Public opinion is fickle. Opinion polls regarding the major parties swing wildly from week to week, in entirely whimsical and unpredictable ways. Labour are doing considerably better now than they were a while ago. The only cause, as far as I can tell, is that David Cameron has been getting a lot of media coverage lately.

But on some things the public are certain. They want a government that will:

(a) let them kill burglars in their homes.
(b) bring back capital punishment.
(c) bring in euthanasia.

Unfortunately for the public, politicians are out of touch. Stuffy old Enlightenment views about the unconditional value of human life still hold sway in the corridors of power, holding back change on all three points. But for how long? With regard to euthanasia in particular, the momentum for change is growing. The public might actually gets its way.

For me, the question of whether assisted suicide should be legal is secondary to the question of whether it is moral. If we could work out the answer to the latter question, we’d be in a better position to answer the former. Here are three vague sorts of answer:

(1) Of course assisted suicide is wrong! The Abrahamic faiths have got something right: human lives have unconditional value. We should never encourage, condone, perpetrate or accelerate the termination of a human life.

(2) Of course assisted suicide is okay! Sometimes a person is better off dead. It’s in their interests to end their life. It’s immoral to deny them the opportunity to be at peace and at rest.

(3) Silly question. Human lives have no particular value at all. We are just overeducated animals who sometimes need to be put down and chucked in the incinerator.

I think (1) and (3) are tenable. Though (1) would be more comforting, either could be correct. But (2) is a kind of halfway house, a dubious compromise between (1) and (3). It imports a highly Christianized conception of the afterlife (a “better” place where we are “at rest” and “at peace”) but strips away the idea that human lives have unconditional value.

This surely won’t do. If you are prepared to abandon the teachings of the world’s religions, you need to be ready to abandon any illusions about death. Death is the total annihilation of everything you are, not a chance to be at rest or at peace. It is not “in your interests”: it is the excision of you and your interests from the world.

Yet I fear that something like (2) is fast becoming the consensus. Why carry on, when death is the better option? This seductive chimera threatens to end countless lives prematurely.

Filed under: health, ideas, jonathanbirch on February 1st, 2010