Daleford v. Stolyarov: A Euthanasia Debate

                               A transcript of an online ideological exchange

     Issue VII--  October 13, 2002

MR. EDMUND DALEFORD: The Case for Euthanasia: Opening Arguments:

This nation philosophically rests upon the principle of individual rights. Rights, in a nutshell, are negative obligations. One's right to life implies that other entities cannot intervene with one's attempts to live and to live better. It does not imply an obligation on the part of society or private individuals to keep one alive at their expense, nor does it endow society with the authority to dictate the means by which the pursuit of one's life can be undertaken. In essence this grants the individual sole ownership of his life and destiny, ownership implying the ability to dispose of it as he deems fit.

In a normal and prosperous state of things, the rational man will select to build up his material resources and intellectual prowess in order to rise to a higher plane of existence. However, circumstances may affect him which permanently bar him from such pursuits. Thomas A. Bowden, a Baltimore lawyer and senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, presents such an example. "But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise-- to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself-- is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to live, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you; you live by permission, not by right." A man whom an accident permanently disables, who cannot pursue his career, who cannot live within his income, who is spiraling down toward wretched poverty, is forever confined to a miserly existence because his former cognitive and physical capacities had been deprived from him. He has lost all paths toward happiness (confined by his pain), toward liberty (confined by his ailment), and ultimately toward a life proper to man. This man should have the choice to terminate his life rather than face its horrific and irreversible extrapolation.

Derived from his right of free association is the ability to contact a willing physician for the purpose of administering into his system the swiftest and least gruesome means of alleviating his suffering. No man is obliged to perform this service, but a truly free market system should permit it by the following logic. "The customer wants it. The supplier is paid for it. It is therefore a consensual value trade, within the decision-making range of conscientious, rational adults."

The alternative to permitting physician-assisted suicide is the frequently recurring scenario of bloody and torturous individual suicides. Writes Mr. Bowden, "On August 20, 1961, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist shot himself dead, leaving behind a suicide note whose poignant message reminds us of a truth that our society, thirty-five years later, still has not squarely faced. Dr. Percy Bridgman, who was 79 years old, had been suffering through the final stages of terminal cancer. Wracked with pain and bereft of hope, he sought a way to end his life with dignity. But then, as now, it was illegal for a doctor to administer drugs intended to hasten death. So Dr. Bridgman got a gun, and somehow he found the courage to pull the trigger, conscious of the fact that he was condemning others to the agony of discovering his bloody remains." That suicide in itself is prohibited by law (as it should not be) is impertinent to the matter at hand. Just as in the case of highly injurious illegal abortions fifty years ago or the underground drug cliques resorting to violent criminal measures due to the prohibitive ban on their commodities, so will suicides continue illegally, imposing severe burdens upon not merely the concerned individual, but on his relatives and acquaintances who will be left with his remnants to dispose of while constantly watching out for the vigilance of the law, from which they are more likely to receive negligence prosecution rather than sympathy on a personal level and non-intervention on the political. 

Moreover, the sole basis for the current abolition of euthanasia stems from one of two sources: religious imposition or statist collectivism. Mr. Bowden states, "Religious conservatives, by contrast, reject the whole idea of individual rights, asserting that your life is a gift from God and that you are put on earth to fulfill a divine plan. Not surprisingly, therefore, conservatives shrink in revulsion from the very idea of assisted suicide. According to them, one who decides to 'play God' by causing his own death, or assisting in the death of another, insults his Maker and invites eternal damnation." Any attempt to force a religious viewpoint upon a man through the authority of law violates the essential doctrine of freedom of religion, which separates America from the rotten Islamic theocracies of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the recently extinguished Taliban in Afghanistan. Conservatives have the choice not to commit suicide, not to request a physician's services in that regard, and instead apply for their hospital to retain them alive for the longest possible period. They have the choice to follow their religion. Their desire to live, whatever foundations it stems from, is one that finds resonance within my conscience even, despite the fact that I am an atheist. I would never commit suicide, and I would likely attempt to dissuade others inclined toward it. But I would never dream of pointing a gun to their heads (that is essentially what the coercive authority of law implies, threatening the target to do as the government pleases, or else detrimental consequences will follow) and demanding that they refrain from killing themselves... or else. Religious conservatives must understand that their right of free religion does not imply the right to forcefully convert the "suicidal infidel". 

