On Friday MPs vote in the Commons on the Assisted Dying Bill. The bill was introduced by Katy Leadbeater. She has said: “I believe we should have the right to see out our days surrounded by those we love and care for, knowing that when we are gone they can remember us as we would like to be remembered.”
Notice the language of rights.
Rights is a complicated language. The scholars – John Finnis, for instance – say that rights are, and I paraphrase of course, fragments of right. Right is the opposite of wrong. Right is systematic when established: it is established in law. Hegel wrote a philosophy of right. But rights are not like right. Rights are fragments, crumbs, bits: and, unlike right, which is no-one’s, rights are mine or yours. They are property. They belong to us. It is not right to kill anyone, but, oddly, it might be my right to be killed.
Now, it is common to say, ‘No rights without responsibilities’, but, in fact, the true correlative of a right is a duty. And, in fact, it is of some significance that almost every major thinker between Cicero, let’s say, and Pufendorf, when writing about law and order, explained it in terms of duties, and certainly not in terms of rights. Cicero wrote De Officiis: where ‘an office’ is, in Latin, literally, ‘a duty’ (so that what we call ‘an office’ now is the space in which we are appointed to do our duty). Pufendorf, 17 centuries later, wrote De Officio Hominis et Civis, “on the duties of man and citizen”. Duties, not rights. But then the inversion came. It was only a century after Pufendorf that Thomas Paine wrote Rights of Man. And in the last two centuries we have followed Paine, and talked about rights, not duties.
What is a right? Well, it is a credit. If you have rights, you are in credit.
Why do I say this? Well, because a duty is a debt. A duty is what is due someone, what is owed to them.
For centuries, then, we always thought of order in terms of what we, the people, owed that order. Then we changed our minds at the time of the American and French Revolutions and thought about order in terms of what we, the people, are owed by the order. Entitled little citizens, we are. Gimme.
Now, what if we were to think about ‘assisted dying’ in terms of duties rather than in terms of rights?
Is there a duty to die? Well, not really.
But is there a right to die? No.
Death is an inevitability. It is a null act, from the point of view of the rights or duties of the person undergoing it.
Yet there seems to be a duty not to let anyone die unnecessarily. There might be a duty to preserve life. We owe this to others, to ourselves.
The entire abortion debate, in theory at least, seems to me to go wholly wrong because it is conjugated in terms of rights, not duties. Do I have a right to bodily autonomy? But of course! But, a darker question, do I have a duty to defend the life of a child? (Its ‘bodily autonomy’?) Probably, yes. Rights: selfish, demoralising. Useful, no doubt. But a bit irresponsible, n’est-ce pas? Abortion = not taking responsibility. Yes, we think about it in terms of rights, make it about entitlement, serve the self, and that’s it: Roy Jenkins can have his reform. However, now let us think about it in terms of duty. What must I do? Probably not kill an unborn child.
As I say, I only reflect on this theoretically. Practice is, of course, vexed. Our culture has been almost entirely abortive and contraceptive since the 1960s.
Perhaps, nonetheless, on the same grounds, we have a duty not to agree to ‘euthanasia’ or ‘assisted dying’ or any other euphemistic way of describing killing.
This is just a thought. Using the language of ‘rights’ makes it seem pleasant, kind, etc. Read Leadbeater again: “I believe we should have the right to see out our days surrounded by those we love and care for, knowing that when we are gone they can remember us as we would like to be remembered.” Nice. But how will we be remembered? Without dignity, instead going out with Dignitas. Dying is degrading, it seems (we don’t like to be seen suffering, and they don’t like to see us suffering), and so we shall ask for the pillow to be lowered, or the switch to be flicked, gently. But if we use the language of ‘duty’, then the entire subject seems to take on a different aspect. Perhaps MPs have a duty to reject the bill. Perhaps they shouldn’t have the right to pass it.
And it is always possible that there is dignity in suffering. Take that dignity away, as we seem to be doing, and then we might as well be gently good-nighted by a doctor, as soon as it is less troublesome, to him, us, or those we love, than any other remedy.
P.S. I wrote the name “John Finnis” above because I remembered he had written very interestingly about rights in 1980 or so: but then thought I’d better check to see if he has written anything about euthanasia. Finnis is an influential Oxford philosopher. And he has, in fact, written on euthanasia: at least one article, and a few book chapters. So I take a look. Most accessibly, he spoke on the subject to the House of Lords in 2005. He offered two arguments. One was moral: he thought that assisted dying was wrong. But he didn’t emphasise this, because he did not expect everyone to agree with it. The argument he emphasised was that the established law preventing euthanasia was clear, and the proposed law to enact euthanasia was unclear. A law preventing euthanasia avoids all hard cases, because it establishes the principle that no one may kill a patient or help them kill themselves, in any circumstance. He said there was a clear line. But he observed that any sanction of euthanasia would introduce an unclear line. And this in turn would make it inevitable that there would be strictly illegal murders, as doctors would be asked by people who claimed to be sufferingly ‘unbearably’ to be killed, or would be asked by those claiming a ‘right’ to be killed. Finnis said, in effect, if euthanasia is a right then suffering is irrelevant (I have a right to die, no matter what), and if euthanasia is about suffering, then autonomy is irrelevant (why worry if the patient is compos mentis if he is in pain?)
It seems to me that the arguments against assisted dying – both moral and consequential – are so strong that the argument for can only seem to make sense if one allows one’s emotions to be played on by extremely particular stories or cases. As this seems to be the case, it is anyone’s guess what the result will be.
But it certainly seems possible to me that, if it is passed, the Assisted Dying Bill will be the ‘high’ point of rights language.
Rights, originally taken to be a means of secular salvation, will finally have been inverted and made the means of secular damnation.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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