Blog of Death

This is a touching story.

One of Britain’s greatest conductors and his wife have taken their own lives at the Swiss assisted suicide clinic Dignitas.  Sir Edward Downes, 85, and his 74-year-old wife Joan travelled there to end their lives, his family said in a statement.  Sir Edward, who was principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic from 1980 to 1991, had suffered with near blindness for the past 15 years and was going deaf. Lady Downes had terminal cancer and “he could not go on living without her,” said Sir Edward’s agent Jonathan Groves.

I am a strong Right-to-Death proponent — as, according to the article, are an overwhelming majority of Britons:

There is massive public support for a change in the law to allow assisted dying, with polls regularly showing more than 80 per cent of the public want it made legal.

I have never been very clear about the religious objections to suicide and assisted suicide.   The only time I tackled a religious colleague about it he launched into a “slippery slope” argument.   Well, I suppose some slopes are slippery, and some aren’t. I can’t see this one as being particularly slippery.   In any case, slippery-slope is not a religious argument.   What is the religious argument?  Are there any secular ones, other than the slippery slope?

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27 Responses to Blog of Death

  1. Susan says:

    As far as I know, the religious argument is that only God has the right to decide when life ends, or begins. Thus only God has the power to take life, and suicide is therefore murder. That’s how it was explained to me once by a religious person. For what it’s worth.

  2. MSG says:

    As for assisted suicide, there are two objections. First, if there is a right to suicide, there should be right to go into a drug store and buy the fatal pills, without the “assistance” of a prescription and a physician’s approval. Thus, the institutionalization of assisted suicide represents a corrupt accommodation with what Thomas Szasz calls the Therapeutic State. Second — and this is the slippery slope — there is an unmarked progression from assisted suicide to benevolent mercy killing to outright murder. It may corrupt physicians to empower them to kill, and may undermine the confidence of patients who want to live, especially patients with expensive illnesses and greedy heirs. And there are physicians and many others who feel very confident, righteously confident, in their judgments about the quality of other people’s lives; conscience here is as often a threat as it is a protection. Very sick and very old people are vulnerable to bullying and shaming, subtle or blatant, according to circumstances; approval formalities and other imagined safeguards cannot be relied on, as the bullying and shaming go on behind the scenes.

    We are much more secure most of the time if we know that no one, especially not a physician, can claim the right to kill us with impunity, not even if they produce signed consents and a stack of psychiatrist approvals. The common law has with good reason long held that one cannot consent to a wounding, let alone to a killing.

  3. David Tye says:

    Plato held that the philosopher, released from the body, is able to know the truth better than he could in the body. Why then, did Plato not advocate suicide for the philosopher?

    The answer is a secular argument against suicide that still retains force today. The philosopher is born uneducated and helpless into the city, which did not ask his permission in expending its resources on raising and educating him through his youth. The question is not whether this is right or wrong, fair or unfair – it is a statement of the natural order of things. The philosopher owes his life to the city whether he likes it or not. He is not an isolated atom moving through the universe in blessed independence, but a creature existing inextricably and organically within his city. He has no more right to “check out” of the city at his own pleasure than he exercised a right to be born into the city in the first place. The individual citizen was “drafted” into the city, and must “remain at his post” until the city relieves him.

  4. I also support the right to die, but the secular arguments against it seem obvious to me. A law that allows assisted suicide opens a window for abuse by doctors, care-givers and selfish family members. Some slopes really _are_ slippery. The Economist has a good article about the topic.

    ISTM that the safeguards built in to the proposed amendments to the British law (two doctors, advance consent etc etc) provide a reasonable compromise.

  5. j mct says:

    Here’s a “traditional” arguement. It’s from Chesterton, so it ‘wanders’ a bit, but it’s in there.

    http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2008/08/gkc-at-crossroads.html

    I have no idea if that will work as a link that can be clicked on.

  6. Anonymous Coward says:

    I thought religions were forced to condemn suicide mainly when they preach of a blissful afterlife. If you go around telling everyone that after they die they can go to a wonderful happy place some of them might naturally think “why bother?” with our real sometimes-not-so-wonderful world. So they add the gotcha that god will punish you if you try getting to the afterlife early. Logical, in the context of the silly afterlife thing.