Lastly, there are numerous liberals who will oppose assisted suicide on the grounds that the man willing to surrender his own life is a valuable resource for society, the marketplace, or the community. They will urge a "weighing of interests" to decide, essentially, whether the man's life is worth living. If they happen to arrive at the latter conclusion, then away will go all pretense at their support for free choice and individual control over the state of their organisms. The individual will be forced to live against his best judgment because someone else's need binds him here on this world.

To reject both theocracy and statism and to consistently endorse human rights this country needs to legalize assisted suicide and grant both patients and doctors the economic and ideological freedom they rightly deserve.

MR. G. STOLYAROV II: The Case Against Euthanasia: Opening Arguments:

Life is the ultimate and absolute basis for all values. It is only the condition of life that makes the concept of "value" possible. If one is deceased in a coffin, one cannot espouse an ideological standpoint, nor engage in self-ameliorating activities, nor partake in one's hobbies and pastimes. Even the depraved mystics who argue for the worthlessness of life on Earth, for a transcendent nominal universe, for the need of government protectionism, nevertheless require their existences here on Earth as a prerequisite for the ability to propagate such thoughts. Moreover, they require humanly sentience to be able to formulate their doctrines, and are unable to express any ideas whatsoever on the level of unthinking, arbitrarily pre-programmed, and oblivious animals whose conditions they so extol. The above two axiomatic propositions, the absolute value of life and the inseparably human characteristic of reason as a means for its attainment, are therefore the foundations of all morality.

To claim that suicide, or the deprivation of life, can ever be a genuine value is to contradict reality and to pursue non-existence while still existing, to pursue two irreconcilable antitheses simultaneously. Death can bring happiness, one might say? What happiness can an entity experience, what of anything can an entity experience that no longer retains its status as an entity? A lack of life implies the inability to value. A man who has committed suicide cannot hold any mental states or pursuit, nor can he claim the satisfaction which had supposedly led him to commit the act in the first place. Death is the ultimate state of non-value, which can never be justified through rational, moral means. Because a man requires reason to live (and to perform any activities whatsoever), an act on the death premise is the ultimate repudiation of rationality within the particular suicidal individual.

Not merely does the suicidist seek to eat his cake and have it too, but, by becoming a pursuer of euthanasia, he perverts the integrity of the free market by introducing a coercive element into it. What is the initiation of force, one may ask? It is an arbitrary, subjective, coercive imposition in defiance of reality, effectively barring rational pursuits by inflicting pain upon those who undertake them while leaving inherently destructive irrational pursuits as the only alternative for the victim. It is a double bind of death, and it is instituted via the defiance of objective reality, by temporarily rewarding the aggressor with some manner of service from the victim in return for the inexorable eventual demise of both for having deviated from rationality, which is the sole means of consistently maintaining life. The physician who assists in suicide participates in such a coercive imposition, for the reason that he is rewarded with the suicidist's money for having performed an act contrary to all value and, hence, to the only pathway to reality having been available to the individual thus destroyed. This is identical to the plunderer who robs an industrialist and then briefly flourishes from the automobiles that he did not manufacture, effectively defying reality by an arbitrary and subjective confiscation. Neither of the two trade value for value. Instead, they receive value for non-value, a supplement to their lives in exchange for another's death, and could thus rightly be dubbed parasites.

The parasite does not survive for a significantly protracted period of time beyond the life of his prey. As soon as he finishes pillaging his victim, he possesses no other means of sustenance and must search for fresh deaths to cause and fresh non-values to foster. Thus, a euthanasia doctor (a Death Doctor), instead of earning money by ameliorating or curing his clients, will earn it by killing them, and the amount he earns will be in proportion to the clients he robs of their lives. In a coercion-free, laissez-faire capitalist system, the blending of force with economics is barred, and money is therefore earned by physicians through the rendering of services beneficial to doctors and patients alike. Doctors tend to maximize the swiftness of their cures, the civility of their relationships, and the technological finesse of their facilities in order to maximize profit in a scheme purely compatible with reality. In a laissez-faire system, the sole purpose of government is to prevent or punish the imposition of force, i.e. to counter parasitism and thereby foster a purely rational economic system. However, should reality be defied through the legalization of euthanasia, of money-making murder, then certain doctors will employ it to, in their irrationality, earn something for nothing, to earn life for death (as the sole purpose of such legalization will be to permit them to do so). In order to maximize profit, those depraved creatures will seek to kill their patients in the most efficient way possible, and because they earn money for the killing, they will frequently persuade their patients to commit suicide even absent the case of a terminal illness or irreversible disability. Death rates will soar, as will the inpouring of cash for Death Doctors, which will result in ever more dramatic escalations of hospitalized killing for ever more trivial purposes. Only when the amount of patients available for killing, i.e. all of humanity, will expire, will the parasites perish themselves.

