Suicide, Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: When People Choose to Die, Does It Matter What We Call It? (original) (raw)
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The ethical problems surrounding voluntary assisted suicide remain formidable, and are unlikely to be resolved in pluralist societies. An examination of historical attitudes to suicide suggests that modernity has inherited a formidable complex of religious and moral attitudes to suicide, whether assisted or not. Advocates usually invoke the ending of intolerable suffering as one justification for euthanasia of this kind. This does not provide an adequate justification by itself, because there are (at least theoretically) methods which would relieve suffering without causing the physical death of the suffering person. Carried to extremes, these methods would finish the life worth living, but leave a being which was technically alive. Such acts, however, would provide no moral escape, since they would create beings without meaning. Arguments seeking to justify ending the lives of others need some grounding in concepts of the meaning of a life. The euthanasia discourse therefore needs to take at least some account of the meaning we construct for our lives and the lives of others.
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Undoing Suicidism: A Trans, Queer, Crip Approach to Rethinking (Assisted) Suicide, 2023
REFERENCE: Baril, A. (2023). Undoing Suicidism: A trans, queer, crip approach to rethinking (assisted) suicide, Foreword by Robert McRuer, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 335 pages. Open access at https://temple.manifoldapp.org/projects/undoing-suicidism ABSTRACT CHAPTER 4: Divided into four sections, Chapter 4 explores the right-to-die movement and discourses. The first section critically presents the main arguments of the right-to-die movement, which are founded on autonomy, liberty, dignity, and the right to refuse treatment. This section also explores the controversial question of extending the right to die by assisted suicide to people for whom mental or emotional suffering is the sole reason for their request. I demonstrate that regardless of whether the proponents of a right to die approve of this extension, they all adhere to what I have called the “ontology of assisted suicide”—that is, what assisted suicide is or is not (Baril 2022). As I establish in the second section, this ontology is anchored not only in individualistic and neoliberal conceptualizations of autonomy but also in ableist and sanist presumptions. For physically or mentally disabled/ill people, suicide is recast as a logical and rational response to “tragic” situations (Taylor 2014). On the one hand, from ableist/sanist/ageist and capitalist and neoliberal perspectives, these discourses rationalize assisted suicide for “special populations.” On the other hand, anchored in sanist and suicidist perspectives, these dis- courses cast suicidal people as irrational. As discussed in the third section, in the battle for assisted death, the rationale of the right-to-die discourses is to establish clear boundaries between the practice of suicide, described as impulsive and irrational, and the practice of assisted death, described as rational. Right-to-die discourses are anchored in biopower and biopolitics (Foucault 1997, 2004, 2004b): The maximization and protection of the life of the population (or “making live,” as Foucault phrases it) depend on letting “abject” subjects die. Therefore, I examine the sanist/cogniticist and suicidist presumptions in the right-to-die movement and discourses that cast suicidal people as “irrational” and “illegitimate.” Despite the promotion of a right to die, right-to-die discourses represent powerful somatechnologies of life to keep suicidal people alive. Moreover, by promoting a right to die anchored in individualist, ableist, and sanist perspectives for “special groups”—that is, those who are disabled/sick/ill/Mad/old—the right-to-die movement and discourses promote a logic of accommodation, a smokescreen to real, mean-ingful, and collective access to assisted suicide for everyone, and particularly for suicidal people. As such, assisted suicide may be seen as relying on the notion of cruel optimism. In the last section, I pursue the work initiated in Chapters 2 and 3 of queering, transing, cripping, and maddening suicidality and extend this work to assisted suicide. In the spirit of critical disability/crip studies, I mobilize critical reflections regarding accommodation and accessibility to theorize a genuine accessibility to assisted suicide for suicidal people through suicide-affirmative health care. I show that the ableist/sanist/ageist/ suicidist logic of accommodation to which the right-to-die movement and discourses cling represents a missed opportunity to develop an intersectional thanatopolitics for suicidal people.
Assisted suicide and euthanasia: arguing for a distinction
2005
In this essay, I will try to analyze the problems of assisted suicide and euthanasia by using the Joel Feinberg's analysis of the so-called 'right to life'and the Wesley Hohfeld's legal terminology. Through Feinberg's analysis I will trace a conceptual and normative distinction between assisted suicide and euthanasia; through the Wesley Hohfeld's legal terminology I will develop this distinction to show where the distinction precisely arises.
A History of Ideas Concerning Suicide, Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2005
not theology. This question of scope is not to discount the importance of such lines of inquiry concerning the relationship between faith and reason. 4 Rather, it is merely to state that the scope necessarily has to be limited to questions of what can and cannot be justified by natural reason in the light of our attempt to pose publicly accessible reasons that can, in principle, inform 'secular' morality and law in this area. 5 The history of suicide and euthanasia practices may, at first glance, seem to have only a distant influence upon the contemporary debate. Yet, the historical development of thinking on the subject is vital if we are to adequately contextualise the contemporary arguments made against traditional negative prohibitions; prohibitions that have hitherto formed the status quo in the West. 6 Being able to claim historical support lends credence to claims, especially when those figures or sources appealed to have had a significant impact on contemporary patterns of thought. 7 It is to the task of reviewing and analysing those historically rooted ideas, that I now turn. 4 Tensions with my own position concerning the relationship between faith and reason exist on two fronts: firstly, certain authors such as Ronald Dworkin blur the line between the kinds of truth that can be know by reason and kinds of truth that can be known only by an appeal to faith based considerations; secondly, there is the problem of thinkers and politicians who support the state sanctioning of religion, at least in the 'broad sense' of the Judaeo-Christian heritage. For a stimulating account of the general relationship between faith and reason, somewhat sympathetic to my own perspective, see
Keywords: euthanasia, dying, death, existential analitics; fundamental ontology, ontology of death, metaphysics of death Abstract: The paper attempts to conceptualize the “ancient” issues of human death and human mortality in connection to the timely and vital subject of euthanasia. This subject forces the meditation to actually consider those ideological, ethical, deontological, legal, and metaphysical frameworks which guide from the very beginning any kind of approach to this question. This conception – in dialogue with Heideggerian fundamental ontology and existential analytics – reveals that, on the one hand, the concepts and ethics of death are originally determined by the ontology of death, and, on the other hand, that, on this account, the question of euthanasia can only be authentically discussed in the horizon of this ontology. It is only this that may reveal to whom dying – our dying – pertains, while it also reveals our relationship to euthanasia as a determined human potentiality or final possibility. Thus euthanasia is outlined in the analysis as the possibility of becoming a mortal on the one hand, while on the other hand it appears in relation to the particularities of its existential structure, which essentially differ from the existential and ontological structure of any other possibility of dying. This is why it should not be mixed up with, or mistaken for, any of these.