Ross Douthat writes about the death of Dr. Jack Kevorkian today, but really fails to grapple with the central moral dilemma of assisted suicide despite correctly identifying it:
The difference, of course, is that Kevorkian's clients asked for it. That free choice is what separates assisted suicide from murder, his defenders would insist.
But this means that the moral case for assisted suicide depends much more on our respect for people's own desire to die than on our sympathy for their devastating medical conditions. If participating in a suicide is legally and ethically acceptable, in other words, it can't just be because cancer is brutal and dementia is dehumanizing. It can only be because there's a right to suicide.
I wouldn't call myself a "defender" of Kevorkian, but the issue of consent here is an important one that Douthat doesn't really offer a strong counterargument to. He merely asserts that if people were legally allowed to end their own lives, then Bad Things Would Happen.
Laws regarding assisted suicide vary, but in a philosophical sense societies often make distinctions between different kinds of killing based on consent. We do not refer to soldiers killing each other on the battlefield as murder, but the laws of war draw lines distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants precisely because non-combatants haven't consented to being part of hostilities. The practice of using child soldiers is abhorrent not just because it robs children of their childhood by forcing them to kill people, but also because children can't really consent to taking on the role of a combatant.
There's certainly something that makes me queasy about the idea of a professional assisted suicide industry, but as long as people aren't manipulated or otherwise coerced into ending their own lives then I'm not really sure what business it is of mine to tell them they have to go on living. And I suspect that often when Americans about "assisted suicide" we're really talking about abortion, since some of the issues--when does the government get to decide to tell you what to do with your own body--are similar, and for someone like Douthat arguing that terminally ill people might not want to suffer through their last days probably sounds a lot like saying women shouldn't have to carry their rapists' children to term. But I think there's even less of a moral argument against a "right to die" since the only life that can be said to end is that of the person making the decision. Since terminal illness, unlike pregnancy, happens to men as well as women, there's no opportunity to reduce the conversation to a litany of sexist stereotypes about how "fun" assisted suicide is, or how it abets a culture of sinful hedonism that needs to be rectified. But in at least one sense the issues are similar to me, they're complex moral decisions that people don't make lightly, and so they're best made without much involvement from strangers.
