Is killing worse than letting die?
I had a conversation this weekend about what sorts of things philosophy majors would be much more likely to say than similar but non-philosophy major college students. I think philosophers would be far more likely to say that there’s not a morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia. That is to say, it’s no worse to kill than to let die.
For a lot of people it’s counterintuitive, but the arguments (from James Rachels above) are really good.
First, in some cases killing is far more humane than letting die. This is the most obvious rejoinder — for people whose existence is consumed by suffering, life is a burden. Forcing a patient to die of painful throat cancer rather than relatively painless lethal injections seems like an incredible cruelty.
Further, in some cases it’s used to make life or death decisions on irrelevant grounds. The example Rachels uses here is children born with both Down’s syndrome and an intestinal blockage. In some cases, the blockage could be removed with surgery, but parents and doctors decide that it would be better for the child not to live. Now regardless of whether you think the baby should live or die in such a case, the intestinal blockage seems entirely irrelevant. Yet when such a blockage is present one can “let the baby die” rather than kill it. This then seems like a hard case for those who wish to defend the distinction between killing and letting die.
It’s also strange to think that doctors perform no action by letting patients die. I can insult someone by not shaking their hand. Alternatively, if a doctor let a patient die who was suffering from a routine and curable illness that would also be morally and probably legally impermissible (assume the doctor doesn’t tell the patient her life is in danger — a non-action in itself).
One worry people might have about allowing doctors to perform such mercy killings is that patients will be pressured into dying. As with kidney donations and other things today it would be good to surround the process with some basic checks to ensure patients choose death freely. But even if patients only wish to die as a way of reducing the burden on others, that seems like a good enough reason that we shouldn’t necessarily preclude the possibility.
