This article is part of our special print debate issue. Below, you’ll find the case in favor of the resolution, followed by the case against the motion and rebuttals.
Should Libertarians Support Euthanasia and the Right to Die? Yes!
by Charles Amos
When it comes to assisted dying, one might expect the libertarian verdict to be crystal clear: assisted dying should be legal, because individuals should be free to die at a time and place of their own choosing. Yet many libertarians are staunchly against it precisely because they fear individuals will be pressured into dying by either family or state officials, totally undermining any voluntary choice of their own. The fact Canada’s MAID program now accounts for 1 in 20 deaths in the country is taken as evidence that things have already gone astray.
Libertarian opponents of assisted dying, however, have a phony conception of voluntariness in mind—pressure from others doesn’t undermine voluntary choice at all. Libertarians, with a true, thinner conception of voluntariness at their side, should support the freedom to choose assisted suicide.
Many people fear family members might pressure their older relatives to die in order to receive an inheritance early, or that doctors will do the same in order to lower costs to their department. This pressure is said to undermine voluntary choice, and, indeed, result in a forced death or even murder. But this ‘thick’ conception of voluntariness is implausible. There are many choices we all make under pressure which we still count as voluntary. This might be anything from ordering a starter at a restaurant out of peer pressure, to marrying the wrong person out of embarrassment, to joining the army during wartime simply to avoid being called a coward. But these actions remain voluntary, despite the influence that varying forms of social pressure might have. The existing potential for pressure or coercion on our choices does not justify taking away those choices entirely.
What about blackmail? Imagine, for example, a son telling his mother he will kill her dogs unless she opts for assisted dying. Libertarians should be against such blackmail because it creates an unfree choice due to her person or property being threatened. No doubt a few instances of such unfree choice will occur should assisted dying be made legal. But is the potential risk of such unfree ‘choice’ reason enough to prohibit assisted suicide entirely? No. Suicide itself would implausibly have to be made illegal (thus bringing the risk of prosecution for those who survive a suicide attempt) because that could be done under blackmail too; and doctors would no longer be allowed to pull the plug on patients who wanted to be left to die due to the fact that choice could be made under the threat of blackmail as well.
Libertarians of the Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard type should be persuaded to the case for assisted dying at this point, but libertarians with a Christian foundation to their ethics may not be. Pope John Paul II objects to a ‘culture of death’ on the moral basis that “man’s life comes from God…it is the property and gift of God… God therefore is the sole Lord of this life” (Evangelium Vitae, 1995). Since assisted dying violates His property right in you, after all, God has ordained your life to continue. It wrongs Him, and, thus, should be prohibited. John Locke made the same argument too. Accepting the existence of God, this argument still proves too much. Unhealthy lifestyles of all varieties, indeed any action which doesn’t serve to maximise one’s lifespan, would also have to be considered a violation of God’s property rights; yet it’s hard to imagine a libertarian Christian advocating for government prohibition on alcohol or unhealthy foods.
Against this, the doctrine of double effect may be invoked, i.e., the moral idea that an action is permissible if a bad effect (such as killing oneself) is not intended, even if it is foreseen. So, it would be fine to eat unhealthy foods knowing that they might reduce your lifespan, but not permissible to intentionally kill yourself or be have your life ended by a doctor. Perhaps Catholics could avoid my rebuttal that way. I doubt it though because there are many activities where the actual risk of death is part of the thrill, for example, off piste skiing, sky diving, and Antarctic exploration. Those are morally acceptable however, thus, the inviolability of life based on the idea you cannot intentionally reduce it is implausible. Hence, assisted dying cannot be ruled out on Catholic grounds as described.
It might finally be asserted as a brute moral fact that life is sacred and simply cannot be taken by anyone. This is very implausible. Life is not valuable in itself; rather, life is valuable in virtue of the good things it contains. As a challenge to those such as Immanuel Kant who would argue for the sacredness of all innocent life, I ask them whether or not they would support the wishes of someone who asked to be killed after falling into molten metal at a steel works. Should they answer ‘yes’ then life in itself is not sacred; rather, something within it is, e.g. pleasure and the absence of pain. 6,394 people die slowly in pain each year in the UK, and such people are the ones whose comfort, well-being, and freedom are really at stake here.
Individuals should be free to pursue their own good in their own way, and, crucially, they should be free to choose a good death too. No longer should the state imprison people in their own pained flesh. Concerns about the voluntariness of their choice rest on a phony notion of the idea, and, contrary to those of a theological bent, life is not sacred in and of itself. Again: Freedom demands assisted dying is legalised.