Additionally, it is a fundamentally flawed conception that there exist lives which are "not worth living". No matter what the degree of a person's disability, he is still capable of performing certain elementary as well as complex actions (depending on the nature of the particular disability). A man who had been blinded can still sing in a choir. A man who is mute can still write treatises. A man who is both can still perform athletic feats such as sit-ups or push-ups which do not require extensive spatial orientation. Or he can specialize in the reading of Braille texts. Every human being possesses certain limitations of ability due to the choices he had earlier devised as well as certain both advantageous and unfortunate circumstances that had affected him during his life. This does not in any manner bar him from accessing all categories of life, nor does it stifle all aspirations for greatness and extraordinariness. Even a terminally ill man still, until the time of his death, has values open to him. He is able to engage in discourse, spend valuable time with friends and family, pursue his milder hobbies, and even create lasting intellectual products, such as essays, poems, musical compositions, or even his own will. Because he is aware of the fact that his pursuit of values is temporally limited by his physical condition, instead of committing suicide he should on the contrary live his last days to the fullest, furnishing an inextinguishable legacy and self-amelioration to the maximum extend of his capacities. Moreover, he should strive to prolong his existence, and, thus, his pursuit of values, for as great a time as possible. He should pay for the most advanced life support systems and containment drugs, for money outside his own life needs possess no value to him. (Money is but a means to self-amelioration.) He should, with all the efforts of his mind and body, combat the menace within and aim toward a cure to his ailment. Values are still open to him, even when he lies unconscious, his lungs' functionality maintained by a respirator. He lives, after all, and he has chosen with his rational faculty to uphold the essential health of his organs and thus paid his hospital to imbue his lungs with life. The value he receives is the consequence of such a decision, his existence. 

The calculus that one would wish to die in order to "not burden his loved ones" is but another example of the sacrificial altruism/collectivism of the death premise. A rational man will prioritize his values in the following manner: his own life, then that of the people from whom he derives friendship, comfort, assistance, and pleasure. Therefore, all of the financial resources that are legitimately his should rationally be devoted to prolonging his own life and pursuit of values. To love one's family is a virtue; both parties receive material and emotional commodities from the relationship. To sacrifice to one's family is a vice; one surrenders one's own existence, prosperity, and integrity to receive nothing in return from those one supposedly "loves". One transforms his family into parasites, who, in one's eyes, require one's death to achieve a transitory financial alleviation. It is a service to the death premise on both sides. If, say, one of my parents or grandparents had chosen to apply to a physician for their destruction, I would condemn them for warping me into a plunderer of man's most precious commodity against my consent.  Moreover, I would feel gravely insulted at their thoughts that my sole possible means of survival entail the consumption of the corpses of my family.