  7. TrueNorth says:

    I would distinguish between two types of situation.

    1) The patient has been declared terminally ill or has been classified as having an extremely poor quality of life and this finding has been reviewed by another doctor, or board of doctors. In this case, I would say that assisted suicide should be legal, but only if the patient himself has explicitly authorized it and was deemed to be of sound mind when he did so. I would not give this authority to anyone else, whether they are doctors or family members with power of attorney.

    2) A patient not meeting the above criteria (say an otherwise healthy young person who is temporarily suffering from depression). In this case, assisted suicide should be strictly illegal.

  8. R.B. Glennie says:

    I have no religious sensibilities whatsoever, I am a big opponent of assisted suicide – for the very reasons of the `slippery slope’ that the author of this piece says is `unlikely.’

    Not only is it not `unlikely’, the slope has already slipped, as it were. In places were assisted killing is legal – Oregon, the Netherland, and apparently Switzerland – there are many cases where people entirely without terminal diseases, but who suffer from depression or other non-life threatening conditions, have been given the go-ahead to have others help kill them.

    Indeed, this is the case with the individual described in the link.

    Of course, the other problem is having doctors and other medical personnel making death-decisions, completely against the Hippocratic oath.

  9. kurt9 says:

    I had a friend who had an inoperable form of brain cancer. He knew that the growth of this tumor would gradually destroy his brain and, hence, all of his memories and identity. He wanted the option of assisted suicide so that he could get decent cryo-preservation before the tumor spread. You see, you have to be legally “dead” before you can enter cryo-preservation, but he needed to enter cryo-preservation while his brain was still largely intact. So, he was caught in a rather vicious catch-22 situation. He sued the state of California for the right of assisted suicide in an attempt to resolve this catch-22. Unfortunately, he lost the case. The good news is his tumor went into remission for another 15 years. The bad news is that it came back around 2005 and he entered cryo-preservation in 2006.

    Consider cryonics as a form of medical “time travel”. Medical conditions that routinely kill people today, such as aging and cancer, will most certainly be curable at some point in the future. Robust regeneration will also be available at some time in the future. For someone who is afflicted with such a malady, the key is to make it into the future where such maladies are routinely cured. This is the purpose of cryonics. As long as your neurostructure is intact, you are potentially still alive, even though you may be “dead” from the current legal standpoint. Thus cryopreservation while your neurostructure is intact is necessary. In many cases, this requires assisted “suicide” because of brain wasting diseases and the current legal requirement that you be classified as “dead” before you can enter cryo-preservation.

    Also, there are financial reasons for wanting to enter cryo-preservation early where one may need the option of assisted “suicide”. Many expensive medical procedures, often paid for by one’s assets, are applied to keep you “alive” even though the current state of the art has no chance of restoring you to youthful functionality. Thus, your assets get drains in this pointless medical “care” to the point where you cannot afford cryo-preservation, let alone be able to take assets with you into the future. This has happened to many cryo-suspension patients.

    “Suicide” by someone with the intent of securing a decent cryo-preservation is IN NO WAY the moral equivalent to suicide by someone who does not seek cryopreservation at all. The purpose of “suicide” by the former is not the negation of existance itself, but the desire to more effective transition to a future existance of far greater possibilities than anything offered today.

    Cryonics is not just medical time travel, it can be thought of as immigration across time. In the 19th century, many people immigrated across a distance to create a new life for themselves in the new American frontier. Likewise, people who enter cryo-preservation are seeking to immigrate across time to a future of greatly expanded opportunities afforded by the biotechnological conquest of aging and death.

  10. Two points:

    1) Re: cryogenics — what makes anybody assume that, even if resussitation and treatment become possible in the future, that the people of the future would have any interest in thawing out the frozen chosen and bringing them back to life? Sounds like a “faith-based” idea to me.

    2) RE: the “slippery slope” — we’re already sliding down it when it comes to pressuring people to kill themselves. Take the case of Barbara Wagoner in Oregon. Oregon allows physican-assisted suicide (it was the first state to legalize the practice, and until last fall the only state in the country to do so). Wagner had treatable but not curable brain cancer. She was on Oregon’s public health program (hello, socialized medicine!). The state refused to pay her treatment, but in the letter notifying her of its denial of payment, noted that the state was more than willing to pay for her to kill herself under the assisted-suicide law. So, no life-extending treatment, but a life-ending one, would be provided.