Charles Amos studied Political Theory at the University of Oxford and writes ‘The Musing Individualist’ Substack.
Should Libertarians Support Euthanasia and the Right to Die? No!
by Paritosh Purohit
‘We live in a society’, a schoolboy might say; a Christian might instead point out that the Fall happened. Both phrases serve to convey the same message: imperfections—in the real world—are inevitable. No matter how meticulous a plan, no matter what its safeguards; upon implementation, the chances of something—anything—going wrong are too high to sweep away. To err is human, and nigh unavoidable; more often than not, the question is to what degree error can be restricted, and on which side to err.
That is the first of three premises from which a liberal opposition to assisted dying might be derived. The second is less arguable, and that is that outcomes matter more than intent. Laws or movements should be judged by what they do, and not what they mean to do.
The third is that choices are not made in a vacuum. The ‘right to choose’—whenever exercised—is never unshaped by persons, exchanges, conversations, sentiments, and a complex group of other forces that make up the societies in which persons live. The choices people make are moulded by the norms by which they are surrounded.
The core of the (liberal) case against assisted dying is a combination of premises two and three. If society is so arranged that the power to choose (in some context)—if offered to the public-—is likely to be exercised in a way that produces illiberal outcomes, it might be permissible to deny the general public the right to choose (in that context).
For example, drug liberalisation is easy (or easier) to defend in societies in which drug-taking is discouraged and it is likely that addiction might be treated as a public health issue to be solved. But, hypothetically, in a society in which drug-taking is encouraged and addiction never thought of as a problem (of any sort) to solve, the prohibition of drug-selling could be defended, on the grounds that the freedom to take drugs—in such a society—would only lead to significant numbers of drug-related deaths (the right to life being a core liberal principle).
More generally, the freedom to choose should not be extended to the public as though they lived in a vacuum—it is not a freedom that is ever exercised in one. Liberals must make peace with reality, and ensure that the freedom to choose is extended responsibly; to the degree that it is certain that it will not be used in ways that threaten other liberal cornerstones (most notably, the right to life).
This is, of course, not to say that state force should prove a first resort. The ideal case would be one in which the freedom to choose is conditioned voluntarily, by society itself; where people are free to choose whatever they please, but successfully encouraged to exercise that freedom responsibly, through example-setting and voluntary dialogue.
What this requires is a participatory society of reasonably informed and concerned persons; a society in which there is enough of a sense of civic duty and a sufficiently large degree of information amongst the public for it to be likely that that public might correctly condition the manner in which persons exercise their freedoms.
For a number of freedoms, the stakes are sufficiently low that even if society were not so, and unlikely to provide positive and reasoned ‘freedom channels’, it would still be impermissible to use state force to condition the choices of persons. But for some freedoms (like the freedom to die at one’s request), the stakes are (arguably) high enough for such force to be justified. In a society where assisted death, if legalised, might risk being misused, over-invoked, or in any way not socially conditioned, the results (at worst) would be large numbers of unnecessary deaths; a violation of the basic and natural right to life.
Such ‘misuse’ could take many forms. Popular archetypes include that of older or frequently-ill citizens being incentivised (or coerced) to kill themselves for budgetary, financial, or familial reasons, and otherwise vulnerable citizens (such as those with depression or disabilities) being offered assisted suicide as an easier ‘way out’ than other forms of care. It would, I suggest, be permissible to legalise assisted suicide if it is sufficiently close to certain that societal persuasion will prevent its overuse.
But to return to the first premise: we live in a society; error will be inevitable. One faces the question of whether to err on the side of individuals suffering varying degrees of pain for varying amounts of time, or unnecessary deaths. Only if social attitudes guarantee that the latter is not a risk can assisted suicide be legalised without losing a threat to liberal principles.
Do they guarantee this? Comments made by some supporters of assisted dying—that “bloody Christians” stand in the way of something that would be worth it “even if a few grannies were bullied into it”—provide some cause for concern. The safeguards meant to keep assisted suicide from slipping down the slope are too far from perfect; some safeguards have been done away with altogether (such as the requirement for a High Court judge to approve assisted dying applications, which was scrapped last month by MPs in the UK scrutinising a controversial bill). If assisted suicide is to be legalised without threatening the core liberal principle of the right to life, it ought to be held to a higher standard than this. For as long as society lacks the capacity to condition the right to choose one’s death, that right must unfortunately be denied to the public, lest the right to die become a license to kill.
