Kudos to France's continuing humanitarianism and Macron's endorsing euthanasia. Unlike Putin, Macron is one of those men who seek to lessen human suffering rather than increase it.
Voluntary euthanasia
is not immoral.
Suicide, the taking one’s life, isn’t immoral. It isn’t self-murder. Morality has to do with how people treat others—people, creatures, nature, property, etc. Emmanuel Kant offers the foundational principle of morality: the principle of autonomy. Which says that the autonomy of others should be respected. And that can be extended to people’s property. What is the defining difference between killing others and killing oneself? Choice. When a person harms himself, he chooses to do so, thus acts in accordance with his free will. The same is true if he chooses to die by euthanasia. Morality condemns violating other people’s autonomy against their will. Thus, euthanasia performed without consent would be immoral. On the other hand, euthanasia requested by someone experiencing incurable pain and suffering is not immoral. In such a case, euthanasia could be considered an act of kindness.
Suicide is already
with us, like it or not.
France experiences about 9,000
suicides each year, about 25 each day. In 2021, 48,183 people died by suicide
in the US. None of these suicides were immoral. They are acts of desperation to
escape suffering of some kind. However, there are two categories that need to
be considered. The first involves
situations that cause suffering, but the situations can be treated, remedied,
and eliminated so the person no longer suffers and can go back to living a
normal life. The situations are various and require different forms of
treatment by doctors, psychotherapists, social workers, etc.
The second involves conditions caused by disease or old age that cannot
be remedied. Years ago I read about a child that suffered from cancer. He
underwent endless treatments, some experimental. And one day he said enough.
Let me die. He chose death rather than more treatments because his fight for
life was hopeless and too painful.
My brother John suffered lung
cancer caused by exposure to asbestos during the Vietnam War. He suffered
painful treatments for months, though the doctors knew his cancer couldn’t be
cured. (They weren’t greedy or evil, but their Hippocratic Oath would not allow
them to give up.) In a moment of great pain he attempted suicide. His wife
called emergency services and he died weeks later in hospice. Was his
attempted suicide immoral? Of course not. Would euthanasia been a less painful and terrifying option. I think so.
A close friend of mine, Bill, died
of cirrhosis of the liver. He was bedridden for months before he died. For
years we were involved with judo and weightlifting and heading out to the
mountains and deserts. Bill was a plumber who had spent two years in Vietnam.
He was a very active guy. However, he was also a big drinker and smoker. He
burnt the candle of life at both ends. Would he have opted for euthanasia? I
don’t know. Should he have been given the option of euthanasia knowing he would
never leave his bed? I think so.
I had a cousin farmer, Warren, who
was more of an uncle to me because he was much older. He had a small farm near
the Mississippi River. When he wasn’t farming he was hunting and fishing. He
was a modern-day Daniel Boone, but he was a heavy smoker. He came down with
incurable cancer and like Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun. Would he
have preferred the chemical death of euthanasia to that of death by a shotgun
blast? I don’t know. Probably not. Should he have had euthanasia as an option?
I think so. His wife found his body. The sight must have been horrific.
Sometimes euthanasia is also a better option for the family.
The outrage against euthanasia is ironic when thousands of people kill themselves each year with knives, rope, pills, gas, plastic bags, electricity, by jumping from buildings or in front of trains or trucks. Suicide is going to happen. People deserve the option of treatment or a gentle and easy death when treatment is of no avail.
Is Suicide a Sin?
The Bible says very little about
suicide. Suicide was accepted in ancient times. Samson and Saul committed suicide,
and it can be argued that Jesus sought his own death. Some early Christians sought out Christ-like martyrdom. Christians argue that the
commandment “Thou shalt not kill” forbids suicide, but the fact is God does a
lot of killing in the Bible with floods, plagues, and fire and brimstone, so his
commandment has to be taken with a grain of salt coming from the biggest mass-murdering hypocrite
in history. And in the Old Testament Yahweh encourages Jews to engage in endless
murder of pagans.
