The right to die?

He was a small and wiry man, stooped with age.  He lived alone.  He had outlived three wives, and had served in both World Wars.  A wealth of living behind him, the transcendent highlights of his life were his wartime experiences - the suffering, the deprivation, the atrocities on “our” side^[1]; the ugliness but also the camaraderie, the superhuman effort, the intensity of the will to live. 

In the midst of the experiential peaks and troughs of wartime, suicide never once occurred to him; he had been too engrossed in surviving, in fighting for a cause, in tasting forbidden fruit.  There had been other times much more spirit-sapping; times of unemployment, of marital disharmony, of loneliness.  And the prospect of a decline, alone, into the decrepitude and institutional dependence of advanced old age, held no appeal whatsoever. 

Who has the right to prolong, or to force you to prolong your life beyond what you are willing to tolerate?  Others may seek to dissuade you, to comfort you, to support you through bad times.  But in the final analysis is your life not yours, absolutely yours^[2], yours to end? 

We each have our low times.  Some are lower than others.  That is part of living.  Life can be lonely and awful in the midst of friends and family; it can be impoverished in material plenty; it can be excruciatingly comfortable.  Conversely, the sweetest joys may be experienced in pain and deprivation. 

Those generally healthy individuals who, during a temporary depression, might wish to take the final exit should not be assisted by others in fulfilling their wish.  If all any one of us had to do was to visit the local doctor for a prescription who knows how many of us would still be here now? 

It is an entirely different matter to assist a dying, terminally ill, severely disabled, or senile person to a painless and dignified death if that was their express and repeated wish when they were in full command of their mental faculties.  Can there be a despair greater than when you are so permanently dependent on others that you are not able to take your own life when you desperately want to?  And why should you have to wait until you are no longer in control of your senses?  What is wrong with a dignified exit in your eighties or nineties? 

Many oppose voluntary euthanasia.  Much of the opposition has its roots in the religious tradition of glorifying human suffering and martyrdom.  Pain and torment are variously seen as karma, penance, purification, and enlightening.  The more intense and terminal the suffering, the greater the alleged merit.  

Selflessness, self-denial, and even self-sacrifice are necessary to a degree for each of us to fulfil our potentials over the course of our lives, and to allow others to fulfil their potentials in this life – not in an uncertain afterlife.  Not yielding to our baser instincts, and putting our long term interests and the interests of others ahead of our own instant gratification and short term interests,  is necessary for us and society to progress. 

But suffering and self-sacrifice^[3] are not ends in themselves – they are means to ends in this present life.  Human suffering justified by rewards after death is at best a desperate justification of the intolerable, and at worst a cynical instrument of oppression used by those who have power to keep those who have not under their thumbs. 

Allowing voluntary euthanasia, like capital punishment^[4], does open the door to abuse of an individual's right to life, and any abuse of this fundamental right is serious and unacceptable.  The elderly infirm may be put under pressure to quit their lives while there is still something to leave to their grasping offspring.  Society may gradually relax the criteria for voluntary euthanasia to include those considered burdensome and who are unable to speak for themselves.  All this is true. 

But, unlike capital punishment, the wish to die is essentially a personal wish, however it may have been prompted.  Voluntary euthanasia is not inherently a power of the State, although a corrupt State might appropriate it for its own purposes. 

We cannot and should not save the world from all evil^[5]; we should not sanitise the world; we should not remove all sharp edges, in the event that a human being might blunder into them; we cannot always avoid the exercise of arbitrary power^[6]; we cannot avoid the continual cycling of corruption and integrity^[7].  At best we can soften the blows, and stop a complete rout^[8], not through being too timid to take risks^[9], but through saving our energies for the things that really matter by not trying to win every battle, by guessing where to yield and where to hold the line. 

The risk and human cost of voluntary euthanasia abuse do not justify a denial of the right to die.