If we accept the contrary premise, that "some lives are not worth living", then so-called "voluntary euthanasia" (as I had explained, no such concept exists in reality, because any form of assisted suicide is an inherently coercive practice), the murder of a patient with the latter's consent, will not be the extent of Death Doctors' practices. Every statistical figure within boundaries that have legalized euthanasia testifies in support of such a conclusion. Wesley J. Smith, anti-euthanasia activist, attorney for the Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and author of the book, Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America, reveals a frightening scenario currently in place within the very borders of the United States. "Oregon has legalized assisted suicide where studies show that most who swallow prescribed poison do so in order not to 'burden' their families. Meanwhile, beneath the media's radar, 'futile care' protocols are being quietly implemented in hospitals across the country that arrogantly give doctors and ethics committees the right to refuse unwanted life-extending treatment unilaterally if the doctor believes the patient's quality of life is insufficient to justify the cost of care. At the same time, cognitively disabled patients-- both conscious and unconscious-- are made to die slow deaths by dehydration in all 50 states by having their tube-supplied food and water withheld or withdrawn on the basis that their lives are no longer worth living. In such a cultural milieu, is it really surprising that some medical professionals would take the extra step of 'mercy' killing  dying, elderly, and disabled patients or that a few evil psychopaths would use 'compassion' as a front for the fulfillment of their homicidal obsessions?" Any time a man acquires the perception that his own life is not worth living, he commits the immoral deed of destroying himself. However, the more destructive mindset is within the healthy, middle-aged, fully capacitated man who assumes such a mindset in regard to the lives of "some others". This creates an inherent distinction between his standing and that of another man, it places him, whose life is "worth living" in the position to dispose of the lives of others and impose destructive force upon them. Such a mentality subverts the doctrine that man must place no authority above his own rational mind, that the disabled or the terminally ill ultimately have only the fruits of their own syntheses and deliberations to rely upon. It places those people in subjugation to the entrenched elites of leftist academia who scoff at the notion of equal human rights and an inherent distinction between a human being (who cannot be assailed or violated unless he is the initiator of force) and an animal (whose exploitation as a resource is acceptable, as he is not a being of volitional consciousness). This new breed of bioethicists ultimately seeks to bring about a scheme for social engineering, coupled with government-controlled managed care and medical resources. The patients who can afford in a laissez-faire environment to sustain themselves from their own pocketbooks, but whose lives are too costly under a rationing environment will be euthanized to "alleviate financial burdens" from the State. It is not collectivism which holds a man back from suicide, as Mr. Daleford claims. It is collectivism, instead, which fuels the assisted suicide movement by having regulated health care in the first place, now seeking a rationale for rationing which it does not possess under a calculus which recognizes the absolutism of individual life.

Let us examine another instance of legalized euthanasia so extensively lauded by its proponents. Mr. Smith writes on the matter, "We need only look to the Netherlands for proof that widespread acceptance of the culture of death leads inexorably to non-voluntary euthanasia. The Netherlands has permitted doctors to kill patients who volunteer to die since a court decision essentially decriminalized the practice in 1973. Since then, Dutch doctors have skied down the steepest of slippery slopes, normalizing medicalized killing in the process. Today, Dutch doctors lethally inject dying people who ask for it; chronically ill people who ask for it; disabled people who ask for it; depressed people who ask for it; and disabled babies whose parents ask for it." Early advocates of "death with dignity" had merely asserted that a terminally ill patient should possess the ability to hasten his already inevitable demise via a physician. While this is a horrendous suggestion, what occurs in the status quo is far more disturbing. With the legalization of any assisted suicide, the scope of eligible victims shall inevitably broaden. The most alarming of these instances is the murder of already born infants with nothing but their parents' consent as the sanction. Now, my stance concerning the illegitimacy of abortion is known, due to considerations of futuristic certainty in the development of the fetus's volitional consciousness. Here, however, not mere futuristic certainty, but consciousness already existent from the moment of birth, is being eradicated from the caprice of parents who, only in the most primeval of societies, hold the power of life or death over their progeny. The legalistic positivist will argue that children are yet incompetent to fully manage their lives, and therefore the law assures parental guardianship and supremacy over them until a certain age. While this is true and proper, such guardianship is strictly limited in scope and must prescribe to the same Hippocratic Counsel that Death Doctors have systematically violated, "First, do no harm". The parents, entering into a value-exchange with their children, are obliged to exercise rationality to ensure life, not death for young ones who may yet not have fully developed to assure such conditions through full independence, but for whom the latter is a necessary goal. Any interpretation to the contrary would legitimize the termination of sixteen-year-olds, still technically susceptible to parental guardianship, on grounds no less fallible than are the arbitrary whims of their custodians.

Moreover, physicians have taken the dreadful next step in the Netherlands to euthanize fully conscious adults against their consent. According to Terence Monmaney, Medical Writer for the Los Angeles Times, "Chris Rutenfrans, a criminologist in the Department of Justice in The Hague, said that their analysis shows that nearly half of all doctor-assisted deaths in the Netherlands in 1995 (2844 out of 6368) were not voluntary. 'In too many cases,' he said, 'it is the physician who decides.'" So much for "do no harm" and the purely consensual relations of laissez-faire capitalism. Both go down the drain along with the blood of euthanized corpses in any society which sanctions murder and protects the murderers.

