I was once privileged, when I was a School Chaplain several years ago, to lead an hour-long discussion with a class of sixteen year olds on the question of suicide.
As Chaplain, I was privy to information that many in the class were not: that there were at any given time as many as ten students in the school for whom there was grave concern about the possibility that they might attempt self-harm.
The question I put to the students was this: what would you do if a friend of yours told you that they had decided to kill themselves?
The answer was chilling – more chilling than they realised. As one they insisted that, although this was a sad circumstance, you ought not intervene and tell someone else they couldn’t do it, if that was their decision. You could certainly not say to the person that they were doing the wrong thing.
For the students, the autonomous decision of the individual was absolutely sacrosanct, even to this terrible point.
This story is not about euthanasia, exactly, but it is about the kind of moral language we are equipped with and with which we are equipping young people. And it demonstrates the prison into which we have locked ourselves with the language of free choice. The priority of the individual’s right to choose renders us inarticulate just where we most need to say something. It coarsens our moral language. It makes us unable to say to someone else: ‘You can rely on me to stay with you and preserve your life as far as I can even when you feel like doing harm to yourself.’
It is the language of moral autonomy that propels the push for voluntary euthanasia, and renders us speechless to oppose it. For if my individual freedom to choose is the trump card in all moral questions, then the best thing that the law can do is to facilitate that choice. In this instance, that means legislating so as to enable the medical profession to assist in the suicide of terminally ill patients in their care should the patient seek to be so assisted. If individual choice is ultimate, then it seems to me there is no argument.
But I would argue that, as a theological perspective shows us, individual choice is not ultimate. It is part of a whole suite of moral factors that have bearing on these very complex and difficult circumstances. The choice to end one’s own life is, in most circumstances, an immoral choice that the law should protect us from making; and in which the law should protect others from complicity.
Why is this?
Because we are, as the Christian story tells us and plain observation confirms, not essentially agents of individual choice, but creatures made for community. We are made for love and trust more than we are made for freedom. And it is to love sustained by trust that we owe our moral decision-making, and not to freedom. It is not permission that we need, but a knowledge of what our licence to act in a certain way might cost others.
We should remember that for Christians, life itself is not an absolute good, nor even the highest of goods. Christians carry before them an astonishing symbol - the cross of Jesus Christ. At the very centre of the Christian gospel is an act of voluntary self-sacrifice to suffering and death. This is what Christians call ‘the good news’. That free laying down of one’s life becomes in the New Testament the very source of life for those who follow Christ. And it becomes the model for their lives in turn. The Christian is called to a cross-shaped existence as an echo of and a testimony to that relinquishing of a life that others may live. Christians are those who are ready to die for what they believe – and have done so in their droves down the centuries.
What does this teach us? That life is good as a wonderful gift from a good creator, but that it is not the ultimate good. There are some things that are worth giving up your precious life for. As American theologian Stanley Hauerwas says: ‘Dying is not the tragedy but … dying for the wrong thing’. Christians repudiated the Roman cult of noble suicide to preserve one’s honour. But they certainly accepted that a violent death might well be the price of a life lived in the service of God. Greater love has no-one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
What the martyrs show us is that death is unavoidable – but that the manner in which one dies may remarkably affirm human life. If a death affirms human life it must do so by affirming the communities of trust and care that are basic to human existence. One of the basic conditions that shapes human community is our willingness to live and our assumption that others share it.
If we have some manner of control about the manner of our dying, then, let us rule out the possibility that the voluntary euthanasia proposal may well afford us. Because death seems so lonely, the temptation to which we may succumb is to think of our dying as an isolated incident quite apart from anyone else. What is in fact the case is that in calling on others to assist us in ending our life, we are normalising this manner of death. We are inviting the medical profession to ask why the person in the next bed has not chosen the same but is insisting on staying alive when the bed is needed and the palliative care is expensive. We are inviting our community to increase its loveless-ness towards the elderly and the sick – after all, if their choice is to stay alive, then they can be blamed for it.
Law is a blunt instrument in the moral life. I am not heedless that the change in the law is sought for the purpose of alleviating great suffering. But the law can help us here by preparing us for the human-ness of our death. It can restrain us from insisting on a death which will corrode the community’s commitment to care for the elderly and the sick. It can restrain our tendency to see the aging population as an accounting problem. It can restrain us from investing far too much moral authority in the medical profession, under the illusion that men and woman of science deal only in tangible facts. It can restrain us from on insisting on a right to die which comes at the cost of another’s right to stay alive.
The pressure on the sick, the disabled and the dying is already there. We cannot, as those who are schooled in the gospel of Jesus Christ, commit to a policy which deepens their abandonment, nor can we commend it to our community.
They have real mountains here - and you can almost see them in my poor photograph:
