Imagine a world, in a not too distant future, in which you are surrounded by people who love and care about whatever might be left of your elderly fragile self and who would be legally allowed to help you end it all when you want and if you cannot do it yourself. It is reasonable to expect that in such a legal climate you may confuse your mind as well as the minds of those who care about you most. You may make a decision to end your life that you might never have made if the relevant legislation was not in place. What is more, the people you ask for help may find themselves reluctant to do so – yet short of excuses to say no.
This is a world that the moral philosopher Mary Warnock may yet live to see. This is the world which in Holland and Switzerland, where assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia are legal, is not a projection of the future but very much the contemporary reality. It is this reality that makes it possible for a country like Holland to push the boundaries and recently start thinking about the possibility of offering a lethal potion to people over 70 who consider their lives complete. Baroness Warnock, who was a member of the House of Lords select committee on euthanasia, and who has now written Dishonest to God in which she covers extensively the topics of euthanasia and assisted suicide, may not welcome a future in which old age, in itself, constitutes a reason good enough to help someone die.
Liberated from fears of possible predicaments, Warnock’s plea concerns a small minority of our society, those who are most desperate, whose prolonged suffering in an age in which so much has been done to improve the quality of people’s lives, poses a challenge to British law.
In a public debate, held at the Royal Geographical Society on October 19, she was one of three speakers, alongside Debbie Purdy, multiple sclerosis sufferer and campaigner, and Emily Jackson, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, who all argued for a change in the law, and in particular demanded more clarity in the law, in relation to the circumstances under which the terminally ill are allowed to die. The three speakers against the motion were Lord Carlile, Liberal Democrat peer and chairman of Care Not Killing, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop of Oxford and now Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London, and Dr Patrick Stone, Macmillan Reader in Palliative Medicine at St George’s, University of London.
Emily Jackson argued that the new legislation would enhance people’s choices, helping them “make the most important decision about their lives – how to die” while Mary Warnock argued that it is not quite right “to turn a blind eye if it is not in our back yard.” In other words, how can it be right to watch people travel to a clinic in Switzerland so they can be helped to die, and at the same time argue it is not right to legalise assisted dying here in the UK.
One possible response would be to say that we should separate moral questions from legal questions but, as Warnock argues in her book, it makes sense to think that law making should be governed by moral reasoning. However, the concept of morally founded legislation is wide and by moral concerns, in particular in the case of legalizing assisted suicide, we may mean moral convictions that are derived from religious belief. Warnock questions “whether those moral convictions that are derived from religious belief carry special authority.” Looking in the direction of liberality, she points at the danger of religion and “its claim to absolute immutable moral knowledge which, if justified, would indeed give its adherents a special place in instructing others how to behave.”
It is true that proposed legal changes about people’s right to die, which concerns mostly a minority of society, those who suffer most, will unburden them from legal and, in some cases, moral instructions about how and when to die. Of course, people who firmly believe in the “sanctity of life” will be unlikely to change their views in the light of new legislation.
As for the great majority of those who, as they approach old age, might start questioning the value of their lives, and who in the absence of firm legal instructions and living in a more liberal climate in which the questions of life and death are being considered, will in some cases be left in a dark and confusing place, this will be the price to pay, in the name of liberalism and those who suffer most.
And if this kind of liberalism, that advocates of legalizing assisted suicide, including Mary Warnock, propose is where we are heading, it would perhaps not be unreasonable to ask people like Debbie Purdy to look beyond themselves when insisting on their right to make a decision about their own lives.
For it is the decisions made by the terminally ill that affect not only their own lives but also the lives of others. The act of helping someone to die changes things; it plants new seeds of doubts in the minds of those who would otherwise not doubt whether they should still be here. It also puts more pressure on those who are asked to help, defusing their reluctance to assist someone to die. But perhaps this reluctance, even when defused in this way, cannot negate its roots, an unavoidable sense of guilt in doing something which they sense is fundamentally wrong, a deep sense that helping end an innocent life can never be morally right. Holding on tight to this reluctance is something from which the liberally-minded should be careful not to discourage us.