So, as a result, not merely is suicide objectively and metaphysically immoral, but a decision to seek assistance in the commission thereof will inevitably reflect upon other others in the form of imposed suicide, murder, as death becomes profitable and life no longer remains so. This is the hallmark of a feudal, statist, collectivist society, not an individualist one in which coercion is banned and only free mutually beneficial economic exchanges are "let alone".  I must emphasize that, like Mr. Daleford, I am an atheist and I do not advocate the imposition of religious beliefs upon men living in a free, Constitutional country. However, I dare say Mr. Daleford is mistaken in assuming that the only pro-lifers are religionists or need-calculus liberals. I am a secular Objectivist conservative, and I condemn suicide as incompatible with the fundamental individual right to life. A "right to die" implies a right to have someone kill you, which that someone can easily and logically (under such a premise) transform into their right to kill you, whether or not you choose to allow it them. Again, this is because any suicidal inclination holds within it the delusion that the victim is undeserving of life. This automatically subordinates him to society or to any tainted creature who profanes the good name of "doctor", and such entities may do with him as they please.

In order to defend the sanctity of human life and the individual rights therefrom derived, it is essential that the law retain its rightful purpose of enforcing only peaceful value-trading and prosecuting the initiation of force that is euthanasia.

Interactive Discourse:
MR. DALEFORD: I shall begin with a question to you, Mr. Stolyarov. You may recall my example of Dr. Bridgman's gruesome suicide as the consequence of the law's prohibition of euthanasia. What disgusting sights that must have yielded the man's relatives and friends! What trauma they must have undergone in transforming his condition from that of a bloodied corpse to that of a properly buried man! Is that not a coercive imposition on their welfares and a source of suffering for them due to the fact that the law did not allow Dr. Bridgman the ability to die tranquilly?

MR. STOLYAROV: You are correct in stating that this act was a coercive imposition upon his loved ones. Any suicide is. Only here they were forced to clean up his remnants and experience mind-wrecking distress, and in the event that Dr. Bridgman were euthanized, they would be branded with the status of parasites, thriving from his death. Both cases are a result of Dr. Bridgman's deviation from the facts of reality, which prescribe for every man not merely a course of action (reason), but also its purpose (life). You may recall my essay, "An Objectivist Condemnation of Abortion", in which a similar double bind of death was demonstrated. Either the mothers who sought to murder the children within them performed underground pregnancy terminations which rendered them susceptible to infection, puncture, and loss of blood, or the law did it for them, neatly, cleanly, tidily, but still murdering an innocent human being. Any time that the absolutism of life is denied (as is the case in terms of suicide by definition), death and force are the only logical consequences.

MR. DALEFORD: But in asserting that you are essentially dictating that men must abide by your preference that they live. Do you not by that rob them of mastery over their own lives?

MR. STOLYAROV: By no means. Life does not belong to God or to society. It belongs to the individual. However, the individual possesses no right to violate the rights of others. In committing suicide within a home that one shares with his relatives, one is violating the relatives' right of free association. (No one honestly would wish to clean up blown-out brains or a pool of blood, and in this case, the suicidist is no longer capable of paying for the "service".) In the case of euthanasia, the doctor is violating the patient's right to life (by defying the Hippocratic Counsel), and so is the patient's family forced to violate his rights (by parasitically thriving on his death). Moreover, the family's right to liberty is being violated, since each individual relative of the suicidist no longer possesses the authority to preclude the breach of integrity which has transformed him into a parasite. Suicide is not a demonstration of self-ownership, but rather one of anti-selfish destruction.

MR. DALEFORD: But by that same logic, would you not also prohibit substances such as narcotics or tobacco which are slow inducers of the consumers' deaths?

