Abstract
As we observed in other chapters, at the heart of the debate on assisted suicide and assisted dying is suicide. How should we look upon suicide in relation to question of whether to accept assisted suicide as medical treatment?
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Notes
Cited in C. S. Evans ‘Faith as the Telos of Morality: A Reading of Fear and Trembling’, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 209–223
Reverend Kevin D. O’Rourke, ‘The Catholic Tradition on Forgoing Life Support’, The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 3 (Autumn 2005), pp. 537–553
Antoon A. Leenaars, ‘Edwin S. Shneidman on Suicide’, Suicidology Online, vol. 1 (2010), pp. 5–18
Kevin D. O’Rourke, ‘The Catholic Tradition on Forgoing Life Support’, in M. T Lysaght and J. J. Kotva Jr. (eds), On Moral Medicine, Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, Third Edition (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012), p. 1118.
Cited in Manuel G. Velasquez, ‘Defining Suicide’, Issues in Law and Medicine, vol. 3 (1987–88), pp. 37–52
Cited in Robert F. Martin, ‘Suicide and Self-sacrifice’, in Margaret Pabst Battin and David J. Mayo (eds), Suicide: The Philosophical Issues (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 48–68
There are those who disagree with this precept, especially those who feel it is possible for an animal to commit suicide. See, for instance, Halmuth H. Schaefer, ‘Can a Mouse Commit Suicide?’, in Edwin S. Sheidman (ed.), Essays in Self-Destruction (New York: Science House, Inc., 1967).
Duncan Wilson and Edward Ramsden, ‘The Nature of Suicide: Science and the Self-Destructive Animal’, Endeavour, vol. 34, no. 1 (March 2010), pp. 21–24.
Cited in Margaret Pabst Battin, Suicide: The Ethical Issues (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1995), 21.
Kant cited in Martin,’ suicide and Self-sacrifice’, p. 49. Michael J. Seidler, ‘Kant and the Stoics on Suicide’, journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 44, no. 3 (July-September 1983), pp. 429–453
Allen W. Wood, Kantian Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 172.
Recent research questions whether this particular double-effect, of morphine killing the patient as well as the pain, really does take place. See Mary Warnock and Elisabeth Macdonald, Easeful Death: Is there a Case for Assisted Dying? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 111.
Peter Y. Windt, ‘The Concept of Suicide’, in Battin and Mayo (eds), Suicide, pp. 39–47. Thomas Szasz, Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002), p. 64.
Iain Brassington, ‘Killing People: What Kant Could Have Said about Suicide and Euthanasia but Did Not’, journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 32, no. 10 (2006) pp. 571–574.
See, for instance, John P. Safranek, ‘Autonomy and Assisted Suicide: The Execution of Freedom’, Hastings Center Report, vol. 28, no. 4 (1998), pp. 32–36
Kumar Amarasekara and Mirko Bagaric, Euthanasia, Morality and the Law (New York: Peter Lang, 2002)
Bonnie Steinbock, ‘The Case for Physician Assisted Suicide: Not (Yet) Proven’, journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 31 (2005), pp. 235–241.
Iain Brassington, ‘Five Words for Assisted Dying’, Law and Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 5 (2008), pp. 415–444
Sheila McLean, Assisted Dying: Reflections on the Need for Law Reform (London: Rout ledge, 2007).
See Chapter 1. Not one report on the reasons why death is sought in these areas has pain as an important motivation. The key reasons listed in the 2010 Oregon Death with Dignity Act report are loss of autonomy (93.8 per cent), decreasing ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable (93.8 per cent), and loss of dignity (78.5 per cent). All feature loss, which is similar to the motivations of non-assisted suicides. See Warren Breed, ‘Suicide and Loss in Social Interaction’, in Sheidman (ed.), Essays in Self-Destruction, pp. 188–202; David Lester, Making Sense of Suicide: An Indepth Look at Why People Kill Themselves (New York: Charles Press, 1997)
Roy F. Baumeister,’ suicide as Escape from Self, Psychological Review, vol. 97, no. 1 (January 1990), pp. 90–113.
On 26 March 1997, Marshall Applewhite and 39 other members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, of which Applewhite was leader, took their own lives. The group timed their suicides according to the comet Hale-Bopp’s appearance as they claimed that a spaceship was tailing the comet; see also Charles Wahl, ‘Suicide as a Magical Act’, in Edwin S. Sheidman and Norman Farberow (eds), Clues to Suicide (New York: McGraw Hill, 1957), pp. 23–33
M. D. Faber, ‘Shakespeare’s Suicides’ in Edwin S. Sheidman (ed.), Essays in Self-destruction (New York: Science House, Inc., 1967), pp. 30–58.
