NOT all the discussion of euthanasia centres on the question whether we should Get Esther Done (Press, 11 October). There were some remarkably grown-up pieces this week, which illuminated the weaknesses in both sides’ arguments.
In Prospect, Rowan Williams debated with Brenda Hale, who had written a Supreme Court opinion in favour of Tony Nicklinson; he was suffering, she says, “from a completely disabling illness, but he wasn’t terminally ill. Two of us took the view that there was a human right to decide the time and manner of one’s death — that it’s a matter of dignity and autonomy.” This goes straight to the heart of the philosophical disagreement, which is some way further on than the preliminary demand that two doctors testify that the patient has less than six months to live.
Lord Williams asks “exactly what is it that constitutes a right to determine the time of one’s own death, and on what basis?” He goes on, in a rather convoluted way, to ask why the law should curtail this right in some cases but not in others — which is what all the safeguards proposed must do. If people have this right, he asks, do others not have a duty to assist them?
Lady Hale replies that “I would never impose upon anybody a duty to help people to die. . . They may have the freedom to assist you, but they don’t necessarily have the duty. . . And I would also draw a distinction which the law has drawn for a very long time, between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’. What’s usually referred to as euthanasia is where the other person administers the lethal dose, as opposed to letting the person do it to themselves, or helping the person to do it to themselves. I think I would stick with that distinction as being morally quite plausible, but also as a practical safeguard.”
This is a much more nuanced proposal than much of what is debated. More importantly, it would exclude the vast majority of assisted dying as that is presently — and legally — practised in hospitals today. Dr Druin Birch, in The Spectator, wrote one of the most illuminating pieces I’ve seen on the subject: “As junior doctors, we were taught that we had the power to kill. Not merely the technical ability, not only the moral and legal right, but often the duty. The doctrine of double effect holds it perfectly acceptable to cause someone’s death if you are doing it in order to relieve their pain. If I dose someone with morphine because they’re distressed, but in the full knowledge it may hasten their death, I act legally. My decision is subjective. I have no forms to fill in, no hoops to jump through, no supervisor to ask. If you suspect that I am deliberately describing my powers in such a way as to suggest that they are open to abuse, you are correct. I am doing so because it is useful to remember that powers always are.”
Back in Prospect, the discussion remained safely elevated above the practicalities. Alan Rusbridger produced a question wonderfully pregnant with the English suspicion of priestcraft: “Is your personal conscience so intertwined with your faith that you can’t make a distinction?” he asked Lord Williams — who did not reply, as he might have been tempted, “I should bloody well hope so.” I mean, isn’t that the state to which Christian intellectuals should aspire? But no, he’s been Archbishop of Canterbury; so he replies in eirenic tones. “I wouldn’t draw a distinction. But I can’t simply stand up, so to speak, in the public sphere and say, well, ‘scripture and tradition say “do this’’’ and expect everybody to fall in line.”
Lady Hale describes herself as “a mildly practising member of the Church of England . . . to my mind, it’s not a very Christian thing to do to oblige somebody to go on suffering unbearably when they do not wish so to do, and when they are in full possession of their faculties. We can talk about what that means. To force life upon them by denying them the assistance they need still seems to me to be a terribly cruel thing to do.”
The whole 5000-word discussion is really worth hunting down.
For Church Times readers, too, there is a kicker paragraph later on in Alice Goodman’s clerical diary: “In the old days (by which I mean the turn of the millennium), once a year, a parish priest would go to the bishop’s study, sit down and have a conversation about how things were going in the priest’s life and in the benefice. Then the bishop might pray for that priest and that place, and they’d exchange pleasantries and part. What is the smell of a bishop’s study? Books, as I recall; furniture polish and the tea tray; sometimes sweat. These days you see a ‘Reviewer’, and are designated as a ‘Reviewee’. The Ministry Development Review form drops into my inbox like the Auditors into Ankh-Morpork in a Terry Pratchett novel. ‘Hi Alice!’ it begins.”