Friday, October 10, 2014
Kant and Mill in Opposition to Physician Assisted Suicide
Physician Assisted Suicide is a touchy subject right bow. People asks questions about whether it is moral or not to help someone commit suicide when they have a debilitating disease or are in overwhelming pain. I am not going to go in detail in his post, but I am going talk about why both Kant and Mill would deem it immoral. First off with Kant, killing in any sense is immoral. It would also break the first categorical imperative of Kant, that is going to suicide when you are victim of a disease and/or pain. Mill would not see it as for the good of the whole. It will only benefit that one person and will cause pain his family and friends, the opposite of utilitarianism. That is why I think they would deem this subject immoral.
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Part of what makes this problem difficult from a Utilitarian perspective is our inability to accurately measure emotional pain. Being that we each experience our emotions "In our heads", our subjective sense of pain cannot be simplified into the utilitarian calculus in a manner that can fully represent the extent of our experience.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of assisted suicide, particularly if morbid depression is the driving factor, it is entirely imaginable that a person might be in such emotional agony that extinguishing it (and unfortunately the individual) could still net a diminished overall level of pain, even when factoring in the grief of close loved ones. Cold as it sounds, the smaller the number of individuals affected by the suicidal person's passing, the more likely it is that the utilitarian calculus will be swayed in favor of the assisted suicide. There are still massive flaws with this idea however, as we simply aren't capable of measuring pain to the degree that would be necessary to solve this case, so in general we assume that a life is infinitely valuable unless countered by another life, whereby simple arithmetic can solve moral problems.
Another possible utilitarian argument against assisted suicide is that allowing a death denies the individual the possibility of contributing to the net overall happiness in the future. The phrase, "suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem" comes to mind. If we exclude terminal illness, we have to assume that treatment and recovery is an option. Successful rehabilitation completely circumvents the grief of loved ones, and so it must be the preferable course of action.
I think that you have to consider the mental and physical condition of the person before deciding whether or not to assist them in suicide. If the person have depression and is asking for suicide, then surely you wouldn't assist them because their mental state is altered by depression and their decisions may not be rational. If the person is in intense pain and their mental state is normal, then you may consider euthanasia if the situation is not going to improve and the person will keep experiencing intense pain. I also think that euthanasia can be for the good of the whole in certain situations. If someone is brain dead and they may live for ten to fifteen years with support, then you should consider euthanasia because the person would just spend the rest of their life on a bed and their family would suffer emotional pain for the next 10-15 years.
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