On Nov 29., English Members of Parliament voted in favor of the Terminally Ill Adults Bill, which would legalize assisted dying. It must be made clear — regardless of whatever euphemisms one chooses, whether it be assisted suicide, assisted dying, medical assistance in dying or any such language — it is suicide, plain and simple.
The preservation of life is a fundamental right that all other rights draw from. Everyone is made in the image and likeness of God and as such are given rights purely on the basis of their humanity. That alone is enough to not support this legislation.
There is nothing medical about assisted dying. Medicina, the Latin from which we derive medicine, refers to the art of healing and of curing. The removal of one’s life is fundamentally in opposition to the traditional and historical understanding of the nature of medicine and the role of the physician in human life.
The argument presented by Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and post-Enlightenment thinkers like John Stuart Mill asserted man as a limitless agent unto himself. The constraints put on man by virtue of his birth, family and culture are limits unnecessarily imposed on his desire for pure self-determination.
Rousseau claimed that a person “is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” and suddenly, the right to live freely has been usurped by the right to die. But the truth is this: a person does not, in fact, have the right to die.
By nature, man is oriented towards life and acts contrary to his existence are fundamentally illogical. Regardless of whether a man consents to his own demise, such an end is neither moral nor ethical.
Obsession with consent as the supreme basis of ethical decision-making simply must come to an end or there will be no “free man” to protect.
“If the experience of American social conservatives suggests anything, it suggests that the appeal of consent-based moral frameworks cannot be opposed solely by pragmatic arguments,” Adrian Vermeule, a legal scholar and professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, said in a post on X. “But only by a more robust metaphysics, which in this case would insist that our lives are not and never were our own to dispose of as we please, even by the most deliberate and well-considered choice.”
Conservatives fear making claims about God, the nature of man and metaphysics lest they be accused of imposing their beliefs. However, they fail to recognize that consent as the ultimate moral standard is itself a belief that imposes ideas about the nature of reality.
If they refuse to make a claim in defense of the sacred nature of life, progress will move forward and trample what it is supposed to serve.
Less than a week after Parliament’s vote, news sources began circulating the government’s plans to announce offers of cash incentives for those who choose to go through with the procedure.
The “slippery slope” that experts love to claim doesn’t exist reared its ugly head before the week closed. The law is indeed a tutor, it will be frightening to see how such legislation informs the consciences of the English people.
There are such things as virtuous and dignified deaths and a state that advocates for the death of its constituents will sooner or later cannibalize itself.