    Here a link to Ms. Wagoner’s story:

    http://www.kval.com/news/26140519.html

    And some analysis by the American Thinker website:

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/oregons_suicidal_approach_to_h.html

    As the country appears to be moving in the direction of greater government control over healthcare, don’t be surprised to find this kind of story becoming more and more common.

  11. Oops — Ms. Wagoner had lung cancer, not brain cancer. My apologies for the error.

  12. Caledonian says:

    @MSG

    The common law has with good reason long held that one cannot consent to a wounding, let alone to a killing.

    Wrong. It is perfectly possible to consent to injury or the risk of injury. In practice, this tends to be restricted to “acceptable” risks and injuries – when society or even specific authority figures don’t approve, they tend to deny that right.

  13. Pingback: On the Ethics of Suicide, Assisted or Otherwise « Occluded Sun

  14. Florida resident says:

    Dear Bradlaugh !
    Dear participants of the discussion !
    Being secular myself, I want to ask what is the position of various Religions on the problem of overpopulation (Maltus) ?
    I am interested to hear your enlightened opinion, without obligation to agree with you, but also without prejudice.
    Your truly, Florida resident.

  15. kurt9 says:

    @Mark in Spokane

    You don’t get it. We do not expect “others” to reanimate us. “Others” being defined as people outside the cryonics community. What we expect is a general bionanotechnology being developed for many other commercial and medical applications and the future versions of ourselves within the cryonics community to use this off the shelf technology to develop the technology specific to reanimating people from cryo-preservation.

    You call cryonics as “faith-based” because there is no guaranteed outcome. When you start a new company, particularly a technology one, you also do not have a guaranteed outcome. You hope for the best, plan for the worst, and do whatever it takes to make your business successful. Cryonics is no more faith-based than this.

    Internal locus of control, my man.

  16. Florida resident says:

    Dear kurt9 !
    What cryonics community thinks of overpopulation problem ?
    Your F.r.

  17. Kurt9:

    I heartily agree with you that I “don’t get” cryonics. I have never really understood it aside from an attempt at wishful thinking. I don’t object to anyone doing it — if you choose to freeze yourself in the hope of someday being thawed out, more power to you. In a free society people get to do all kinds of wacky things that I may or may not agree with. But for myself, it just strikes me as a profoundly weird idea. A refusal to acknowledge the limited nature of human life — and the reality of death. I understand the desire to live forever, though.

    As for the future, of course, the “cryonics community” probably won’t have the last say in who gets thawed out and brought back to life. If the hoped for future utopia has socialized medicine, I imagine that there will be very few resources dedicated to keeping people (bodies? heads?) in liquid nitrogen, and even fewer resources dedicated to thawing out & resussitaing such people (bodies? heads?) and providing them with treatments for their underlying diseases.

    Remember Jefferson’s statement: the world belongs to the living.

  18. kurt9 says:

    @Mark in Spokane

    Socialized medicine is an issue that we will need to deal with. However, I think there will always be possibilities to work outside the system, even if it means relocating internationally. Every scenario you can imagine we have probably thought of.

    Reanimation (and curing aging) will involve the kind of bionanotechnology that is being developed for many applications, including non-medical industrial applications such as semiconductors and materials science. It is highly unlikely that access to this technology will be completely limited even if we do have socialized medicine in the future. I expect this kind of molecular technology will be so widespread in another 50 years that a single point of control (e.g. medical regulatory authority) is highly unlikely. The Russians have a proverb, for every rule, there is 100 ways around it.

    You are correct that the world belongs to the living. Is it not likely that some of those living will be members of cryonics organizations and will be working to make the technology successful? The future is what we make of it, nothing more.

    http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/cambridge.html

    The following link neatly answers (and destroys the credibility of) all of the overpopulation and other arguments against radical life extension.

    http://sens.org/index.php?pagename=sensf_faq_concerns

    There is no legitimate argument against cryonics and radical life extension.

  19. One clarification: I think people should have the right to have their remains frozen after death — the current practice in the “science” of cryonics. I don’t support people being frozen prior to death.

  20. “Death comes for us all, yea, even for kings he comes.” — Thomas More.

