What I read
According to the article "Perth academic, 104, chooses to end life" (2018), supporters of Professor David Goodall's mature decision to end his life have expressed dissatisfaction with Australian law, which the Premier of Western Australia has said would not be revised to allow such freedom. Although he has no terminal illness, 104-year-old professor Goodall wants to kill himself because "his quality of life has deteriorated." His daughter agrees that he has the right to make this decision, as do groups supporting his trip to Switzerland this week, where the law respects his wish to die.
___________________________________
My response
Although I found a couple of other interesting articles on the BBC News as I browsed it with my morning coffee, this one in Australia's daily newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald, which I've read regularly for several decades, beat the others. But I've also emailed myself links to them as possible sources to respond to blog later.
In fact, I thought that there was a connection between this article about euthanasia and a BBC News story about the rapidly developing research and production of non-animal meats for human consumption. When we kill and eat animals, we need a reason why it is OK to kill those animals since the fact that they are animals is not a good supporting reason for turning them into steaks, burgers, or other tasty meals, such as the kai yang I've just enjoyed for breakfast. Making connections such as this between different ideas from different sources is an important part of academic work, as you saw this morning in the two new Classroom questions I posted from Bixby and Scanlon's critical thinking questions in exercise 2 on page 12.
When we kill and eat animals, we need a morally relevant reason for treating non-human animals differently to ourselves, and that they are not in the given group identity of being human is not a good enough reason: that is like arguing that women can't be engineers like men because they are not in the given group identity of being male, or that black can't vote because they are not in the given group identity of being white. Accidental membership of a given group is not a reason to treat members differently to non-members unless there is also some other characteristic that comes with being a member of the given group. Since you know I eat meat, you can probably guess that I think there is such a characteristic, but I haven't told you what it is: I think it will make an interesting question for you to respond to, even though it's not the one I wrote below that directly addresses the ideas in my chosen source.
Finally, the idea that you haven't killed an animal if you only buy meat already dead is wrong. When we order a hamburger at McDonalds or buy a tasty pork leg at Tops supermarket, we are paying someone else to kill for us to keep up the supply, which makes us responsible for the killing. When I bought my kai yang for breakfast, I was effectively paying someone else to kill a chicken for me. If myself and others were not buying kai yang, those chickens would not be being killed: when we eat meat, we are killers.
 |
| Breakfast from the market next to my condo. Yum! |
When we kill and eat animals, we need a morally relevant reason for treating non-human animals differently to ourselves, and that they are not in the given group identity of being human is not a good enough reason: that is like arguing that women can't be engineers like men because they are not in the given group identity of being male, or that black can't vote because they are not in the given group identity of being white. Accidental membership of a given group is not a reason to treat members differently to non-members unless there is also some other characteristic that comes with being a member of the given group. Since you know I eat meat, you can probably guess that I think there is such a characteristic, but I haven't told you what it is: I think it will make an interesting question for you to respond to, even though it's not the one I wrote below that directly addresses the ideas in my chosen source.
Finally, the idea that you haven't killed an animal if you only buy meat already dead is wrong. When we order a hamburger at McDonalds or buy a tasty pork leg at Tops supermarket, we are paying someone else to kill for us to keep up the supply, which makes us responsible for the killing. When I bought my kai yang for breakfast, I was effectively paying someone else to kill a chicken for me. If myself and others were not buying kai yang, those chickens would not be being killed: when we eat meat, we are killers.
___________________________________
My question
Should the law allow adults to choose to die?
___________________________________
Reference
- Perth academic, 104, chooses to end life. (2018, April 29). The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/perth-academic-104-chooses-to-end-life-20180429-p4zcc7.html
The summary is only 95 words, which is good.
ReplyDeleteAnd although I would not do it in academic writing, I thought that the one word sentence "Yum!" (a single adjective) in the caption of the second photograph was appropriate for this piece of writing.
Euthanasia always intrigue me and your question seem to simplify it. One thing that make death wish never so simple is that it is a one-way ticket and no coming back. I am not at all against the freedom of conscious adults and also in this case, the law might allow it with very strict criteria to prove that the reasons or the conditions behind the wish is permanently as cruel as death, or even more.
ReplyDeleteI think that Kan makes a good point. It sounds like the same one that the Premier of the state of Western Australia also makes, but I'm not sure I agree. Why do the conditions behind the wish to die need to be cruel? And why think that death is cruel? I think the evidence is that death is not cruel: it is nothing. What is cruel is to kill someone (or something) that wants to keep living, but is it any less cruel to force someone who does not want that to keep living in conditions they find cruel, even if most people would not? We are not told exactly why Goodall's life "has deteriorated," but he is surely the best person to judge that. I would agree that there need to be strict criteria to ensure that the adult decision is freely made and a long term wish, not a mere whim that someone woke up with this morning, but that is clearly not the case with Prof. Goodall, who seems to me to simply be tired of living after so long. What I thought most interesting about this story is that he is not terminally ill, he is not dying painfully of cancer or any other condition. He just wants to be dead rather than alive. Who has the right to make this decision about his own life if not him, as his own daughter accepts?
DeleteDespite my comment above, I do agree with Kan that I have simplified a complex issue. It is more complex than my comments above might suggest I think it.
DeleteI agree with Peter that death does not have to be cruel and I mentioned this with the varied subjectivity of cruelty of death in my idea. I hardly know either that death is not cruel since I have no idea about the other side of the door. However, the fact that it is nothing would be enough to somebody to consider it cruel missing what they have in their life before death. Up to this point, I think death is extremely subjective and sometimes people judge each other by their own values. Peter's point makes sense to me that it might not be less cruel to force someone to live their unwanted life. The best is to help a person like Goodall think throughly and to involve the effect he is going to leave behind.
Delete