Michael Gerson: The value of a human life

From Belgium comes news that a mentally disturbed prisoner is to be granted government help in committing suicide. A typically shallow ethical debate ensued isnt assisted suicide for a prisoner a bit too close to capital punishment? before the trump card of individual autonomy was played. Regardless, hes a human being, said Jacqueline Herremans, the head of Belgiums right-to-die association, a human being who has the right to demand euthanasia.

This is the culmination of a certain line of moral reasoning: The human right to cease to be a human being.

If your overriding values are individual autonomy and choice, this is an easy case. In fact, all cases however individually are theoretically easy. A mentally ill criminal or a lonely senior, or a depressed teenager has every right to take his or her own life. It is just another profound, self-determining decision, like marriage or retirement. Retirement from an existence one finds unbearable.

But even the Belgians dont really believe this. They surround assisted suicide with legal qualifications. The prisoner in this case apparently had an incurable mental disorder, which Belgiums justice minister cited as the reason for state action in putting him to death. Assisted suicide is generally available to Belgians in cases of serious physical and (more recently) mental illness. According to The Associated Press, 1,800 Belgians took advantage of the offer last year an increase of 400 from the previous year. Causes included dementia, cancer and psychosis. Belgium is simply extending this right to prisoners.

This is justified by an ideology of choice. But the determination of certain societal classes that are helped in committing suicide is hard to separate from a judgment about the worth of those classes. The right to suicide adheres, in this case, not to all human beings but to sick and apparently flawed human beings. And such a right begins to look more and more like an expectation. A mentally or physically ill person can be killed, in the end, because they have an illness. A qualification can slide into a justification. This is a particularly powerful social message since people with cancer or severe depression sometimes feel worthless, or like burdens on their families, anyway. It is pitifully easy to make them with an offer of help into instruments of their own execution.

All of us particularly those who face cancer, Alzheimers, Huntingtons or other gnawing horrors can imagine circumstances in which the extension of life does not seem to serve the cause of life. Our excessive tolerance of suicide, said sociologist Emile Durkheim, is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves. We are accused by our own darkest thoughts.

But when a friend takes his or her own life a cause of death now more common in America than traffic fatalities it does not seem like a choice. It seems like the end of all possibility of choice. It doesnt seem like freedom; it seems like slavery to a single moment of despair. Our immediate response is: I wish I had known his night was so dark. I might have done more.

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Michael Gerson: The value of a human life