Murder is defined as “the unlawful
killing of another human without
justification or valid excuse committed with the necessary intention as defined
by the law in a specific jurisdiction.” Killing oneself then hardly qualifies
as an immoral act, and making it illegal would be mean-spirited. Sin is a religious
notion. Ingénue Eve committed a sin for disobeying God (eating forbidden fruit)
and was given a death sentence by God for her disobedience. Actually, the death
sentence was extended to include all human beings. That alone disqualifies God
as a moral authority.
If religious people want to believe suicide is a sin or self-murder, that’s fine and dandy. Then they can avoid committing suicide. However, what is immoral (via Kant’s principle of autonomy) is imposing their beliefs on others who do not share their religious ideology. Christians have been very good at forcing their views on others using threats of burning, drowning, crushed under rocks, or various forms of torture. Once again, morality is concerned with the treatment of others, not about how one treats oneself. Euthanasia is no worse than masturbation. Of course Christians consider masturbation a sin!
Two deaths: Socrates
and Jesus
Socrates chose suicide rather than escape. In David’s painting The Death of Socrates he welcomes the cup that contains the poison hemlock:
He didn’t have to drink the hemlock. He could have left the
city. Even his accusers hoped that he would. Durant says, “It still remained
open to him to escape from the prison.” But he chose to stay and drink the
hemlock; thus he committed suicide. And he’s considered by both philosophers and Christians a big hero for doing so!
Some argue that Socrates was
looking forward to the afterlife (in the painting he's pointing upward) once his spiritual soul was set free from his
lowly mundane body. This is often referred to Socrates’ four arguments for the
immortality of the soul as described in in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo. However, the views expressed are
Plato’s, not those of Socrates. Historian Will Durant says that Socrates accepted the
“relativism of Protagoras” and “refused to dogmatize” because he was “certain
only of his ignorance.” He gave “lip service to the gods of the his city,” and
said “of the gods we know nothing.” He “applied his skepticism even more
rigorously to the physical sciences.” That’s serious skepticism. “Philosophy
was for Socrates neither theology nor metaphysics.” (The Life of Greece)
Philosophy for Plato was both
theology and metaphysics. Plato’s mentor was Pythagoras. Says Wikipedia, “Aristotle states that the
philosophy of Plato was heavily dependent on the teachings of the
Pythagoreans.” And “The historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston states that
Plato probably borrowed his tripartite theory of the soul from the
Pythagoreans” (“Pythagoras”). So the theory of the soul winging its way from
the body to eternal bliss originated in the West with Pythagoras, who probably
got the idea from the Egyptians, adopted by Plato, and from him by Apostle Paul
who passed it on in his version of Christianity. Jesus speaks of the soul rarely,
only in the gospels of Matthew and John written 40 to 60 years after Jesus’s
death by men who never met Jesus.
Okay, let’s suspend historical
evidence for the moment and assume that the view of the soul in the Phaedo is that of Socrates. If so, he apparently
didn’t believe that suicide was a sin or would compromise the soul’s journey in
the afterlife.
Jesus
also chose to die, but his death involved excruciating pain that lasted about
six hours on the cross. At one point he cries out in pain, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark
15:33-34). Suffering Christians have asked the same question over the
centuries. Yet, Christians believe that everyone should face death as Jesus
did—with all its excruciating pain and suffering. However, he didn’t seem to
feel the same way. To Catholics suicide is considered a mortal sin that destroys one's relationship with God. Well I think God sinned against his son
Jesus by allowing him to suffer on the cross rather than showing up as he does
in the Transfiguration of Jesus (Mark 9:7). According to his book God’s Problem (the problem of horrific
evil) Bible scholar Bart Ehrman believes that God has failed to live up to his
relationship to humanity. For example, as many as 50 million people, mostly Christians, perished,
perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population, during the Black Plague. Those
people could have asked “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” The Jews
could have asked the same question during the Holocaust that killed approximately
six million of his chosen people.
