Is Euthanasia a Moral Problem, or an Aesthetic One?
Christianity, Eugenics, and the Idea of a Good Death
In our latest attempt to speedrun post-christian modernity, Ireland is planning to follow Switzerland, the Netherlands, numerous other European countries and of course Canada by introducing Assisted Dying legislation. As proposed by a Parliamentary committee, someone with a terminal illness and 6 months to live could avail of the programme.
The Canadian system has become notorious for extending the right to die to people who are neither terminal nor suffering from any verifiable chronic illness. This article in The Atlantic gives a good summary of some of the most grotesque cases:
The details of who can avail of Assisted Dying (I prefer Euthanasia, and will use that from here on in) in Ireland may change once it’s brought in. We know for certain - based on how the laws have played out in other countries, and the underlying logic of liberlisation which is always to push a law of this type to its uttermost degree - that once instituted in Ireland the process will be extended way beyond the chronically or terminally ill.
I’ve known people who were either close to death or had serious and chronic conditions that made their daily life a cruel and unliveable nightmare, and probably would have liked to use such a service had it been available. I’m not troubled by the idea they might have done - they were in their right minds and had reached an understandable conclusion about their life which I might not agree with but which was intelligible.
My experience is that most members of the public and that it’s the other type of case, what you could call Lifestyle Euthanasia, that causes the most discomfort in people who object to the law. The nature of that discomfort is what interests me; it’s generally positioned as a moral objection, connected to Christian principles about the inherent value of life and opposition to eugenics. But I’m not sure it is either of those things.
It’s true for instance that an extensive programme of euthanasia in part mimics the effect of Eugenics by removing self-identified incapable people from the gene pool. But motivation matters, and the reasons for instituting such programmes are the opposite of eugenic. The judgement that a life is worthless doesn’t emanate outward from a eugenic-minded state but from the individual themselves. The state listens to the individuals not because they are worthless, but because the perspective of people we regard as vulnerable is particularly precious and worth paying attention to; even if the wishes they express are crazy or break basic moral taboos.
In the case of christianity the same is true. Executing someone at their own request is of course anti-christian because of the implicit judgement that society renders on those it seeks to euthanize; we agree that you have reached a resonable conclusion in deciding that your life is not worth living, so much so that we are willing to assist you in ending it. The unavoidable conclusion is that your life is of lesser value than others, since we’re assisting you in disposing of it.
But that value judgement is reached by unquestioningly centering the perspective of the self-identified weak, inadequate, helpless, pitiable, and so on. It is a result of an overriding reverence for that perspective as the supreme moral consideration of a society. There *is* something essentially christian about that. Rather than carelessly throwing away the lives of the pitiable, we live in a society that now not only venerates them to such a degree that they can be designated as ritual sacrifices to the value.
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people with a sophisticated or developed understanding of Christianity who could articulate a dislike of Euthanasia based on those principles. But for the average member of the public, I don’t think that the uneasiness with Lifestyle Euthanasia is based on submerged Christian principles, since the reason to institute the practice is derived from, if not Christianity itself, then from a similar root as those principles.
So we’re again left with a question of “what is the basis of the objection”?
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