MR. STOLYAROV: As a matter of fact, I would encourage the prohibition of such substances, but only under the firm conviction that no beneficial uses are to be found. I would support, for example, the use of marijuana and morphine as pain killers in medical facilities, or the consumption of chocolate, fatty foods, and miscellaneous sweets in moderation. It is up to the consumer's discretion to administer to himself quantities which are beneficial to his existence (as chocolate, fat, and even alcohol have been found to exhibit desirable effects if not abused). However, I do not wish for legal sanction to be granted to substances whose sole purpose is to destroy, be they in the meantime instilling an illusion of euphoria or not. Tobacco, cocaine, and heroin fall into that category, and their manufacturers and distributors must be targeted as parasites that thrive off the deaths and suffering of others. Such drug traders are plunderers, not capitalists, for capitalism is an economic system based on free association, not coercion. When one is addicted to death, one's association can hardly be called free.

MR. DALEFORD: Then, let me place a more overt question before you. Do you see it as a proper function of law to prevent men from acting on the death premise when such actions do not affect others?

MR. STOLYAROV: In that case, no. Neither private individuals nor society in general are obliged to maintain an entity's life gratuitously. I would consider it a moral virtue to dissuade suicidists, as, according to my impression, would you. Nevertheless, I cannot force a man not to consume a box of Twinkies in one sitting, even if that will quicken the pace at which his organism disintegrates.  However, as outright suicide (not masked by any motives, such as pseudo-pleasure or a pseudo-life premise) is not an act that affects solely the victim, its apprehension is within the functions of law. Of course, police officers cannot enter into the home of every citizen and monitor him for "tendencies", but they can detect attempts to seek outside assistance for the commission of suicide and prosecute mostly the physician who agrees to provide the "service", although imprisoning the victim or referring him to a private rehabilitation center (i.e. one not sustained at taxpayers' expense) are also suitable remedies.

MR. DALEFORD: So, you are essentially leaving to the man who no longer wishes to live the only choice of brutally destroying himself as Dr. Bridgman had done, for he will know that the only means of successful suicide will be through a gun or a kitchen knife at home.

MR. STOLYAROV: It is precisely because such a choice is most repulsive that it is preferable in the realm of suicide choices to a clean and tidy euthanasia. Do you understand the deterrent effect it would create for men inclined toward self-destruction? How many people would have the courage to blow their brains out who, when offered it, would have willingly gone along with a needle in their vein? The ultimate effect of a prohibition of euthanasia would, therefore, be a dramatic reduction of suicides due to the psychological inability of most to pull the trigger on themselves.

MR. DALEFORD: And what of those who do possess the courage to pull the trigger? Will they still not inflict massive discomfort if not damage?

MR. STOLYAROV: At least they will be the sole culprits in the violation, who will already have been punished by their own deaths, unlike the Death Doctors who would have continued to euthanize more victims, often against the consent of the latter. Law is not an efficient force in the realm of perpetrators such as Dr. Bridgman, and the optimal means of dissuading those individuals from committing suicide is through discourse and (private, uncoerced) education.

By the way, Wesley Smith expresses some profound words on the matter: "The most effective weapons in the pro-assisted-suicide arsenal are fear-mongering, distortion, euphemism, half-truths, and lies, all deployed to the drumbeat of 'choice.' False arguments are gladly spread by the contemporary media, which avoid depth and context, preferring 30-second sound bites, tabloidism, and soap-opera shallowness. The best defense against this propaganda onslaught is to be constantly about the business of spreading truth. After six years in the moral struggle against the culture of death, I can state confidently that the more people learn about assisted suicide, the less they support it. The key to victory, then, is education, education, education.”

For example, men inclined toward seeking a Death Doctor may find it frightening that the cultural shift toward the perception of death as a solution and of some human beings as inherently “unworthy” was precisely the one that had occurred during the early days of Nazi Germany. Nat Henthoff, a liberal commentator for the Washington Times, who nevertheless espouses a pro-life standpoint, offers insight into the matter. “In a prophetic article in the July 14, 1949 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, [Dr. Leo Alexander, an agent for the chief counsel for war crimes during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial] examined the initial causes of the Holocaust. The beginnings, he wrote, were merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as ‘life not worthy to be lived.’ The Nazis described the patients they killed as ‘useless eaters.’ Not long before Alexander's death in 1984, he warned that the same lethal attitudes were taking root in this country. He cited the rise of the death with dignity movement, which advocated what later became more widely known as assisted suicide doctors providing the means for patients to kill themselves, which is now legal in Oregon.” Under the guise of individual choice (the rhetoric of which appeals to irrationality only, for, as I have proven, no man can rationally choose to seek death under any circumstances), the suicidists are being exploited for the purpose of adding fuel to the fire of statism and gradually fostering an implicit tradition of eliminating the terminally ill, the disabled, or even men whom the dominant elite (be it the National-Socialist Party or some affirmative action pressure group) judges to be inferior by no reason other than that of arbitrary polylogist hogwash.