I’ll end this segment with the extinction event caused by God: “I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made” (Genesis 7:4). Of course, Jews, Christians, and Muslims point out that he saved two of each species crowded onto Noah’s ark, though I doubt a billion creatures could be herded onto an ark. How are insect herded? I assume that those left behind became extinct. And then what about the millions if not billions of humans and other creatures that drowned? Apparently, they didn’t matter. And we should worry about what God thinks about suicide when suicide harms no creature other than the person ending his or her life because its suffering can no longer be endured? Oh, says the deity's defender, the story of the Flood is just a story not to be taken literally. If so, then we can ignore anything the rest of the story (Genesis to Revelation) might say or imply about suicide.
Two of my favorite human beings—Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath—committed suicide because their lives had become unbearable to them. Yet, the goodness of those two women is infinite compared to that of the so-called omnibenevolent deity who can only be described as the greatest mass murderer in the history of the Universe.
Taoism, Existentialism, and Noble
Suicide
Unlike
the Abrahamic religions Taoism is a
humanitarian spiritual philosophy in part because it is human-centered rather
than God-centered and because it seeks peace, harmony, and serenity, rather
than conflict, oppression, and disquiet. It is aligned with nature in that
nature allows her creatures to live freely. Religious and secular ideologies,
on the other hand, are artificial, inherently oppressive and controlling. Such societies
operate like bureaucratic machines. It can be argued that societies are created
to benefit people; however, to oppress people, to control them as if they were
societal pawns does not benefit them. Certainly, some control is necessary such
as Kant’s principle of autonomy that says people should be free but should not
interfere with other people’s freedom. That’s a very Taoist principle,
existentialist as well.
The Taoist Lao-tzu was the wisest of the wise, even wiser than wise Buddha, who sought detachment from the world that Lao-tzu was devoted to. Buddha’s goal was to investigate of the causes of suffering and how to avoid them. Like Lao-tzu, Buddha was a humanitarian, yet his humanitarian concern included the suffering of all life forms. These two spiritual philosophies are affable cousins unlike the Abrahamic religions that have been for centuries at war with one another and the world. The principle that separates Taoism and Buddhism from the Abrahamic religions is that of letting be rather than being domineering, oppressive, abusive, and manipulative. Jesus was a bit of a Taoist-Buddhist, often protecting women from the Pharisees who sought to stone them to death. His philosophy can be summed up with the phrase “Leave her be.” Why? Because those who sought to harm her were also sinners. They became sinners when they sought to stone a woman. Unlike them, Jesus believed that control (moral = spiritual) should come from within, not from without. That is his central gospel.
The
Taoist principle most relevant to suicide is wu-wei* or no-action. The idea is “letting be,” or perhaps “letting
go” of life in the case o suicide. An idea that is alien to patriarchal totalitarian societies, yet
essential to allow people to achieve self-realization and to allow societies to
flourish. (Lao Tzu was especially concern with oppressive warmongering
governments like his home country today’s communist China.) The root of the
idea is to let nature take its course, but that does not mean that one must
allow himself to be eaten by a tiger. It means “letting people go their own
way” (J. Koller’s Oriental Philosophies
289). Imagine a person a person being painfully and debilitatingly consumed by an
incurable disease or old age. The choice is to either to allow the disease/old age
to take its course in tiger-like fashion or to allow the person to decide what
is to be done: either to let nature take its course or to “let go” of life and
embrace death.**
*Wu-wei
does imply “nonintervention” and imitating “the Tao by not intervening in the
course of things, thereby permitting all things to unfold in accordance with
their own nature” (The Encyclopedia of
Eastern Philosophy and Religion, “Wu-wei”).
When it comes to suicide wu-wei
appears to create a conundrum, but it doesn’t. First, wu-wei is not the primary principle in the Taoist program. It is a
means to realizing the greater humane principle of creating peace, harmony, and
serenity. Is this a moral principle to be achieved? That would depend on
circumstances. However, it is a practical goal. So practically or morally at
times it would be necessary to suspend the strict sense of wu-wei.
