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Killing and Allowing to Die: The Ethical Importance of Precise Language
| Article
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10815 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
1,245 Words |
| Author
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Gilbert Meilaender
Gilbert Meilaender is a professor of religion at Oberlin
College in Oberlin, Ohio. His most recent book is Faith and
Faithfulness: Basic Themes in Christian Ethics (University of
Notre Dame Press, 1991). |
Anyone wanting to learn to think clearly about the choices facing us with respect to care for the dying and euthanasia will not be helped by Rosemarie Tong's discussion.
She builds her entire treatment around the concept of euthanasia--in what are purportedly its active and passive forms. Never, though, does she offer reasons for preferring this terminology to other possibilities (such as those suggested in my title), even though a footnote promises the reader that reasons for this terminological choice will become clear.
The language of "active" and "passive" euthanasia suggests that these are two examples of what is essentially the same sort of action. If, by contrast, we speak of "killing" and "allowing to die," we describe actions that may be quite different morally.
Tong defines active euthanasia as "the taking of immediate, active steps to end a person's life (administering a lethal injection, for example)." Passive euthanasia, then, is "withholding or withdrawing 'extraordinary' treatment from a person who is 'terminally,' 'irreversibly,' and 'incurably' ill, or who has fallen into a persistent vegetative state." And since those are simply two versions of the same thing--two kinds of euthanasia--the distinction between them turns out to be of little moral importance. "Whether a physician withholds medical treatment from a severely impaired newborn or lethally injects that newborn, his intention is the same: to produce the death of the infant."
Are we well served by this way of speaking? Indeed, can we even make conceptual sense of it? The fact that either of two choices may produce the same result does not make them morally indistinguishable. If you are irretrievably dying, on a respirator but certain to die very soon, and I remove the respirator in order that you may not be burdened with a now useless treatment--in order, that is, to care for you in your dying as best I can--you will die as a result of my action. But I will not have aimed at your death; I will not have embraced you death as part of my plan. Should you--contrary to expectation--continue to breathe, I will not then proceed to smother you with the pillow. For my aim was not to abandon you in your dying but to care for you. If, on the other hand, in the same circumstances I give you a lethal injection, I aim to kill. The result is the same in either case; what I do is not.
Tong notes a similar objection raised by Daniel Callahan and says of it:
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