Combining Great Insights with Serious Mistakes

By Dave Andrusko

First one friend and then a couple of others forwarded me a link to intriguing piece that appeared today at Spiked-online.com. Titled, "The humanist case against euthanasia: If you're opposed to legalising a 'right to die', people assume you must be a religious crank. But not all of us are," you correctly anticipate that there will be parts that are enlightening and others not so much.

Written by the editor, Brendan O'Neill, the op-ed begins with O'Neill separating from "them." We needn't go into this except to say O'Neill insist he is not one of "them." He is "an atheist. And I consider myself a radical humanist."

But, he quickly adds, "I am also very worried about the drive to legalise assisted suicide." Good.

Since the first half goes seriously astray and the second half is excellent, I would be wasting your time to talk about the deficiencies of Part One. Part Two looks at assisted suicide as the intersection of a "broader social pessimism" and the expenditure of a "great deal of our moral and political energies on bringing to an end damaged or impaired human lives."

Let me offer one long, representative quote from the piece which is a speech O'Neill delivered April 22 to the South Place Ethical Society at Conway Hall in London:

Secondly, legalising assisted dying would be bad for people who want to live, too. It seems pretty irrefutable to me that the campaign to legalise assisted suicide has become bound up with society's broader inability to value and celebrate human life today. It is clear that society finds it increasingly difficult to say that human existence is a good thing – you can see this in everything from the environmentalist discussion of newborn babies as 'future polluters' to the widespread scaremongering about the 'ageing timebomb'. And you can see it in the fact that some in the pro-assisted dying campaign want to go beyond having 'mercy killings' for people close to death to having 'assisted dying' for the very disabled, the ill and even, in the case of Dignitas in Switzerland, the depressed. This effectively sanctions suicide as a response to personal hardship, and gives a green light to hopelessness.

To his credit O'Neill grasps that the flip side of the "right to die" is the idea--actually the dread--that there are too many old people "and that society can't cope with them." Too many social commentators share the opinion of one that O'Neill quotes who believes that the rising number of old people is a "social catastrophe," especially those with dementia.

"This is increasingly how we judge human life today: not by its internal worth or moral meaning, but by its financial implications or environmental implications," O'Neill writes. "It is not a coincidence that at a time when society is so down on the worth of human life, there is also a very vocal campaign for the 'right to die': these two phenomena are linked in subtle but important ways."

Whether we are a person of faith or a self-avowed "humanist" like O'Neill, we can all agree, I think, with his conclusion that "the views of the very active minority of pro-euthanasia campaigners are likely impacting on the way the majority of people experience their lives, possibly making them feel like a burden--a social, financial and environmental burden--if they choose to continue living.

"And as a humanist, I am also opposed to any undermining of the majority's quality of life by a tiny minority of campaigners."

Please send your thoughts to daveandrusko@gmail.com.