Second, morality overrides the
principle of allowing nature to take its course. In fact, not doing nothing would be
unnatural. In Stephen Crane’s short story "The Open Boat" a group of
men in a lifeboat are caught in a storm at sea. If they do not struggle against
nature, then they drown. For them not to struggle against nature would be
unnatural.
Third, to require a dying person
endure pain and suffering until death comes to the rescue would be immoral
according to existentialism (a very Western philosophy) because it requires the
person to relinquish freedom to become merely a victim (an object) of the
malady. Only in freedom is dignity possible. In other words, noninterference
must also apply to the will of the person as long as it doesn’t violate Kant’s
principle of autonomy. And to a dying person the freedom to choose how to die
may be the last profound free act available to him or her. It can be consider
an act of defiance against disease and suffering, a rage against being treated
as an object by an affliction.
**Death is not evil only tragic, more so for humans because of their awareness of what is lost and their complex attachment to life—not just to their own life but to the lives of loved ones, be they humans or other creatures. (We put animals down when they are in incurable pain. Why do they deserve such compassion and humans don’t? James Herriot of All Creatures Great and Small fame didn’t believe animals should be allowed to suffer just because their owners wanted to keep them alive. His philosophy of euthanasia was based on concern for the welfare of the creature, not on what its owners wanted. He served as an advocate for the welfare of creatures who were unable to speak for themselves. Humans, however, can speak for themselves and their freedom of choice must be considered the cardinal principle in deciding to die by euthanasia. And that moral right should not—morally—be usurped by others. Dying with dignity means to act freely in the face of pain and suffering: to choose to end one’s life or to allow nature to take its course. However, there can be no freedom if there is only one option.) Life is inherently a tragic affair because it is the nature of reality that nothing endures forever. That doesn’t make accepting death any easier but only recognizes that death is unavoidable. The tragic aspect of life should inspire a greater love and appreciation of life. It, unfortunately, doesn’t in dull-minded, egocentric males who enjoy causing others to suffer.
Such men are evil because they make
life more tragic than it need be. As Lucretius points out in his poem De
rerum natura (on the nature of things), all pain and suffering and evil
people happen in life not in the postmortem because there is no postmortem
existence, except for those who can’t face reality but believe the dead will
live again, a creepy notion. As if that isn’t bad enough they add the fires of
hell to the afterlife. At least Plato wasn’t so hateful as to wish or believe that
suffering should continue in the afterlife.
Christianity and Islam deny the tragic side of
life with a pie-in-the-sky afterlife, and by doing so commit an injustice
toward the dead by falsely claiming that they are or will be in a better place.
This lie is often use for the purpose of manipulation. To encourage aggression
and terrorist acts Muslims are told that they will be admitted to Paradise if
killed in battle or while engaging in terrorism. Russian Orthodox priests tell Russian soldiers, as they
sprinkle them with holy water, that if they die in Ukraine while murdering
Ukrainians they will go to Heaven with all sins forgiven, even the sin of murdering Ukrainians.
However,
that is not true. They will simply die murderers, their lives wasted and lost
to lies—those of Putin and those of the Russian Orthodox Church that serves him. The fancy
dress of priests should not be seen as evidence of the truth of their religious
ideology, though that is exactly its purpose.
Jesus’s suicide could be considered a noble suicide that rejected the malevolence of Judaism, a religion that bred hatred rather than love, compassion, and forgiveness. Russian soldiers could do the same by committing suicide rather than obeying a malevolent tyrant who oppresses his own people as he seeks to realize his blood-stained will to power. That would be a noble suicide. Taoists would say refusing to participate in a program that is contrary to achieving peace, harmony, and serenity can only be noble.That would be a noble suicide.
Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc made the ultimate sacrifice of self-immolation (June 11, 1963) to protest the oppressive Catholic regime of Diem and its persecution of Buddhists. His suicide suspended the principle of wu-wei on moral grounds. In Buddhist fashion he protested the suffering being inflicted upon Buddhists.* To him allowing evil to continue its course was unthinkable. Thus, he chose heroism rather than submission. Existentialists would say one should assert his or her freedom by refusing to be the slaves of madmen even if doing so means death. Alexei Navalny also stood up to evil and became a hero for his courage and goodness.
*Religious and secular ideologies are simply tools made to serve the masculine will to power. They are inherently nihilistic because the ideologies declare the people who reject them to be without value or to be nothing of value, thus having no moral rights. Buddhism isn't an ideology, nor was the polytheism of the ancient Greeks. An ideology is a us-versus-them system of ideas that always include an enemy to be either converted or destroyed. Thus, "letting be" is a principle contrary to religious and secular ideologies, which are inherently intolerant of other belief systems and ways of life. Native Americans found that out when Christians arrived in North America. Letting Native Americans be as pagans was out of the question because it would have been inconsistent to Judaeo-Christian ideology.
Wu-wei is not the goal of Taoism but
only the means to achieving it. The goal is a life of peace, harmony, and
serenity. If incurable disease and old age reduce life to ongoing agony, then
letting go of life should be an option for the sufferer.
In regard to the principle of wu-wei, existentialism and Taoism are compatible because both emphasize the
important role of freedom as a categorical principle in human life. This means
that people’s freedom is to be respected unless they allow their freedom to
impinge upon the freedom of others. (The principle is so simple, so just and
decent yet beyond the comprehension of dull-minded men.) To be human is to be
free; thus, denying a person’s freedom dehumanizes the person. In his essay
“Existentialism is a Humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre says that “man will only
attain existence [actualization] when he is what he purposes [proposes] to be.”
That is what makes existentialism a humanism: it argues that humans must be free
to achieve self-realization because self-realization is the process of
overcoming one’s nothingness (such as the unrealized state of infancy).
To
be human is to be free, which is why slavery is abhorrently dehumanizing. Yet, billions of
people live in a state of slavery imposed by (masculine) ideologies. Ideology
is made only of words. Yet, oppressive states use those words to justify the
bureaucratic cages in which they imprison their citizens. It is interesting
that keeping animals in cages is frowned upon, but billions of people are
forced to live in societies that are essentially bureaucratic dystopias. Encaging
people is immoral, of course, but that is how states based on ideologies work.
Take the ideology of Judaism as an example. It says that one must do whatever God
demands (according to the ideology). Thus, if God (i.e., the ideology) tells
Abraham to sacrifice his son, he must do so. What about his son Isaac who is to be sacrificed? From the point of view of the ideology, he collateral damage. As
with God, obedience to the ideology is supreme, and disobedience is
unforgivable.
Abraham
is God’s slave. Of course, like Eve he has he freedom to disobey God, but as in
the case of Eve the consequences would be catastrophic. Yahweh doesn’t mess
around when it comes to punishment. That he comes up horrific tests of faith
(as in the case of Job as well) reveals that he is a brutal totalitarian
deity—pure masculinity on steroids. Isaac represents the sacrifices that must
be made in the service to God because as God is the supreme authority of right
and wrong. The incident reveals the two categories people fall into according
to the ideologies of the Abrahamic religions as well as secular totalitarian ideologies: those who serve the ideology and
those who are sacrificed to it. As the story continues, Isaac is given a reprieve
because his father is willing to kill him if demanded by God (i.e., by the ideology). However, there will be no reprieve for pagans/gentiles
that God wants exterminated later in the story. Who’s to argue? In all
patriarchal societies Daddy knows best, Daddy being the ideology enforced by the
men who serve it.
How
does this relate to suicide? First of all, neither God nor ideologies are true
logically or empirically—the only two categories of truth. They are inventions
in the way the game of chess is an invention. If you play the game, then you
must obey its rules. But the rules of the game do not extend beyond the game
itself. Secular and religious ideologies are life games, but
they have no logical or empirical validity outside the ideology, just as their
rules have no validity beyond the ideological game itself. And it should be noted
that religious ideologies and many secular ideologies are based on myths.
