There is only one really serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.
— Albert Camus (1955)
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A modern telling of a classic ethical dilemma has a policeman coming upon a fiery car wreck. The policeman can see that the driver will be burned to death before the rescue squad will arrive to free him from his car. The policeman can save the driver from inevitable agony by putting two bullets in his brain, killing him quickly and relatively painlessly. The driver pleads with the policeman, “Please shoot me. I don't want to be burned alive.”
What should the policeman do?
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I mention this because since March 17, 2021, people in Canada have been eligible to receive Medical Assistance In Dying, if they can satisfy a few requirements, including:
1. make a voluntary request that is not the result of external pressure;
2. give informed consent to receive MAID, meaning that the person has consented to receiving MAID after he has received all information needed to make his decision;
3. have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability;
4. be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability; and
5. have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable.
On its face, this appears to be the codification of an unfortunate, but essential, and even ordinary, part of medicine: bringing about the death of the terminally ill. Rationales of this practice tend to emphasize that it is moral only if it is based upon compassion for the patient. Typically in consultation with the patient, the doctor will conclude that the patient’s life is, or soon will be, so bad that the patient would be better off dead.
Upon examination, however, this law expresses a shocking development in political liberalism. The statute is very broadly drawn, and my understanding is that it is being given a broad construction by the government and the courts. As a result, with the flexibility inherent in such clauses as “have enduring and intolerable . . . psychological suffering,” which “cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable,” the statute provides the government with tremendous power.
Under this statute, the government is expressly authorized to euthanize people who are mentally ill. Furthermore, the law has been interpreted to authorize the government to euthanize people who find themselves in financial straits, if such a person is suffering and is unlikely ever to find a way of life which he “considers acceptable.”
So, for example, consider the hypothetical case of an older man who has lost his business due to unscientific and malicious edicts of a medical tyranny imposed in response to an alleged pandemic. Because he has lost his income, he loses his home. Gradually, and then suddenly, he finds himself living under a bridge eating bread he has to steal from the grocery. He has no prospects. Even if the government oppression ends, he won’t have the finance necessary to start a new business; nor is it likely that he can persuade a prospective employer that he still has the vigor to be useful.
Surely after living an upstanding life with its earned comforts, these circumstances would cause intolerable psychological suffering. Just as surely, it is unlikely that these circumstances could be alleviated by something he would consider acceptable. The fact is that a person like this will never again have a decent income, let alone get back into a home.
By a straightforward reading of the Canadian statute, this individual qualifies for euthanasia, if he chooses the option. The problem is that the Canadian model, which is probably a test case for greater adoption in the West, is nothing more than a candy-coated version of the Nazis’ Final Solution, which sent such useless eaters, defectives of all sorts, and the racially unclean to the showers, so to speak. And just as the Nazis were not, and could not be, forgiven for their atrocities, even though the Final Solution was motivated by a horribly misguided desire to improve the human race and society, no government acting upon the Canadian model will be absolved from its moral liability even if its agents are deluded that they are killing with compassion, if this is even possible.
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The liberal enterprise has brought freedom, of one degree or another, to much of the world’s population, beginning with England in 1688, America in 1776, and France in 1789. This freedom has been expressed in economics and in individual liberties.
Many, many mistakes have been, and continue to be made, and many, many lives have been ruined. However, capitalism has brought tremendous progress to mankind. Likewise, the ideal of the American political principle that all men are created equal has been a beacon to the world, and has resulted in the enactment and enforcement of comprehensive anti-discrimination laws, and in hard-fought gains in women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights.
Notably, the American liberal enterprise split into two factions as a response to a monstrous depression from 1893 to 1897, which itself was the consequence of mistakes in the application of laissez faire economics. This is essentially the thesis espoused by Adam Smith that as long as supply, demand, prices, and competition are left free of government regulation, the pursuit of material self-interest, rather than altruism, maximizes society’s wealth through profit-driven production of goods and services.
After this depression, part of American politics continued to fight over how much the government should regulate economic activity, if at all. Another part began to advocate that the levers of the government should be used to make life more equal for everyone, and in particular, to free the poor from the oppression of their poverty. This latter project was effective in improving necessary public services, such as, schools, hospitals, workplace safety, and the social safety net, and in bringing about many socially beneficial legal reforms through such programs as the New Deal and the Great Society.
But liberalism has always been a precarious ride prone to unanticipated derailments. For example, to qualify as a “liberal” today, one must be willing to play make believe that a woman born in a man’s body is biological science, but that a woman born in a woman’s body is a social construct. More to the point, it appears that a new “liberal” requirement is, or is about to be, that one must accept the government killing people to relieve them of distress which the government itself has created, or at least failed to alleviate.
It appears, therefore, that the descendants of the folks who fought so hard for the poor and disadvantaged are now in the process of abandoning their movement’s core beliefs, and slowly adopting the idea that the poor and disadvantaged should be killed, albeit only if they want to be. Obviously, at this time, this is a very minor thread in our politics. There’s no doubt that most people who identify as “liberal” will insist that they want to help the poor and the disadvantaged. However, I am even more certain that nearly all of these folks would insist that it would be right and moral that the policeman shoot the driver in the fiery crash. In addition, the Covid era has demonstrated above all else that the public can be sold any load of bullshit as long as it is seductively packaged, so that what the public believes now may be very different from what it believes next week.
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A big problem with the Canadian model is a problem which the “liberals” appear to have overlooked. This problem is that the most reliable law that we have makes suicide illegal. St. Thomas gave three reasons why:
1. Everything naturally keeps itself in being, so that suicide is contrary to natural law and to charity;
2. Every man is part of a community, so that by killing himself, he injures the community; and
3. Life is God’s gift to man, and is subject to God’s power, so that whoever takes his own life, sins against God.
The response to these arguments is familiar and takes the form of the rationale of the euthanasia laws and ethics. For example, David Hume argued that suicide is permissible, if, on balance, more value is produced for the individual or for society than would be produced by not committing suicide.
Law or not, and good or not, medically assisted dying has been a part of Western culture for a long time. As a result, Bill Clinton’s suggested moral boundaries for abortion rights, that abortion be “safe, legal, and rare,” is probably the best framework for medically assisted dying, at this point.
On the one hand, this is not an issue of human life which should be the subject of radical change. The society should move slowly as the issues develop, so that we can have confidence that we are making a full examination of all of the relevant factors and ultimately, that we have made the correct decisions.
On the other hand, we have seen that the government will abuse its power. Further, we have also seen how little influence the people have over the activities of the government. The most foolish thing the people could do in this regard is hastily adopt poorly thought-through laws which the government might tend to, and probably would, abuse. This is literally a matter of life and death. Cooler heads must prevail over the immediate demands of the fanatics.
In the broader view, the stress from the constant worry over such basics as food, shelter, and medicine, which is an inescapable feature of a life in poverty, can take an intense and emotionally paralyzing toll on a person’s mental and physical health. The answer to this cannot be death by the government. Poverty, especially extreme poverty, is evidence that the society has failed, so that such a death, such a killing, would be to let society off the hook for its own failures. No amount of compassion in the process could absolve the government or its people of the immorality. Moreover, compassion, genuinely expressed, would be in efforts to prevent such circumstances from obtaining, arguably the liberal's true and natural enterprise.
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Someone once remarked that life can be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” These facets of human existence can provoke strong emotions, including a profound wish for early death. Setting aside the legality of suicide, one important way that we can make life a bit less nasty and brutish, is to resist the trend in the United States of the extreme becoming the mundane. In practical reality, where we are heading is not very far from where the Nazis were.
We should watch our steps.
Does Compassion Absolve a Government Killing?