How Not to Argue About the Ethics of Assisted Suicide

Civitas, 31 March 2009

‘Allowing people to arrange their death is a simple act of kindness.’ So runs the title of an opinion piece in today’s Times that defends the morality of assisted suicide. It was written by A.C.Grayling, professor of applied philosophy at London University’s Birkbeck College.

Tomorrow there is due to appear in the same newspaper a second piece that argues against that practice, written by another university professor. One sincerely hopes the quality of its argument will be a trifle higher than that exhibited by today’s piece. I make this harsh assessment, not because of what today’s piece contains by way of argument, let alone because I disagree with the conclusion being argued for, although indeed I do.

I make the claim because the piece disobeys the first rule of adequate philosophical argumentation in debating about such contentious moral issues. This rule is that anyone seeking to argue in favour of any particular position on such an issue must address what most persuades the best informed and most intellectually able among those holding the opposite view to one’s own. Unless one does, one’s arguments will carry no persuasive force with them.

More than that, not to rehearse those counter-arguments before addressing them also does an intellectual and moral disservice to those who are unaware of what they are, and who become persuaded by what one argues. This is because not to do so prevents the latter from being able to make up their own minds on the basis of a consideration of all the relevant factors.

Philosophers are not supposed to be like advocates in court, seeking merely to gain a victory for their client whilst leaving it up to the prosecution to establish his or her guilt. It should be their duty as public intellectuals to inform and educate the public, not to gain cheap victories by suppressing relevant evidence and testimony.

In arguing for the view they favour, it should be the duty of every public intellectual worth their salt to consider and seriously address those arguments and considerations that have weighed with the best-informed and most qualified to judge and persuaded them of the opposite point of view to their own. Otherwise such debate fails to rise above the level of cheap rhetoric more suited to a sixth-form debating society rather than a purportedly serious national newspaper.

Exactly what considerations against the morality of assisted suicide did Professor Grayling fail to consider when arguing in favour of the practice on moral grounds? I do not pretend them to be conclusive. Only that, without addressing them, the probative force of any arguments adduced in favour of its practice will count for nothing.

Very briefly, the central considerations against the morality of assisted suicide Grayling fails to mention, let alone address, are essentially religious. They derive from the thought that the world and the various orders of being it contains are, or at least might be, not the result of blind chance, but of providential design by a benevolent, all-powerful and all-knowing intelligence. Such a Being would not have allowed morally innocent human beings to suffer in the way many terminally ill people have always done before dying without having had some good reason to.

On this view, the crucial morally relevant factor is less the suffering such people might endure in their last days or weeks, than the opportunity with which they and others remain presented during that period or at least before it.

It is highly doubtful anyone who had come to regard themselves and the rest of the world as the handwork of such a divine and benign intelligence would be as prepared or eager to elect for assisted suicide, if terminally ill and suffering severely, than someone would who did not have such a religious outlook. To sanction its practice, ethically and legally, is to foreclose the possibility that such an outlook might be true.

Not only is this liable to compromise the moral integrity of those who might be tempted to opt for it in their own person. In a still more invidious way, it would seriously morally compromise that of medics called on to assist in the process, especially when it is presented as a ‘human right’ of the terminally ill, something Grayling argues it to be.

Should such a religious outlook be correct, then we are not owners of ourselves who may blithely decide when to end our lives to suit our own convenience. At the start of the death-bed debate, known as the ‘Phaedo’, held in his prison-cell immediately before he drank the hem-lock that he was wrongly but lawfully ordered to do as a punishment he had become persuaded he had to endure rather than commit the wrong of weakening the rule of Athenian law by escaping from jail, Socrates says:

‘I believe that… that the gods are our keepers, and we men one of their possessions… If you look at it this way I suppose it is not unreasonable to say that we must not put an end to ourselves until God sends some compulsion like the one which we are facing now.’

Two and a half thousand years later, essentially the same argument against suicide, assisted or otherwise, was advanced by another professor of philosophy from no less a reputable university than Grayling’s (to out it mildly) whose ethical writings have received enormously high praise from a range of esteemed ethicists as wide as Phillipa Foot, Anthony Kenny, Alisdair MacInytre, Hilary Putnam and Roger Scruton, another recent occupant of a chair in philosophy at Grayling’s own college.

That other philosopher was Elizabeth Anscombe. In an essay first published in 1994 entitled ‘Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia’, and recently re-published in a collection of her essays entitled Human Life, Action and Ethics, Anscombe wrote as follows:

‘With the plea “Kill me: I need death but cannot kill myself” it becomes clear that it is not the dignity of human self-determination that is in question. What is [being] demanded is that such suffering people be treated as we treat other animals. The impulse to “put an animal out of its misery” is an impulse of sympathy with a creature that resembles us… But men, being spirit as well as flesh, are not the same as the other animals. Whatever blasphemes the spirit in man is evil, discouraging, at best trivialising, at worst doing dirt on life. Such is the considered recommendation of suicide and killing in face of suffering… [P]ropaganda in favour of death as a remedy… is irreligious… the contrasting religious attitude [is] one of respect before the mystery of human life…

‘A religious attitude may be merely incipient, prompting a certain fear before the idea of ever destroying a human life… Or it may be more developed, perceiving that men are made by God in God’s likeness, to know and love God. The love of God is the direction of the will to its true end. The human heart and will… may be set… when it comes to dying… in acceptance of life – which is God’s gift – and of death, as it comes from him… [W]here there is intellectual consciousness…, the human being then operates under one or other of [two] conceptions of what counts ultimately for him: either amenity only [– i.e. exclusive preoccupation with pleasure and pain (D.C.)], or acceptance, which is obedience in spirit, which is justice. Acceptance of life and death is what justice is in circumstances of unavoidable dying: it is accord with God’s will.

‘Such perception of what a human being is makes one perceive human death as awesome, human life as always to be treated with a respect which is a sign and acknowledgement of that it is for.

‘To fight a human being to the death, to try him, and condemn him to death and execute him, are grave and tragic actions, But they may be compatible with this awe and respect. To kill him (whether he is oneself or someone else) because one has judged his life is wretched or not worth living, is not…

‘Possibly doctors sometimes kill their patients in what they conceive to be a spirit of mercy. If so they do better to keep quiet about it than to try to change the hitherto accepted ethic, which is based upon these values. It is not necessary or good, for those who do not have a religious attitude to life, to seek to destroy it where its principles inspire our treatment of people.’

I am not suggesting that Grayling will, or even ought to, be persuaded by these considerations. I know he won’t be, since he recently has publicly claimed belief in God is on a par with that in fairies. However, one would wish to hope that even as hardened an atheist as he should at least appreciate that, without even so much as a reference to such considerations as those advanced by Socrates and Anscombe, his arguments in favour of assisted suicide are, at best, radically incomplete, and at worst just possibly downright pernicious.

For suppose, just suppose, that God did exist. Can Grayling be so sure that God does not to be wishing to deprive people of the perspective towards their own life and that of others articulated by Anscombe?

Grayling might feel absolute assurance God does not exist. But for him to suggest that belief in God’s existence is on a par with belief in fairies carries that confidence a might too far. Albert Einstein, to name but one person, believed in the existence of God, but not in fairies.

Come on, Anthony, dear boy, I feel like concluding, admit there may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Surely, an admission of one’s own ignorance on such matters is the very beginning of wisdom according to the father of philosophy, just as fear of the Lord is according to religious believers!