By Anthony Barich
National Editor
THE arguments put forward by those seeking to legalise euthanasia in WA are self-contradictory and not applicable in the real world, the director of the LJ Goody Bioethics Centre said during Curtin University’s annual ethics lecture on 18 November.
In his speech, recently acquired by The Record, Fr Joseph Parkinson said that legalising euthanasia could have “disastrous consequences not only for the patient but for our whole social fabric”.
He said he chose the topic “Over the edge: individual autonomy and flat-earth ethics” because public debate on legalising euthanasia in WA has been “mediocre”, which he said is what happens “when we rely on media to drive the issue”.
As distinct from suicide (when a person deliberately causes himself or herself to die), he defined euthanasia as any act or omission by which one person deliberately causes another person to die at the other’s request.
He said that the argument of euthanasia advocates is based on individual autonomy, but it is clear from its causal structure that euthanasia is a social issue by nature rather than a purely personal issue.
The Western notion of autonomy is also based on a contradiction, he said: “We praise radically individualist thinking on one hand, yet rely on systems of social cooperation on the other.”
But he concluded that human beings are not so radically individually autonomous as to be able to choose any imaginable end to pursue, even if in so doing they avoid bringing harm to others – “not only because we happen to live in functional networks of social interrelationship, but by our very nature, we draw our sense of self from our specific social, historical and cultural contexts”.
“Individual autonomy, then, cannot mean that we are free to pursue any end we wish from a virtually limitless spectrum of possible objects,’ he said.
He said euthanasia advocates’ three main arguments – “that most of the public want it; that as autonomous persons we should not be impeded from making this choice if we wish to; and that it is the role of Parliament to make this choice possible” – contradict the facts.
“If 80 per cent of our population really do support euthanasia, why do less then 50 per cent of doctors support it (according to the UK Multiple Sclerosis Society), and less then 10 per cent of cancer specialists?” Fr Parkinson said.
The right to choose our own ends, he said, and the underpinning view of “what it means to be human has served us so well that, in the Western world at least, it is accepted as a basic individual right which is limited only when necessary to meet the demands of living in community”.
This, he said, is “an essentially two-dimensional view of what it means to be human”.
There is a general assumption, he said, that so long as a choice is made autonomously, it ought to be respected – “that is, as long as the process of choosing is reasonable, we can ignore the object of that choice”.
He quoted peer-reviewed research published 15 years ago by Canadian clinician and academic Harvey Chochinov – recently in Perth for an international palliative care conference – which revealed that among terminally ill patients around 45 per cent express a desire to die at one time or another, but less than 10 per cent acknowledge a “serious and pervasive desire to die”.
The reason for this is sometimes physical pain and discomfort, but more often than not it involves existential pain and suffering: “hopelessness, burden to others, loss of a sense of dignity”.