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The Forum > Article Comments > Why making voluntary assisted dying legal best respects both sides of this debate > Comments

Why making voluntary assisted dying legal best respects both sides of this debate : Comments

By Andrew McGee, published 25/5/2020

After almost three decades of refusing to agree to it, Australian parliaments are slowly beginning to warm to the idea of voluntary assisted dying (VAD).

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Thanks for your further thoughts Andrew, however you didn’t really respond to my point that there is no meaningful distinction between VAD and VAS.

Just because a person may be considered to be dying, should they employ VAD, they are nevertheless deliberately killing themselves – they are committing suicide, even if it is just a day or eleven months before they would have otherwise died. The reluctance of supporters of VAD to use the appropriate English is, to my mind, telling.

The choice to use the euphemism, voluntary assisted dying, rather than the honest terminology of, voluntary assisted killing, indicates that there is a reluctance to face the hard truth of what is actually being done. If you as a supporter of VAD think it is a legitimate thing for people to be doing, then you should have the courage of your convictions and call a spade a spade – you support killing people, albeit at their own request and under particular circumstances.

Of course, those being killed in these situations, and their loved ones, probably prefer the softer sounding “assisted dying”, but again, as a matter of integrity, we should speak the truth. If people can’t handle the thought that they are committing suicide then they are not ready to be doing the act.

You make the point that some “experts” (what qualifies someone to be identified as an expert on this?) think we should have a ‘death is reasonably foreseeable’ clause, or that a person’s condition should be incurable, advanced, progressive and be one that will cause death, instead of the need for someone to be terminally ill.

This just goes to show how rather vague, subjective, and ultimately unenforceable any boundaries around assisted killing will prove to be. Once people get used to some killing and cases arise where people are just outside the boundary, they will see that the boundaries are not based upon any inviolable moral principles and so there will be continuous pressure to expand the boundaries. You would be well aware of this taking place in the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
Posted by JP, Monday, 25 May 2020 7:58:34 PM
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Hi again JP

Apologies for the delay in responding to your last post.

I appreciate you following up again; the points you raise about euphemisms are important and are sometimes raised in this debate, so I will address them. Before I get to that, I don’t think it’s quite true to say that I didn’t respond to your point that there is no meaningful distinction between VAD and VAS. I did explain how I would draw the distinction. However, I agree that I didn’t address your point that, whether we are dealing with people who are dying or not, such people are ‘killing themselves’ and that ‘when a person intentionally kills themselves they are committing suicide’ regardless of whether they are dying.

This is not, in my opinion, true. Let me take the term ‘suicide’ first. When you say that ‘when a person intentionally kills themselves they are committing suicide, and this remains so regardless of whether they are dying’, you are making a recommendation that we reject any distinction between those who are dying and those are not, and that we should call this suicide. That is a normative recommendation on your part in the guise of a neutral sounding description. You haven’t provided a reason why we should accept your recommendation, other than your claim that “in a real sense” we are all dying – a contention I have already answered.

Note that it doesn’t matter here how suicide might have been defined in the past; within limits, we can always change how we use certain words, and so appealing to how words were used begs the question against those of us who are recommending that we use the word differently (eg, more narrowly, to exclude those who end their lives under a VAD regime).

Now, making a recommendation as such is not wrong. As I just said, those of us, like me, who claim that we should not call VAD assisted suicide, or VAS, are equally making a recommendation. But we have good reasons for doing so, some of which I gave in my earlier posts.
Posted by Andrew McGee, Wednesday, 27 May 2020 11:41:15 AM
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You might reply that we can’t just choose to define terms differently, and that ‘suicide’ just means intentionally killing oneself. On this view, since ‘intentionally killing oneself’ applies to the terminally ill no less than to other people, it follows that such people are committing suicide.

But I see no reason to accept this. The term ‘suicide’ is not just a legal term (like ‘homicide’); it has accrued connotations and freight in its use in everyday language that can justify avoiding its use in some circumstances.

By analogy, we may want to avoid the term slightly derogatory term ‘cop’ and use ‘police’ in some contexts. The other term can have connotations we want to avoid. The same applies to ‘suicide’. The term ‘suicide’ can connote an ill-thought through decision made by somebody who is internally coerced and is therefore not making a truly voluntary decision. Since the decisions under a VAD regime -- assuming adequacy of safeguards – will be voluntary and well-considered, we can justifiably claim that we ought not to call these cases instances of suicide. Meanings are not set in stone or God given; they are norms and in that sense partly up to us
Posted by Andrew McGee, Wednesday, 27 May 2020 11:43:02 AM
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ateday,

<<The bottom line is
"whose life is it?">>

The real bottom line is: Whose responsibility is it to end life?
Posted by OzSpen, Wednesday, 27 May 2020 11:43:24 AM
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We can make a similar point about ‘killing’. This term has connotations that we may want to void in some circumstances. For instance, in our society we are fearful of, and want to lock up, ‘killers’. Although the term can be used neutrally, as when we talk of killing our plants, ‘killing’ can also be used to mean ‘murder’ as when we talk about the serial killer’s killing spree. It is, in my view, entirely legitimate to want to avoid the connotations of or baggage weighing down certain terms. We can legitimately claim that people under a VAD regime end their lives, avoiding the word killing not because, in its more neutral uses, it doesn’t apply, but because in its other uses – where it connotes something reprehensible, it doesn’t apply. Opponents of VAD will always object to this, and will always dismiss it as a ‘mere euphemism’. But I don’t find that objection convincing for the reasons given.

Thanks JP. It's been a good discussion.

Andrew
Posted by Andrew McGee, Wednesday, 27 May 2020 11:45:09 AM
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Hmmm, I’m not convinced Andrew.

You sound rather like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

You say I should not use past definitions of words because meanings can change. I agree meanings can change but the dictionary definition of suicide continues to support my position not yours, eg, Cambridge Dictionary, suicide: the act of killing yourself intentionally; Dictionary.com, suicide: the intentional taking of one's own life; Merriam Webster, suicide: the act or an instance of taking one's own life voluntarily and intentionally.

The person using VAD - wittingly taking a lethal dose of poison - is intentionally taking their own life; they are committing suicide, they are killing themselves, as per current normal usage of the words. I am not making a normative recommendation, just a descriptive one with nothing hidden.

You say I don’t provide a reason for accepting my recommendation. I am saying that until there is an accepted change to the meaning of words, if we want to successfully communicate, we must go with their established meaning.

You say you have provided good reasons for your recommendation for a narrower meaning of suicide. As far as I can see the only thing you have offered is, “it seems meaningful for these people [the terminally ill] to then claim that they want their death to be as comfortable as possible, and to avoid having it drawn out”. (Apologies if I missed something else.)

Certainly they may want that but that does not mean that in using VAD they don’t commit suicide and neither does it provide a justification for redefining the word suicide. Unless you mean that by using softer words (even though incorrect terms in normal English usage) that helps make their death “as comfortable as possible”.

But perhaps killing is always reprehensible.
Posted by JP, Wednesday, 27 May 2020 3:09:40 PM
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