    Is the argument that the cryonics folks make that death will one day cease to be a possibility? I’m not talking “die of old age death” — it is conceiveable that science could figure out some way to thwart aging. But death by accident will no longer happen? Murder will no longer happen? Suicide will no longer happen?

    I have no problem with radical life extension — I’d love to live to be 500 or 1000 years old. But I simply cannot conceive of a natural world where human beings will not be subject to death.

  21. kurt9 says:

    @Mark in Spokane

    Certainly one can die of homicide, suicide, or accidents in a world free of the aging process. That’s why I prefer to use the term post-mortal rather than immortal. Bionano and a comprehensive stem cell regenerative medicine will make accidents that kill people today will be routinely survivable in the future. Only an explosion type accident that complete destroys your brain would be fatal. Perhaps we may have “memory backups” as well, then grow a new body, using synthetic biology and download the memories back into it.

    In any case, there will be plenty of things that can kill you in the 24th century. Aging will not be one of them.

    The fundamental moral argument with regards to life, death, and suicide is the same as with all else. Does the individual have the right to make his or her own choices in life, or must the individual live by the dictates of an external agency? This is how Ayn Rand defined morality and I agree with it 100%.

  22. kurt9 says:

    @Mark in Spokane

    Your argument is precisely the reason why we need the assisted suicide option for the following three reasons:

    1) There are degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and brain cancer that destroy neurostructure before cessation of metabolism
    2) The current practice of keeping people on life support and other expensive medical treatments that cannot do anything about the underlying cause of aging depletes people’s assets so they can no longer afford suspension
    3) Ischemic demage occurs to the brain within 1-2 hours following the cessation of metabolism

    All of these are reasons for people to be able to enter cryo-preservation prior to legal death or to pass through legal death under controllable circumstanses.

    There is another reason that has nothing to do with cryonics and life extension at all. Who are you to say whether I can frozen before legal declaration of death? Don’t you think its presumptuous for you to say what I can or cannot do with my life and body when you do not even know me personally?

  23. Caledonian says:

    Don’t you think its presumptuous for you to say what I can or cannot do with my life and body when you do not even know me personally?

    The presumptuous rarely perceive themselves to be so. Physicians are not likely to be your allies, kurt9 – they spend too much of their time making the decisions of others to be sympathetic to your principles.

  24. Pingback: Shuffling Off This Mortal Coil « Around The Sphere

  25. igoresque says:

    I felt the need to comment here, which is extremely rare. However I see that the slppery slope argument has been explained by several commenters.

    I’ll just add that in the Netherlands, since patients have a ‘right to die’, not only do doctors have the power to make life/death decisions, but they are actually OBLIGED to make them.

    Think about that Hippocratic oath again? Doctors in the Netherlands are obliged to kill in certain circumstances (as decided by whom exactly, is unclear: the cirts? the patiens family? I believe obscure “deontology comittees” actually play a powerful role)

  26. kurt9 says:

    Caledonian :

    Caledonian

    The presumptuous rarely perceive themselves to be so. Physicians are not likely to be your allies, kurt9 – they spend too much of their time making the decisions of others to be sympathetic to your principles.

    I am very well aware of this.

  27. What better possible rounding up of every benefit of the totalitarian tyranny its supporters like to call “national (socialist?) health,” than that a state-sanctioned death option be added to its shrinking list of available life-style choices?

    Although from over here in (still — and this despite the attack upon our beloved fraternal republic’s every last remaining pillar, tenet and institution currently being waged by the Soros-and/or-other-sinister Svengali-steered, mobbed-up modified-Marxist Mussolini-modeled murtadd-Muslim and abjectly Euro-peon-ized empty-galabiyah glove-puppet presently pretending to its “presidency” — and by his brownshirts) Free America, every last long dead and decadent one of the Euro-peon Neo-Soviet’s squalidly fasciSSocialist member states seems (the while cowering cluelessly behind the shield of its universally-despised Uncle Sam’s nevertheless long willingly-sacrificed blood and treasure) long ago to have committed suicide by socialism. Leaving one to wonder why any individual Briton would any longer need to bother?

    Your gummint’s got you* covered!

    Brian Richard Allen
    Los Angeles – Califobamacated 90028
    And the Far Abroad

    *(And its MP’s perks)

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