Life in Light of Death by James Lindsay

Author:James Lindsay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Published: 2016-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

Death with Dignity

All that stands between us and a better conversation about death with dignity are the terror of death and the immortality projects that service it. Refusing the possibility of death with dignity is the result of our immortality projects, and we can see that fact no more clearly than noticing it is an imposition we place uniquely upon human lives. In our vanity and terror, only human lives are deemed worthy of a forced final march through Nature’s unflinching reminders—irremediable sickness, pain, and degeneration—that She cannot care about our suffering. A horrible end, then, may be universally agreed to be among the worst possible fates in life, and yet it is one we visit solely upon ourselves—routinely, needlessly, and literally with religious devotion.

The quantity of unnecessary human suffering generated by religious opposition to death with dignity is mind-boggling if considered in earnest. To oppose death with dignity in service to an immortality story is to force ourselves, and worse, other people facing the ends of their lives, to die more slowly and painfully than needed. It is to encourage hopeless medical interventions that genuinely are worse than useless. It is to curse the grieving friends and family of the dying with having to watch their loved ones suffer pitifully, and then to request they pay exorbitantly for the opportunity. It is to let the cruelties of biology tear dying people unnecessarily away from their last possession, their dignity. It is to prevent mercy by unjustly calling it murder. And it is to do all of this primarily to protect certain immortality stories we have written so that we may deny death.

The ethical questions concerning death with dignity therefore do not lie in whether or not it should be available; even having that debate is already a moral failure. The discussion need only concern how we might reliably determine when the time to end a broken life has come. Nothing in the nature of any of our immortality projects, including faith, adds anything of substance to that already difficult debate. An honest discussion of death with dignity demands acknowledging and accepting death, and such a view favors death with dignity.

Both death with dignity and the idea of a route to a perfect death take us to the unpleasant fact of suicide. It may seem that I have made a case for suicide, but I have not, at least not in general. Ethically performed medically assisted suicides like deaths with dignity have to be done under the guidance of qualified medical professionals, including representatives of psychiatric care. Outside of those narrow bounds, suicide is unlikely to be ethically defensible. Not even the most freedom-loving should see suicide through a lens of personal right because rights are shackled to responsibilities, and, for all of our individuality, we are not alone.

The gruesome practicalities of a suicide are one matter. Not all suicide attempts are successful, and the ones that fail are usually medical emergencies that everyone shares a partial burden in paying for.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.