Religious myths are replete with supernaturals entities and events. Also with
mythical assumptions such as Jews were chosen by God to introduce him to the
world or Hitler’s myth that the Aryan race is inherently superior to other
races thus is destined to rule the world (that’s two myths).
These
myths/ideologies are either true or false. If false, they have no bearing on
the issue of euthanasia. If true, they have no bearing on euthanasia. For
example, let’s assume that Yahweh actually existed when he commanded Abraham to
kill his son. Moral logic says that Abraham has every right to disobey the
command for two reasons. First, God is not a moral authority; second, even if
he were considered such does not logically or morally require an individual to
obey him. Deciding to obey or not to obey is a matter of choice, requiring the
individual to decide the morally right action to take.
The problem of lockstep, mindless obedience to an ideology or authority of any kind should be obvious. Putin’s war on Ukraine illustrates the nature and enormity of the problem. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers invade a nation based on the words of a single person. They are treated by Putin as robots and they treat Ukrainians as objects. Like Hitler before him, Putin represents an idea of his own invention. It is his personal ideology. He uses that ideology to program the Russian people so they will do what he says. The question that comes to mind is whether or not people are capable of acting freely once programmed. Hitler transformed Germany, one of the most intellectually advanced nations in the world, into a nation of robots. Only people of great compassion and sensitivity were capable of rejecting such programming, mostly for moral reasons.Hans and Sophie Scholl were two such persons.They were executed by guillotine on February 22, 1943.* Even the so-called great philosopher Martin Heidegger succumbed to Hitler’s programming. Apparently, his wife was an even more vicious Nazi. It really is quite amazing how easily entire populations can be turned into robots.
*Sartre refers to a form of suicide
that is moral in the altruistic sense and truly noble. His reference is to the
captured resistance fighter who commits suicide rather than face interrogation
that might cause him to give up information that would compromise his comrades.
Russian soldiers could do the same an act of defiance against their evil puppet
master Putin, who treats the Russian people as pawns in his private game of
will to power and turns his soldiers into murderous robots in Ukraine.
Suicide Cabins: from
the sci-fi novel Her Quest
As we continued, I had to pee,
so when I saw what looked like an old homeless woman waiting outside a small
building I assumed she was waiting to enter a restroom.
“Peno, I have to pee. Can I use
the restroom where that old woman is standing?”
“Oh Cora! That’s not a
restroom. It’s a suicide cabin.”
“A suicide cabin?”
“The old woman is waiting to
end her life.”
“Inside the cabin?”
“Yes.”
“That seems cruel. Why would
she do that?”
“Because her life has become
unbearable.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If you stay with me long
enough, you will. For many people life becomes so hard that they choose to end
it. In death, there is no pain, disappointment, sadness, or despair—only the
peace that comes when one no longer exists.”
“Is the suicide painful?”
“Not at all. Though I have
never experience what goes on in a suicide cabin, I do know what happens. In
fact, what occurs is described on the door or can be listened to for people who
can’t read. You can go over and read the description for yourself.”
“No!” The woman had entered the
cabin. “Still, I want to know.”
“I’m not surprised. Knowing is
what you do. Okay. The suicide enters the cabin and lies on a bed. The AI tells
the suicide to relax. Relaxing music begins to play and an aromatic gas is
released into the compartment. As the suicide relaxes the AI asks her to choose
a pleasant scene. The cabin then illuminates as various scenes or landscapes
are paraded before her. Once she chooses one then another gas is released that
induces a feeling of peace and happiness. Another gas puts her to sleep and the
final gas causes death. The bed lowers, and the suicide is transported for
cremation.”
“It sounds awful.”
“It’s not awful. It is the most
pleasant way to die. What is awful is the life the suicide seeks to escape.”
“Okay, I understand.”
“No you don’t, but you will. Now let’s get you some food. First go pee.”
