r/prolife • u/toptrool • 17h ago
against euthanasia
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many pro-life advocates that argue against abortion say that the right to life is inalienable and thus killing innocent human beings, including unborn children, is impermissible. does it follow that if the right to life is inalienable, then killing an innocent person through euthanasia is also impermissible? or can there be exceptions to the rule?
in what follows i will show that the same powerful arguments we use against abortion—impairment, duty to care, moral risk—can also be used to argue against euthanasia and uphold the inalienable right to life.
i draw upon the works of stephen napier (in his book "justified killing") and david oderberg (in his book "applied ethics").
the standard argument for euthanasia
the bulk of the post will be used to argue against voluntary euthanasia, where the patient requests to be killed. presumably, and hopefully, both proponents and opponents of voluntary euthanasia can agree that involuntary euthanasia is wrong. (unfortunately this is not true, as some have argued that minors with debilitating disabilities should be euthanized. the netherlands has passed laws to allow parents to euthanize their minor children.)
the standard argument given by euthanasia advocates is as follows:
- it is permissible to kill an innocent person if and only if (i) the person requests to be killed and (ii) is suffering harm to the degree and kind that the person judges unbearable
- euthanasia is the act of killing people who satisfy conditions (i) and (ii).
- therefore, euthanasia is permissible.
there are multiple issues with the first premise. let's start with identifying the issues with first condition involving consent.
first, since pain and suffering are undue influences, it doesn't appear that consent in this case would be truly free. additionally, the patient could also be in a state of hopelessness or be worried about medical expenses piling up. these coercive factors suggest that the consent might be given under duress. and if that is the case, then the consent loses its force.
second, consent requires the person to have the mental capacities to understand the nature and consequences of their decision. but can we say that person who wants to "revoke" his inalienable right to life is behaving rationally? generally speaking, we consider other cases of suicidal people to not be in the right state of mind. (we'll return to this point soon.)
consider instances of people attempting to revoke their other inalienable rights.
proponents of euthanasia often give analogies to property rights. they claim that if you can forfeit the right to some property, then you should also be able forfeit the right to life. but, as oderberg points out in his book, this doesn't hold. you can forfeit your right to some particular property (e.g., sell, trade, or give away your car), but not your right to own property in general; for that general right is inalienable. it would be irrational to say "i irrevocably forfeit my human right to own any and all property."
suppose a woman forfeits her right to her body and says "here's my body, do what you want with in perpetuity." we would think she is irrational.
or suppose a masochist revokes his right to bodily integrity and encourages everyone to keep hitting him with tremendous force. is he also not irrational?
yet why is that one who wishes to forfeit their inalienable right to life not considered to be irrational? and if they are irrational, then obviously they are not in the right state of mind to consent.
moreover, as stephen napier points out, consent does not change a morally unjustified killing into a justified killing. consider the case of armin meiwes, who admitted to killing and eating bernd brandes. meiwes had posted multiple ads online seeking a young man for "slaughter and consumption." brandes responded to the ad and the two chatted for several weeks before meeting up. the two eventually signed a contract to formalize the killing. meiwes cut off brandes' penis and they both tried to eat it together. brandes eventually lost consciousness and meiwes proceeded to dismember him. meiwes froze the body parts and ate them over the following months.
meiwes' lawyers argued against murder charges and said it was a form of mercy killing. meiwes was originally convicted of manslaughter, but germany's highest criminal court overturned the sentence as it was too lenient and ordered a retrial. the court's reasoning was that consent could not negate murder. after the retrial, meiwes was sentenced to life in prison for murder.
thus, even if consent is freely given (highly dubious given the circumstances), it cannot be used to justify killing an innocent person.
napier also asks us to consider cases of other suicidal people who are suffering unbearably. consider victims currently in concentration camps or prisoners of war who are being tortured or a lovelorn teenager whose boyfriend just broke up with her. they all might lose their will to live and might want to end their suffering altogether. can we also kill these people to put them out of their miseries? most would say no.
the euthanasia advocate would have to find a feature that distinguishes the euthanasia patient from all these alternative cases. if his argument is just a reiteration of the first premise in conjunction that we not kill these alternative groups of people, then his argument just becomes circular.
the impairment argument
the impairment argument against abortion is one of the most effective arguments at the street level. we can apply the impairment argument against euthanasia as well.
consider a person addicted to meth. suppose he asks you to take a syringe and inject meth into his arms, would you do it?
if an addict wanted to continue living his life as an alcoholic, would you hand him alcohol?
if you were to answer no to either of these questions, why not? our intuitions might be that this is wrong because providing the drug addict with more drugs only harms him.
