Practical Ethics

Easing the passing: Death booths, misrepresentations and the 'Ugh factor'

Death is in the air. To stop us being engulfed by the ‘silver tsunami’,  Martin Amis urges the construction of euthanasia booths, and encourages the elderly to go to them for a martini, a medal and a pharmaceutical nudge into the void. Terry Pratchett talks cosily about ‘shaking death by the hand’ as he sits on his lawn, Tallis on his IPod, drinking some modern Socratic hemlock washed down with vintage brandy. He and his backers in the euthanasia industry shrewdly propose death tribunals who, having heard evidence about individual cases, would sign or withhold a death warrant. Such tribunals, they say, would obviate the risk that vulnerable people might opt unacceptably for euthanasia. The opinion polls consistently indicate considerable public support for a change in the law against assisted suicide. The opponents of assisted dying are caricatured as reactionary bigots, probably fuelled by otiose, antediluvian religious prejudice: people who care more about some dogma of the sanctity of life than about pain, fear, despair and autonomy. The crusade for assisted dying is a campaign by the modern and enlightened against the mediaeval  and  benighted.

We're all guinea pigs, and it's not so bad

The outrage provoked by Professor Anthony Mathur’s suggestion that patients should sometimes be obliged to enrol in clinical trials (discussed already on this blog by Steve Clarke: 11 December) continues to rage on.  Armies of shrill autonomists tell us that all our worst nightmares are real: that Mengele walks again.