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Euthanasia and the Red Herring of Totalitarianism
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21939 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
1,336 Words |
| Author
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Chris Hackler
Chris Hackler is director of the Division of Medical
Humanities at the University of Arkansas College of Medicine.
He is editor of the forthcoming Health Care for an Aging
Population (State University of New York Press). |
Consider the last years of Jonathan Swift, an Irish clergyman and one of the keenest satiric minds Britain has produced. This brilliant man of letters slowly lost all distinctly human qualities.
"His mind crumbled to pieces. It took him eight years to die while his brain rotted. He read the third chapter of Job on his birthday as long as he could see. "And Job spake, and said, Let the day perish when I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived." The pain in Swift's eye was so acute that it took five men to hold him down, to keep him from tearing out his eye with his own hands. For the last three years he sat and drooled. Knives had to be kept entirely out of his reach. When the end came finally, his fits of convulsion lasted thirty-six hours."
Swift's case is unusually dramatic, but it illustrates vividly the two conditions under which active euthanasia could be justified: (1) intolerable and uncontrollable suffering, and (2) the disintegration of personality.
Suffering. Very few people these days have to die the way Swift did. As both Post and Tong attest, great advances in pain control have significantly reduced the suffering that accompanies ravaging diseases. But both authors are also correct that available techniques are not fully employed. Too few physicians are sufficiently concerned with or knowledgeable about effective pain control. This is a serious problem that is finally being addressed in the literature of medical ethics. But until adequate palliative care is universally available, relief from pain will continue to be a compelling argument for euthanasia.
Disintegration of personality. Even if pain can be controlled, death may be preferable to personal disintegration. Many diseases erode the mental faculties, producing amnesia and confusion and eventually destroying the capacity for personal relationships and distinctly human activities. Many people would prefer nonexistence to a subhuman existence. The Stoic sage Seneca expressed such a preference:
"I will not relinquish old age if it leaves my better part intact, but if it begins to shake my mind, if it destroys my faculties one by one . . . I will depart from the putrid or tottering edifice. I will not escape by death and disease so long as it may be healed and leaves my mind unimpaired. I will not raise my hand against myself on account of pain, for so to die is to be conquered, but if I know I must suffer without hope of relief, I
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