A 2013 post by Scott Alexander (of “Slate Star Codex” fame—which is a very good blog; you should follow it) popped up recently. “Who By Very Slow Decay” was shared by someone I know, and he added this comment: “Euthanasia is a moral imperative.” Intrigued, I read it, and I have at least two points that I want to make about why both the sharer and Scott are wrong.
The post doesn’t say anything nearly as explicit as the sharer, who viewed it as an obvious argument for euthanasia. Even so, Scott’s post is clearly pro-euthanasia (or, at least, it’s not anti-euthanasia). It paints a picture of terrible end-of-life suffering until a lonely death as the meaningless norm, and then Scott, a medical doctor, tells us, “I think if I were very debilitated and knew I would die soon, I would want to go to that park or one like it on a very sunny day, surround myself with my friends and family, say some last words, and give myself an injection of potassium chloride.”1
While I vehemently disagree with the post’s implicit message, it’s nonetheless very much worth engaging with it. Scott is committed to serious thought, and he’s a clear, direct writer. I’ve respected him a ton for years.
But I think his post makes two major errors. From those two erroneous premises, Scott ends up decrying the dying process and, indeed, life itself. As he writes near the end:
And now every time I hear that phrase I want to scream. 21st century American hospitals do not need to “cultivate a culture of life”. We have enough life. We have life up the wazoo. We have more life than we know what to do with. We have life far beyond the point where it becomes a sick caricature of itself. We prolong life until it becomes a sickness, an abomination, a miserable and pathetic flight from death that saps out and mocks everything that made life desirable in the first place. 21st century American hospitals need to cultivate a culture of life the same way that Newcastle needs to cultivate a culture of coal, the same way a man who is burning to death needs to cultivate a culture of fire.
You will want to read the whole post. I simply can’t do it justice here. The basic thrust of it is captured pretty well in the above block quote.
Before that, however, Scott explains how many people die in agony, how they do it basically alone (or with some random volunteer sitting by their bed side), and how the senses are assaulted—flashing lights and grisly wounds, patients’ screams reverberating throughout the halls while doctors simply pass by (because it’s not possible to help every screaming person, and mostly you can’t, anyway), and the odors of various infections—in “hellish” hospitals where all this happens.
He sums up: “[T]his is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed.”
It’s an arresting portrait. Scott makes a powerful, implicit case for what he would take to be a “dignified” exit from all of that. At some level, joining him on that side is an alluring prospect. Doubtless, what Scott describes is heartbreaking.
But he is nonetheless wrong to push for deliberate killing of people undergoing such suffering.
His post makes two errors. First, it assumes that there’s a class of experience, i.e., horrible end-of-life suffering, that’s meaningless—whether spiritually, religiously, metaphysically, or otherwise. Second, it assumes out of existence a certain objective moral norm: that no matter how much an innocent person is suffering, it is wrong intentionally to kill them.
Both of those assumptions are wrong.
Suffering is not meaningless
I’ll concede that, from a non-Christian point of view, suffering is meaningless, or just about the closest thing to meaningless we might be able to think of. And Scott, as far as I know, is not a Christian. So we won’t see eye to eye on this, standing on opposite sides of this metaphysical chasm. This is why conversion and personal witness are so important; people need to be brought to the glory of Christianity because so much of what we do depends on it. We are starting to see the effect that abandoning Christian morality is having on society in general. For example, USA Today recently published an article that nakedly tried to normalize pedophilia. A tweet thread promoting the article was deleted, and the article was moved behind a paywall.
The point is just that a non-Christian can’t be expected to understand how suffering, if united to Christ’s Crucifixion, can be highly meritorious, not just for the one suffering but for the whole world. The secularist sees nothing except a stupid, pointless, and painful twilight of life, which we should end, as a matter of compassion and mercy.
Can you blame them? Would you be able to see differently, without the light of faith?
Christians don’t have that excuse. We know that suffering is, in fact, a gift from God. The Son of God Himself did not disdain suffering or seek to avoid it. On the contrary, He faced it head on, with his whole Being, out of love for His Father’s will and the whole human race. If Our Master suffered for us, on what ground do we reject doing so ourselves, for Him and for our neighbor?