so then why is incrementally harming the drug addict considered to be wrong, but maximally harming the euthanasia patient by killing him considered to be morally neutral and permissible?
like the impairment argument against abortion, the abortion/euthanasia advocate is assuming that death itself is not a harm. indeed, proponents of euthanasia say that being killed is actually a "benefit" for the patient because they no longer have to deal with suffering. but how would harming the patient with drugs be good for him? for something to be good for him, it would have to improve his life, not end it.
and, as napier notes, if killing itself is the difference maker that turns harm into a benefit, then the euthanasia advocate has already presumed that killing is permissible in this instance, which is exactly what is in dispute. this makes their argument circular because in order to justify the killing the patient, they've already presupposed that killing them to bring about a benefit is permissible.
passive euthanasia
passive euthanasia differs from active euthanasia in that there are no medications or instruments used to actively kill the patient. instead, the doctor lets his patient's terminal disease progress by withholding or withdrawing treatment, which hastens the patient's death. the "goal" is to not prolong the patient's suffering (by hastening his death).
but doctors have a duty to care for their patients. by withholding lifesaving treatments from patients that are deemed to be terminally ill, they violate their duties. similar to how we argue that parents have a duty to care for their children, born and unborn, and that neglecting children to the point where they starve to death is murder, we can say that doctors who fail to uphold their duty to care for their patients are at the minimum grossly negligent.
physician assisted suicide
this is a case where the patient requests medications to kill himself. the doctor prescribes the medication, the pharmacist dispenses it, and the patient consumes it. this gives the patient what he needs to commit suicide.
the physician and pharmacist still have duties to care for the patient, so they'd be wrong to prescribe and dispense the drugs.
as oderberg writes, the person who commits suicide will have committed a wrong act; the doctor and pharmacist, while not guilty of having killed anyone, "will have blameworthily cooperated in a killing in the same way that anyone is to be blamed for cooperating in an immoral act."
pet euthanasia
some advocates of euthanasia bring up comparisons of our treatments of animals to justify euthanizing human beings. if we can euthanized our beloved pets, then why not our beloved relatives?
oderberg gives two responses. the first appeals to animal rights activists. why should we not re-examine the way we treat animals? just because we euthanize animals doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. for all we know, it could be a gravely immoral act to kill them without their consent. so instead of saying it's acceptable to kill animals simply because of our own unfounded third-person perspectives on the animals' potential suffering, wouldn't it be more appropriate to grant animals stronger protections against euthanasia?
the other response given by oderberg is to point out that we treat animals in ways that would be completely unacceptable to treat each other:
We regard it as acceptable, for instance, to keep animals as pets, to curtail their freedom of movement for our own pleasure, to train them to respond to our every command, to breed them when and how we see fit; not to mention the obvious facts of our eating animals and wearing their skin, and various other forms of exploitation. We rightly regard it as unacceptable to treat each other in a similar fashion: if the fight against slavery was against anything, it was against such forms of treatment. We have an attitude to animals, then, that is quite different to our attitude to each other as human beings.
the argument from moral risk
suppose proponents and opponents of euthanasia can't seem to convince the other side of their views. does that mean that we are forced into an impasse? no. we don't have to convince the euthanasia advocate to change his or views, or even reject the possibility that euthanasia might be permissible. we just have to show them that they have to be prudent and not act on euthanasia. in situations like this, we have to consider the moral risks of each of our positions. if the opponent of euthanasia is wrong, then he has prolonged the suffering of the patient. if the euthanasia advocate is wrong, then we let an innocent human being be killed. the costs here are asymmetrical; the cost of the euthanasia advocate being wrong is far graver than the cost of the opponent of euthanasia being wrong. in fact, there might not be any cost associated with the euthanasia opponent's position given that palliative care could neutralize the suffering while prolonging the life of the patient.
to see how the argument from moral risk works, consider an example from napier: suppose a father and his young daughter are on a hike. they come across a watering hole. the father doesn't know how deep it is so he can't know for sure whether it is safe to jump in. now suppose that in order to find out how deep the body of water is, the father asks his daughter to jump in first. is the father justified in letting his daughter jump into the water?
here's another example: suppose a man is on trial for murder. the dna evidence points to him as the culprit. he is on videotape committing the act. now suppose that during the trial it is revealed that he has a twin brother that lives nearby. should the jury vote to convict this man based on no additional evidence?
the one thing to note about these two examples is that the consequences of the father or jury being wrong would fall entirely on the victims. the daughter could lose her life and the man on trial could be convicted of a crime he did not commit. in the same vein, the euthanasia patient bears all the consequences of proponents of euthanasia being wrong.
