The Times of London reported yesterday that Dignitas, a Swiss "suicide clinic," will help a healthy (and presumably elderly) Canadian woman end her life alongside her terminally ill husband.
Euthanasia interests me because it evokes powerful conflicting emotions about life, liberty, and mercy. For those reasons, I find myself taking the most unusual of positions on this matter: Assisted suicide should be illegal, and prosecution should be both rare and compassionate. In a world where two sides come down differently on every issue, it so happens that in this case both sides really are right.
This is especially unusual for me, because my libertarian side opposes laws that override free will, while my conservative side opposes laws that aren't enforced. But bear with me -- there's a method in this madness.
In crafting policy, what matters is never what the law calls for, but rather what people will do as a result of the law. When so many bad laws can be identified by their unintended consequences, here's an example where the right law can give us exactly the results we want -- intentional "unintended" consequences.
Look, no law is going to stop suicide. And when rational people suffer enough to seek death, it's not for society to demand that they continue living.
But what we can do is discourage the healthy from promoting death. When we provide for the dying -- whether as society or as family -- we are trapped in a conflicted position where the shared suffering is objectively bad, but how it all ends can be highly subjective.
And the goal is for the exact nature of that ending to be the decision of the person with the greatest stake. We don't want families saying, "Grandpa, maybe you should just let go" -- at times like that it's Grandpa's decision, and "letting go" needs to be Grandpa's idea. Not the family's. And definitely not some politician (or other agent of the state) who's trying to rein in healthcare costs.
I guess it's rare to find me acknowledging political correctness as a valid force in society, but in this case I suppose that what I'm seeking is to keep suicide politically incorrect -- literally. Something nobody talks about, and something nobody suggests -- even if we all knew it was happening.
I think Dignitas could be a little less visible. No, make that a lot less visible. Even illegal. But there's a lot to be said for the idea of support groups, such as those which hide battered women and children, which could only be found by those who need them. And which the law only makes a half-hearted effort to eliminate.
And I have no doubt that the best doctors already know how to warn suffering patients exactly how many pills would be lethal. To keep them from overdosing, of course.
That's the John Galt Line.
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