St. Augustine, in his Confessions, writes, “In my deepest wound I saw Your glory, and it dazzled me.” Pause for a moment and consider what it would take to mean those words sincerely. The only thing that would justify saying that, to my mind, is the example of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ—the God-Hero—Who humbled Himself and became a man and suffered death that we might be taken up into the very life of the most Holy Trinity for all eternity.
I submit that we do not have any good reason to flee from what Christ Himself embraced for our sake, which is why euthanasia is wrong.
Even unaided reason can tell us that Scott is wrong
But even a non-Christian should be able to join us in that conclusion. Terribel suffering cannot cancel out an exceptionless moral norm. Stated at a high level of generality, we may not do evil that good may come of it. On that, Socrates and St. Paul agree. Applied here, it means, no matter how much pain someone is in, we cannot kill them. Homicide, even “tenderly” committed, is not a valid answer to pain.
I suppose it’s possible that someone’s moral sense can be so corrupted that they cannot see the binding force of such a moral norm. If so, they are blameworthy and will have to make an accounting of their blindness to God. We should seek to correct them of their error. Better yet, we should ensure that such people can never act on their error by keeping euthanasia illegal and socially stigmatized. Such is a mercy and kindness to the confused—and those whom they would “help,” not to mention their families.
A warning
I want to close by stressing that euthanasia presents a serious challenge for those who think that a vaguely Christian society has what it takes to resist its advance.
I genuinely don’t believe that anything but a thoroughly Christian society, an explicitly Christian society, has the moral and intellectual resources to stand firm against euthanasia. On what can we build a political, legal, and social culture that can legitimately tell a person in pain, and their saddened family, that we will not allow a white-coated person to “put them out of their misery” other than the solid, unshakeable foundation of Christ’s own suffering at Calvary? What is potent enough to answer the suffering of the dying?
I don’t think it can be the exceptionless moral norm that one must never intentionally kill innocent people; that can only get us so far in the face of horrific suffering. Scott has a point. Frankly, a moral norm, while indispensable in its own narrow way, is far too bloodless and academic to be a sufficient response to the agonized screams of a dying father, and a family whose heart breaks for him.
Only Christ is sufficient. Without Him, we will kill our dying mothers, expecting to find Him.
And how terribly wrong we’ll be.
Very thoughtful article, Deion! Thanks for sharing it. One point still baffles me, though. I get why Christ's suffering is noble and purposeful, but is the suffering of a terminally ill person so too? It may be part of God's plan, but surely the circumstances are wildly different...
Very interesting article, Deion. You lay out some compelling reasons for opposing euthanasia; we often default to talking about how dangerous it would be to allow euthanasia because of the possibility of vulnerable persons being pressured into it, but it is important to, as you do here, make the case against the steelman as well. I find interesting your arguments about the meaning of suffering. It does seem to me that we must root our lives as being a part of something greater than ourselves; this is why we cannot discard them at will, nor make a determination about when another's life is complete. In both cases, the life belongs to one who is greater and more capable of making those determinations than are we. Christianity is the easiest way to this understanding--which makes sense, since it is true.
I do think that Scott hits on something very real, but completely misdiagnoses the issue and provides the wrong cure (troubling, given his profession). The issue is not, as he puts it, that we value life too much, but that we value it too little. Reducing life to the mere functioning of respiratory systems and brain functions is wrong, because it addresses only the biological components of life. To truly live we must nourish not just our physical bodies but our souls as well (this, as has been pointed out by wiser heads than mine, is also at the root of much of our overlords' COVID confusion). When people are left to die away from their families and loved ones, medicated past the point of sense, and divorced from society, something is wrong. I am reminded of when my grandfather passed away; we were blessed to be able to keep him at home in hospice until his last breath. He died surrounded by family, having seen almost all of his surviving relatives and friends, with more scheduled to come see him later, in his own bedroom, aware of what was happening. When the funeral service came to take his body away, one of the employees pulled me aside to remark on how unusual it was to see so many people present at a death; he was used to finding his clients alone. Obviously, what we did for my grandfather will not be possible in every situation. But we should be striving to ensure, as much as we can, that those who exit the world are treated with the same care and love as they were when they entered; just as our parents care for us when we are small and helpless, so should we be on hand to care for our parents when the tables turn. Too much of our society pulls us away from this ordinary impulse and responsibility, and it certainly does not do so because we value life too much.