Thomas Szasz, Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
Battin, Suicide: The Ethical Issues, p. 21. See also Robert L. Barry, Breaking the Thread of Life, On Rational Suicide (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1996), p. 3.
See p. 38fn. James Rachels, ‘Active and Passive Euthanasia’, The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 292 (1975), pp. 78–80.
Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion, An Argument about Abortion and Euthanasia (London: Harper Collins, 1995, ©1993), p. 248.
As H. Rommilly Fedden said, ‘[t]his most individualistic of all actions disturbs society profoundly. Seeing a man who appears not to care for the things which it prizes, society is compelled to question all it has thought desirable. The things which make its own life worth living, the suicide boldly jettisons. Society is troubled, and its natural and nervous reaction is to condemn the suicide’; cited in Glanville Williams, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), p. 240.
Cited in Georgia Noon, ‘On Suicide,’ journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 39, no. 3 (July-September, 1978), pp. 371–386
For discussions of rational suicide, see James L. Werth, Contemporary Perspectives on Rational Suicide (London: Brunner/Mazel, 1999)
George P. Smith, ‘All’s Well that Ends Well: Toward a Policy of Assisted Rational Suicide or Merely Enlightened Self-determination?’, UC Davis Law Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (1989), pp. 275–419
For a useful analysis of the distinction made by Dworkin, John Harris and others between the two concepts, see Theo A. Boer, ‘Recuning Themes in the Debate about Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide’, Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 35, no. 3 (September 2007), pp. 529–555.
The policeman’s dilemma has been used by many on both sides of the assisted-suicide debate. A lony driver is trapped in the cab of his burning vehicle after an accident. The police, fire-fighters and ambulance service are at the scene, but it is clear he will bum to death before he can be freed. He is in agony. He begs a policeman (who happens to be armed) to shoot him rather than let him burn. For a discussion of its importance, see, for instance, John Harris, ‘Consent and End of Life Decisions’, Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 29 (2003), pp. 10–15.
Quang Due asked to burn himself as ‘a donation to the struggle’; cited in Michael Biggs, ‘Dying Without Killing: Self Immolations, 1963–2002’, in Diego Gambetta (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 179.
For an enlightening discussion of the treatment of suicide by early Christian theologians, see Darrel W. Amundsen, ‘Suicide and Early Christian Values’, in Baruch A. Brody (ed.), Suicide and Euthanasia: Historical and Contemporary Themes (Dordecht: Kluwer, 2010, ©1989), pp. 77–154.
As Hannah Arendt observes, ‘men never have been and never will be able to undo or even to control reliably any of the processes they start through action’; Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 232–223. Eric A. Plaut and Kevin Anderson, tr., Marx on Suicide (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
David P. Phillips, ‘The Influence of Suggestion on Suicide: Substantive and Theoretical Implications of the Werther Effect’, American Sociological Review, vol. 39, no. 3 (June 1974), pp. 340–354.
See A. G. Lee, ‘Ovid’s “Lucretia”’, Greece & Rome, vol. 22, no. 66 (October 1953), pp. 107–118.
Arendt The Human Condition. Preceding Arendt, Paul Mich spoke of vitality in similar terms, though he included what Arendt categorized as works (the produce of homo faber) within it: ‘Vitality is the power of creating beyond oneself without losing oneself. The more power of creating beyond itself a being has the more vitality it has. The world of technical creations is the most conspicuous expression of man’s vitality and its infinite superiority over animal vitality. Only man has complete vitality because he alone has complete intentionality’; Paul Mich, The Courage to Be (London: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 81.
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 234. Adam Smith refened to the ability of human beings to breach the existing social and moral barriers: ‘Men have voluntarily thrown away life to acquire after death a renown which they could no longer enjoy. Their imagination, in the meantime, anticipated that fame which was in future times to be bestowed upon them. Those applauses which they were never to hear rung in their ears, the thoughts of that admiration whose effects they were never to feel played about their hearts, banished from their breasts the strongest of all natural fears, and transported them to perform actions which seem almost beyond the reach of human nature’; Adam Smith, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, cited in Bruce Mazlish, ‘History and Morality,’ The journal of Philosophy, vol. 55, no. 6 (13 March 1958), pp. 230–240
Peter J. Steinberger, ‘Hannah Arendt on Judgment’, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 34, no. 3 (August 1990), pp. 803–821
Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2003), p. 46.
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Yuill, K. (2013). Considering Suicide. In: Assisted Suicide: The Liberal, Humanist Case Against Legalization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286307_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137286307_5
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