Pressure to Hasten One’s Death

A response to Matthew Parris

Here are some key excerpts of Parris’ article.

• “As (objectors say) the practice spreads, social and cultural pressure will grow on the terminally ill to hasten their own deaths so as ‘not to be a burden’ on others or themselves. I believe this will indeed come to pass. And I would welcome it.”
• “A proportionately ever-smaller working population carries an ever-larger cohort of elderly and retired citizens, supported by state pensions and advances in medical science that sustain us into ever-longer retirements.”
• “It may sound brutal, but I don’t apologise for the reductivist tone in which this column treats human beings as units — in deficit or surplus to the collective. For a society as much as for an individual, self-preservation must shine a harsh beam on to the balance between input and output.”
• “I suspect — and believe I notice — that our culture is changing its mind about the worth of old age when coupled with crippling degeneration, incapacity, indignity and often suffering. If I’m right, our growing interest in assisted dying may reflect a largely unconscious realisation that we simply cannot afford extreme senescence or desperate infirmity for as many such individuals as our society is producing.”

In summary, Parris thinks it is good for the terminally ill to feel pressure to hasten their own deaths via assisted suicide or euthanasia because it is economically unsustainable to continue to fund their healthcare costs. And it is unsustainable for two reasons: (1) we live longer and (2) we have a shrinking working population.

I do not know how reasonable Parris’ economic prediction is, so I cannot comment on that, but even if it were reasonable, it strikes me as a weak argument in favor of assisted death. Why? Because patients already have the right to refuse medical care, even when it is life-sustaining. So if the goal is to lower healthcare costs, then that could be done by people simply refusing care.

Perhaps Parris believes that with the legalization of assisted death and the pressure to seek it, healthcare costs would be lowered to a sustainable level whereas it would not be so if we simply relied on the right to refuse. That might be true, but he would need to make that case.

To be clear, by pointing out that refusing care would lead to lower healthcare costs, I am not suggesting that our society should pressure people into doing this. In general, we should not see dependents and other vulnerable people as burdens; rather, we should see them as objects of compassion and benevolence. I am of the position that happily taking care of others is virtuous.

Another point I want to make is this. A bad argument for X does not mean that X is unjustified. To elaborate, numerous arguments are given in favor of assisted death, and not all of them are good. But that fact does not mean that assisted death is unjustified. So if opponents of assisted death want to show they are right, they must debunk the best arguments in favor of allowing assisted death.

Lastly, suggesting that the true motivation for X is bad does not say anything about whether X is justified because X can be justified on its own grounds. So even if the true or original motivation for assisted death is bad, it does not follow that assisted death is unjustified.