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I sub­scribe to Time mag­a­zine because two years ago they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. How­ever, at this point, I don’t think I would renew even if they paid me to do so. Their reces­sion cov­er­age has been laugh­able, and the opin­ion pieces seem ever more ridiculous.

One of the lat­est in a long line of lack­lus­ter essays is “Dying Together: An elderly British couple’s sui­cide pact is a beau­ti­fully roman­tic act — and a trou­bling one,” by Nancy Gibbs (Time, 3 Aug 2009).

The premise of this arti­cle is not bad. Basi­cally, Gibbs is try­ing to bring into con­trast our moral intu­itions about euthana­sia and the prac­ti­cal real­i­ties of uni­ver­sal health care. The title makes ref­er­ence to dis­traught but not dying for­mer British opera con­duc­tor Sir Edward Downes, who recently trav­eled to Switzer­land with his ter­mi­nally ill wife where both con­tracted with an active euthana­sia orga­ni­za­tion to (ulti­mately suc­cess­fully) bring about the ends of their lives. Gibbs is dis­turbed by the fact that he would choose to end his life, which was sub­op­ti­mal but not, in her opin­ion, so bad as to be not worth liv­ing. How­ever, as Gibbs rightly notices, in a day in age when uni­ver­sal health care is on the table, it’s impor­tant to real­ize that quicker deaths for the old and sick can mean a lower tab for tax­pay­ers. She seems to reject that finan­cial con­cerns should ever be a fac­tor in whether peo­ple decide to con­tinue treat­ment for them­selves or oth­ers. This is, of course, unre­al­is­tic, as we live in a world of scare resources and huge demand for increas­ingly high-tech and costly med­ical care.

Though the begin­ning of the arti­cle was promis­ing enough, ulti­mately its con­clu­sions are seri­ously con­fused. Gibbs doesn’t think peo­ple should be let go on account of costs, but endorses pal­lia­tive care in part because it is cost effec­tive. Then, she says she respects Sir Edward’s right to die, after hav­ing claimed that soci­ety has a moral right to over­ride even your deci­sion of whether to live or die.

Wait, wha???

This appalling lit­tle tid­bit is tucked into the mid­dle of the essay, where it is likely to go unnoticed:

“Some euthana­sia activists… believe in death on demand… Auton­omy and dig­nity are pre­cious val­ues; the phrase sanc­tity of life can sound ster­ile and pious in the face of pro­found pain and suf­fer­ing. But [they are] argu­ing for much more: that auton­omy is an over­rid­ing right. This view rejects the idea that soci­ety might ever value my life more than I do or derive a larger ben­e­fit from treat­ing every life as pre­cious, to the point of pro­tect­ing me from myself.”

There are really two objec­tion­able claims in here. First, con­sider the lat­ter: that soci­ety can value your life in such a way that war­rants pro­tect­ing you from your­self. The lan­guage of pro­tec­tion indi­cates that this is a claim about pater­nal­ism. We can infer from this that Gibbs prob­a­bly thinks that some or most of the non-terminally-ill peo­ple who wish for death on demand are not act­ing ratio­nally. As such, to pro­tect them from them­selves is actu­ally to try to pro­mote their own best inter­ests. Whether or not there are good ways of fig­ur­ing out if peo­ple are act­ing ratio­nally and what exactly is in their own best inter­ests is a sep­a­rate matter.

Yet, as objec­tion­able as pater­nal­ism may be, the truly odi­ous claim is this: that since “soci­ety might… value my life more than I do,” I ought not to be allowed to request death on demand. It goes even fur­ther than pater­nal­ism, because it reflects the posi­tion that it is in society’s inter­est to keep you alive, not in your own best inter­est. This is a great exam­ple of the kind of time when it is nec­es­sary to stop and think about what “soci­ety” even means. A soci­ety is just a col­lec­tion of peo­ple; in this case, the cit­i­zenry of the US. So let’s rephrase:

“the cit­i­zenry of the US might value my life more than I do.”

Well, that’s prob­a­bly not uni­ver­sally true, as at least some peo­ple do sup­port death on demand-style active euthana­sia. Rephrase again:

“most of the cit­i­zens of the US value my life more than I do.”

Now things are get­ting sketchy. There’s you, who wants to die, a small group of peo­ple who sup­port you in that desire, and a larger group of peo­ple who “value” your life so much as to wish to keep you from freely con­tract­ing to be euthanized.

This is where the mean­ing of valu­ing a life becomes really impor­tant. What could it even mean to say that “I value your life more than you do”? Some peo­ple you know are valu­able in the sense that they are pro­duc­tive work­ers, or they are inno­va­tors in some crit­i­cal field. So we might use this logic to jus­tify keep­ing alive a doc­tor who might be able to cure can­cer. But that is sim­ply to enslave him, which is obvi­ously morally unac­cept­able. Or a per­son might value some stranger’s stay­ing alive on account of her reli­gious com­mit­ments. But those do not pro­vide a legit­i­mate basis for the state tak­ing an inter­est in how long a per­son lives and whether or not she brings about her own death.

I think the way value is being used here has some­thing to do with psy­cho­log­i­cal harm. Many peo­ple are morally unnerved or even dis­gusted by active euthana­sia, par­tic­u­larly that of young-ish or healthy-ish per­sons. In that sense, they per­son­ally value — or pre­fer — the state of affairs in which you are not euth­a­nized. And that is fine. Those peo­ple should do what they can to non-coercively reduce the amount of peo­ple seek­ing such ser­vices. But truly lib­eral soci­eties are marked by the fea­ture that, while it remains incum­bent upon you to respect my rights, it is not incum­bent upon you to honor my pref­er­ences — whether it is my pref­er­ence that you attend church, my pref­er­ence that you not engage in homo­sex­ual behav­ior, my pref­er­ence that you not use par­tic­u­lar sub­stances in the pri­vacy of your own home, or my pref­er­ence that you not con­tract to die before nature would have it.

It is mis­lead­ing to couch claims about forc­ing one group of people’s pref­er­ences upon another group in the lan­guage of what “soci­ety val­ues.” Let’s just char­i­ta­bly hope that Nancy Gibbs was under a tight dead­line, or had too much to dis­cuss in too lit­tle of a space, and that she doesn’t actu­ally hold the rep­re­hen­si­ble posi­tion that soci­ety owns such a stake in my very per­son that it can and should keep me alive even when I clear-headedly wish to die.

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