Most often I'll post here to express a view about some issue. On this occasion, however, I do so to register an uncertainty and raise a question. It is on the issue of assisted suicide. Looking at the opposing arguments reminds me of when, as a first-year undergraduate, I started reading journal articles in Mind or The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, articles in philosophical logic. I found myself agreeing with all of them, even when they were arguing for mutually incompatible positions.
On the one hand, I agree with Mary Warnock when she writes:
[W]e have a moral obligation to take other people's seriously reached decisions with regard to their own lives equally seriously, not putting our judgment of the value of their life above theirs.
And I agree with Simon Jenkins when he says:
What cannot be right is for me to deny those whose unfettered judgment has reached a wish to die, the freedom of this, the last of life's great dignities.
To deny to someone who has full command of their faculties and whose life has become burdensome, and possibly one of constant pain, the option of being able to end it seems like a form of unfeeling cruelty.
On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore the fears of how legalization of assisted suicide may be abused. This - 'the unavoidable risk of abuse' - is at the heart of the opposition expressed by Arlene Judith Klotzko. She says:
[T]erminally ill patients have a liberty interest in not having the state prevent their relief from severe pain and suffering through physician-assisted suicide. However, this interest is trumped by the need to protect vulnerable patients. The systemic dangers are "dramatic" in a society that allows doctor-assisted suicide, [Walter] Dellinger said. "The least costly treatment for any illness is lethal medication."
In the conditions prevailing in the NHS today, Klotzko believes, 'legalised assisted suicide would allow or even invite coercion'.
Those are the elements, then, of the uncertainty. My question is: given human ingenuity, is there really no set of procedures that can be devised which would let through all cases where there was solid evidence of an individual's decision to have opted, with proper deliberation, for assisted suicide, while blocking those cases in which there was an element of coercion or signs that the individual concerned was not in full command of his or her faculties? Such procedures would have to be designed also to 'catch' family circumstances in which there were unspoken pressures on the individual whose assisted suicide was under consideration, or in which she or he had internalized the thought of being too much of a burden upon others. That the task of coming up with such procedures is a difficult one, I have no doubt. But the competing concerns here surely make it imperative to try.