Ross Douthat, responding to a blogger (called “Drum”) who raised basically the same objections as I did to his Kervorkian critique, writes:
For Drum, though, a question: Assuming that the would-be suicide is of sound-enough mind and uncoerced, are there really no secular, non-Judeo-Christian reasons to think that assisting in self-slaughter might be morally problematic? And a follow-up, in the spirit of the daughter test: If Drum had, let’s say, a middle-aged friend confined to a wheelchair by an accident who had spent a few years battling waves of entirely-understandable despair over his condition, and a “merciful” Swiss clinician then prescribed that friend a fatal dose of sodium pentobarbital (after subjecting him to a battery of “common sense” psychological evaluations, of course), would he see no non-religious grounds on which to describe that doctor as a murderer?
Douthat is simply trying to confuse his reader about the role of a doctor in this procedure. He suggests that the doctor decided the friend should die, so prescribed a substance that would make that occur (that, in fact, would amount to murder, unless the friend agreed with the doctor on whether he should die). Whether the patient should kill himself is no more a question for the friend’s doctor to decide than it is for the friend’s travel agent to decide. The doctor just happens to have the tools to allow the person to die as he wishes.
Suppose that the friend who wanted to kill himself collects Social Security benefits from the government, and that if it weren’t for these benefits, he would have no money. Suppose he uses these benefits to buy a ticket to the top of the Eiffel tower, from where he jumps to his death. Would Douthat say that the U.S. government is guilty of manslaughter for providing the tools with which the friend took his life? What if the man had informed the government if his intention to use the benefits to take his life.