Could it ever be more wrong to assist someone commit an act than to commit the act itself? It seems generally like it isn’t: the accomplice to the bank robbery is obviously less culpable than the robber. But Ross Douthat might have us believe that in fact there are cases where the accomplice is more to blame than the primary agent. (I explain towards the end of the blog post).
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I was a little hesitant to unreservedly praise Jack Kervorkian in my last post, since I actually do not know too much about the specifics of his work, so I was happy to see that Ross Douthat wrote a column this morning in the NY Times criticizing Kervorkian — surely Douthat would familiarize me with any cases where Kervorkian was too quick to kill, or otherwise operated immorally.
But it turns out Douthat has nothing on Kervorkian. Instead, Douthat argues as follows:
1) Helping terminally ill people die is no more morally acceptable than helping physically well people die (since in fact the key issue is whether a person wants to die, he points out we never kill terminally ill patients who do not want to die).
2) We know it is wrong to assist in the suicide of the physically well.
3) Therefore it is wrong to assist in the suicide of the physically unwell (this is implied, Douthat never actually says it).
4) Kervorkian, as well as others, implicitly agreeing with 1), has in fact helped physically well people kill themselves.
Douthat betrays the fact that he doubts he has convinced us of the validity of point 1 by finishing the column fixating on cases of assisted suicide of the well (point 4).
Also, he simply never makes any effort at all to argue that it is in fact wrong to help physically healthy people to commit suicide (i.e. point 2 is unsubstantiated, and point 4 is irrelevant). Is this really something that can be simply assumed in a column like this? I actually find myself tempted to use Douthat’s logic in reverse, boring my readers with examples that show how those who are not terminally ill might be just as convinced they want to die as those who are terminally ill (and how flimsy the distinction between “terminally ill” and “not terminally ill” is among us mortals), and then relying on my readers’ intuition that it is ok to assist in the suicide of the ill, so it must be ok to do the same for the physically well. I’ll resist that temptation and simply say that I think it is morally acceptable to help physically well adults to die in the way they’d like to die, particularly if there are tangible difficulties they are facing in life which suggest that their desire is not just a temporary phase (e.g. they lost loved ones and have been unable to find any happiness for years).
One additional element to this debate: would people like Douthat argue that the doctor who assists in the suicide is more morally culpable than the person who commits suicide himself? It seems very hard to argue that someone should not be allowed to die in the way he pleases. But it also is hard to see how it could ever be the case that behavior X is morally acceptable, but assisting in behavior X is morally unacceptable. Could that ever be the case? I don’t believe so.