Euthanasia prioritises personal choice over the common good, ignoring harms to foundational societal values and risks to vulnerable people, bioethicist Margaret Somerville writes. Source: Catholic Voice.
Like the TV advertisements in which two meerkats encourage people to seek insights and make wiser decisions – in their case, regarding purchasing insurance – by comparing options, what might identifying and comparing the values that inform allowing euthanasia and those that inform how we treat poor people tell us about ourselves and our contemporary society?
What individual and collective societal values does legalising euthanasia manifest?
Legalised euthanasia is a prime so-called “progressive value”. It’s a manifestation of intense or radical individualism – often referred to as the right to individual autonomy – which means that when the individual’s choice conflicts with societal values, the former almost always takes precedence.
The progressive values mantra is “Control. Choice. Change.”.
In the context of euthanasia, this is expressed as “It’s my life and I have the right to control it; no one, especially not the state through law, has the right to prevent me choosing to end my life and the law must be changed to allow me to do that.”
Choice, however, gives only the illusion of control – death is unavoidable.
There is often a naive assumption that change is always for the better, that the future will be better than the present and the past.
There is also a mistaken claim that “my death does not affect anyone else” – the harms of euthanasia to foundational societal values and risks to vulnerable people are not recognised.
In short, the risks and harms to the “common good” opened up by legalising euthanasia are ignored or suppressed, and access to euthanasia is claimed as a human right, which brings to mind an old saying in human rights: “Nowhere are human rights more threatened than when we act purporting to do only good”.
Such a belief blinds us to the harms, especially the risks to vulnerable people such as those who are poor. When considering human rights claims in the context of euthanasia, we also need to keep in mind that “human rights” and “human obligations” are two sides of the same coin.
Margaret Somerville is a Catholic philosopher and professor of bioethics at the University of Notre Dame Australia. She was previously the Samuel Gale Professor of Law at McGill University
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What are our ‘human obligations’ to care for vulnerable people? (By Margaret Somerville, Catholic Voice)
