Sense at last – and lessons from history (Kevin Fitzpatrick)
(See Melanie Phillips article in the Daily Mail 11 Oct 2011)
‘At last. Someone who not only ‘gets it’ but talks sense about the issue of assisted dying. The moral outrage that Professor Raymond Tallis demonstrates in his article is just that: his moral outrage. It is not a scientific view. It is not based in medicine or its practice, no matter what he protests. What Tallis fails to acknoweldge is that we do not share his moral point of view. That does not and never has meant we lack in the kind of ‘humanity’ that he sanctimoniously calls his own. Does he really believe we do not face the same terrible moments in our lives too? The real irony which Tallis has missed completely is that many of us have faced death many times, many of us have been with our loved ones who have died. None of us who have watched someone die can ever believe it is entirely without suffering, and every one of us too would love to be able to alleviate all suffering. But in our humanity, we, at least, recognise the limits of medicine without making the move to ‘therefore we must move to a law’ – we, at least, see the danger in allowing children under the age of 16 access to the ‘service’ (in Holland) even if one of their parents disagrees.
But it is also essential to be clear which moral point of view we do not share.
Tallis runs together his judgements of the ways in which some individual people die, with his abhorrence of those of us who wish to oppose a law allowing those deaths to be ‘assisted’. But as Melanie Phillips points out, whether we like it or not, assisted suicide means actually killing someone. Whether or not there are individual circumstances where that might seem to make sense (Tallis cites Ann McPherson’s death), it does not follow that it makes sense in every case. That’s what a law would do, must do, cover all cases.
That is the first point of departure between us and Tallis. But it’s not the only one.
His latest protest is that doctors do not share his view and he calls this ‘a scandal’. In my recent head-to-head article with him in the BMJ, 69% of his colleagues voted ‘No’ to legalising taking the life of another through this method, or by euthanasia. They did so for a range of imaginable reasons.
We can mention the case of the woman whose ‘attentive’ family repeatedly pressurised not her, but a hospital medical team, where she was a patient, to give her major doses of painkilling drugs claiming she was in desperate pain; this medical team is to be congratulated for not bowing to the family (she was not reporting such high levels of pain to them). The family stopped visiting completely one day. It happened to be the woman’s 60th birthday, and her life insurance policy ceased after she reached that age.
Tallis has nothing to say about this and a million other cases like it, nor the moral judgements of that medical team about the behaviour of the family. We are always to believe that every family is like Ann McPherson’s family – but I even wonder whether each member of her family feels exactly as Tallis does. Perhaps they do. Or perhaps there is more in Tallis’s bald statment that when she wanted to die ten days before she actually did, she was refused. Why, I wonder, was she refused? I don’t believe the answer to that is as simple as Tallis would like to think, nor any of his bald statements.
He shows no respect for those doctors who took the opposite moral position to his, for whatever reasons they have.
As Melanie Phillips also points out, he disparages all other opinions as well, but he does not even respect his colleagues, their intelligence, their own capacity for moral judgement. His is the only acceptable view – to him – we might have thought we had learned from history just what happens when one moral position is forced on the rest.
Melanie Phillips is correct to consider how vulnerable people will be pressurised by others to die. Tallis is more than disingenuous to try to hoodwink us that this will not happen, under some ‘well-constructed’ law, because it is already happening and has happened throughout human history.
Melanie Phillips has also spoken about ‘helping’ someone over a cliff, and she is quite right to say that Tallis’s point of view would demand this. It is exactly the same for the broken-hearted. Imagine Fanny Brawne’s despair and desolation over the death of her tender young love John Keats; imagine she said over and over ‘I want to die’. Is our response really to be ‘Yep, quite understand the unbearable pain. Here’s a pill to help you die.’ The hugely worrying thing is that there will be some who will say: ‘Well, if that’s what she really wants…’. How many teenagers have to commit suicide in places like Bridgend before those people wake up to reality? How many broken-hearted have to step off a cliff? How many bereft families must repeat ‘Such a waste’ of a good or a young life?
Tallis is described at times as a philosopher – I take exception to that description. If he was a philosopher, deserving of that title, he would know immediately the difference between making a moral judgement and making a scientific (medical) one, he would know that his moral judgement is not the only possible one and that his role as a doctor gives him no special place to be morally superior, he would know that moral philosophy is not a place to decide moral dilemmas but to understand them better, most essentially he would know that just because he believes it is right in one case does not make it right in all cases, so a law makes no philosophical, logical sense based on individual cases. His stark belief that he is right and everyone who disagrees with him must be wrong and bad has been the judgement of many before him: a cursory examination of their life’s works should be clanging all the alarm bells we can find to resist.