a choice" - but one person's choice to decide another's fate? Isn't that what abortion is about - and what euthanasia would become? Our society already gives the children and the state tremendous power over the fates of dying seniors. If a parent has alzheimers or some other wasting disease, the children decide in which nursing home to place the ailing parent. It's not that far of a stretch to see the children not only deciding where Grandpa should go, but when he should go. Or when Medicare, strapped for cash, decides that Grandpa should go.

We don't even need to work up any kind of high-minded rationale for it. We just use the abortion excuse. We didn't ask to have Grandpa get sick...we aren't prepared for the time and expense...his sickness is ruining our ambitions...why should his problems burden our young, busy lives...this is a private decision between a parent and child... These are all socially-acceptable justifications for abortion. Why not for euthanasia, too?

We're kidding ourselves if we suppose that euthanasia would be limited to people who are fully conscious, completely aware, and perfectly rational when they decide to voluntarily pull their own plug.

Ours is a world awash in legal death. Why drink any more deeply?

 

What happend to "natural circumstances"? We depend too much on medicine today.

I'd say that when a person is no longer afraid of dying, they can choose for themselves whether they see tommorow.

But how would we know?

Personally, I'm with GM on this one. I'd say it's more of a philosophical question rather than an opinion whether someone has "the right to choose".

I was going to say "Besides, it's a well known fact that people don't know what's best for themselves." but thought better of it.

 

I seem to remember a variant of that (exile, rather than execution) in Hitchiker's Guide...as a result, everyone died off as a result of an epidemic contracted from a dirty telephone. (No one left to clean them, you see.)

Another, less theoretical problem with euthenasia is the preponderance of "suicide tourists." I seem to recall a major uproar by the citizenry of one of Australia's states (iirc). An assisted suicide law was passed, and next thing you know everyone from elsewhere in the region is showing up to die.