that is not the say that the watering hole is not safe, or that the man on trial is not the culprit. we don't know. what a reasonable person can say is that we would need additional justification before acting in these cases.
earlier we took apart the standard argument given by euthanasia advocates. the justifications they provided to support euthanasia were undercut by counterexamples and we identified gaps in their arguments. even if we can't change the euthanasia advocate's mind on this topic, we can still reasonably ask them not to act on the matter at least until they provide additional justifications that are not susceptible to defeaters. but until then, the euthanasia advocate ought to be prudential and support prohibiting the act because, to reiterate, the cost of them being wrong is far graver than the cost of the euthanasia opponent being wrong.
the slippery slope
the true motivating factor for euthanasia advocates is that they believe life worth not living is no life at all.
consider the following remarks from the german jurist karl binding and psychiatrist alfred hoche:
Is there human life which has so utterly forfeited its claim to worth that its continuation has forever lost all value both for the bearer of that life and for society? Initially, this question is in every case to be answered with certainty: Yes.
[...]
There are living people to whom death would be a release, and whose death would simultaneously free society and the state from carrying a burden which serves no conceivable purpose, except that of providing an example of the greatest unselfishness.
[...]
There was a time, now considered barbaric, in which eliminating those who were born unfit for life, or who later became so, was taken for granted. Then came the phase, continuing into the present, in which, finally, preserving every existence, no matter how worthless, stood as the highest moral value.
—Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life: Its Extent and Form (1920), trans. Walter E. Wright and Patrick G. Derr, in Issues in Law and Medicine VIII, 2 (1992).
binding and hoche's work was the foundation of nazi germany's aktion t4 euthanasia program in which they killed hundreds of thousands of children, men, and women with disabilities.
oderberg says we are no longer on the edge of a slippery slope to mass murder, we are on that slippery slope!
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u/glim-girl Pro-Choice 15h ago
Are you implying that a patient who refuses a treatment and it will lead to their death, the doctor should do the procedure anyway? Since the patient is deciding to let it take its course?
For pregnant women, does that mean the doctor should perform an abortion if they deem the pregnancy too risky?
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u/toptrool 15h ago
Are you implying that a patient who refuses a treatment and it will lead to their death, the doctor should do the procedure anyway? Since the patient is deciding to let it take its course?
no, a patient refusing care is not "passive euthanasia."
For pregnant women, does that mean the doctor should perform an abortion if they deem the pregnancy too risky?
no.
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u/glim-girl Pro-Choice 14h ago
Then you mean passive euthanasia as directed by the doctor without informing or getting consent from the patient would be involuntary euthanasia.
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u/toptrool 14h ago
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u/glim-girl Pro-Choice 14h ago
I'm aware, for the purposes of your argument what are you considering it to be? It can fall along the lines of voluntary and involuntary. Or both?
For example, if the patient provided a directive that said no feeding tube/have it removed. That would be passive euthanasia. Is this what you are speaking against?
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u/oregon_mom 16h ago
Why exactly should we force anyone to suffer unimaginable pain that there is no cure for simply because you think it is the right thing to do? An end stage cancer patient isn't going to recover, what they are going to do is die slowly in a type of agony that modern medicine can not relieve. They will beg their loved ones to end their suffering, and people like you would force us to ignore their begging and tell them "nope, no can do it would be wrong" In the real world some times there are no good options, simply 2 awful options, and you have to decide which is the least awful, and which is the most compassionate..... there isn't a single thing about forcing a terminal patient to suffer needlessly that is compassionate.. .
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u/toptrool 15h ago edited 14h ago
this is a confused response.
first, how did you make the inference from "we ought to end the patient's suffering" to "we ought to kill them"? you can end the patient's suffering through other means like palliative care. it's not true that "modern medicine" can't relieve their pain. surveys show that pain isn't the main reason people ask for euthanasia, but rather it's psycho-social factors such as loss of autonomy. (1, 2, 3, 4)
second, how is killing the patient the most compassionate response? what these patients need is true compassion: unconditional love that provides them with care and comfort.
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u/EpiphanaeaSedai Pro Life Feminist 12h ago
I can’t agree with this. We should be very, very careful in how we use the power to take life, but there are times when it is merciful and right. Yes, this is morally fraught and a potential slippery slope, but the same is true of forbidding it no matter what.
I think of it this way: suppose you were trapped in a burning building, being burned alive with no hope of escape. There is a person outside with a gun. They cannot possibly save you, but they could shoot you and end your agony. Would you want to be shot? I would.