MR. DALEFORD: Yet I by no means advocate involuntary euthanasia or any societal controls over the way an individual disposes of his own life. It is unfortunate that the mainstream of the current euthanasia front seeks to win this cause for a wicked end, the elimination of “unnecessary burdens” to a government rationed care system. They are like a plunderer using a gun to rob money from an innocent. But a gun can also be a useful tool for self-protection and simply because it can be abused, does not mean that it must be abolished altogether.  This sort of employment of euthanasia as a “puppet doctrine” would not have been a viable weapon for centralization advocates under a laissez-faire system in which medicine would no longer be related to government in any way. Both of us support uncoerced medicine, which implies no Medicare, no federal rationing incentives, and no "futile care protocols" imposed upon hospitals. It implies that a patient would not be euthanized without his explicit, voluntary, written consent, and the government, fulfilling its proper role of enforcing negative obligations, would without any reservations prosecute a physician who presents any sort of unwanted treatment.

MR. STOLYAROV: I doubt that the gun analogy is applicable to the matter at hand, particularly because a gun can be a tool for preserving one’s life, while suicide by definition cannot serve such a purpose. Moreover, you claim, Mr. Daleford, that all the past examples of euthanasia’s abuse and the inevitable transition from “voluntary” to “involuntary” sorts is a result of petty bureaucrats overthrowing the genuine functions of a laissez-faire capitalist system. It may seem that you have a powerful argument here: absolute liberalization of markets had never before been completely attempted, hence the follies of euthanasia’s overstepping proper boundaries which a laissez-faire society would lack. But I will counter it with this: No past society has been fully laissez-faire. However, those elements within it that pertained to a capitalistic society (free enterprise, the stock market, price deregulation) had all resulted in prosperity for that society in proportion to their presence. Therefore, elements of pure capitalism are functional even in a system not purely capitalistic. If euthanasia were such an element and a true representative of the right of free choice and voluntary association, cases of abuse would have been virtually non-existent or sporadic. In the Netherlands, however, the figure of involuntarily euthanized patients is near one half of all men having participated in assisted suicide. This links to my contention that this cultural transition to social planning of human lives as a result of the euthanasia movement “opening the door” is not an accidental phenomenon, but a necessary philosophical extrapolation if, even on an individual level, one accepts that the death premise, one stating that some lives are not worth living, as valid. It is also due to the fact that any form of assisted suicide is inherently coercive and parasitic for all parties involved.

Moreover, Mr. Daleford, we are both advocates of minimalist government which only prosecutes violations of liberties and does not extend its scope beyond it. If cases of euthanasia abuse remain as frequent as experience had demonstrated, then imagine the scope of the agencies that would be required to contain it and punish violators of patients’ consent. How many thousands of regulatory agencies would loom over hospitals, watching physicians to pre-empt any remotely suspicious move? And, most dismayingly, over half of assisted suicide physicians would be eligible for such penalties as are imposed upon them! Would it not be more convenient for taxpayers not to “open the door” in the first place and bar any violation of the Hippocratic Counsel so that any remote hint of a suicide practitioner may be tracked down without a major inflation of the government budget (on a far more infrequent level than would have occurred with legalized euthanasia, as no law-abiding doctor would possess the equipment and poisons deliberately intended for the administration of death)?

MR. DALEFORD: Let me now pursue another line of questioning. Do you believe that a man must not opt to surrender his life at all costs?

MR. STOLYAROV: Indeed I do.

MR. DALEFORD: Does that not then exclude the functions of such essential professions as the military, which protects American security interests abroad?

MR. STOLYAROV: Not at all. A soldier does not enter combat with the intention to die. His wish and his aim are quite the opposite, to survive and defeat the enemy aggressor. This is especially true in a country whose tactics are wholly opposed to using men as cannon fodder and seek to inflict maximum damage with minimum losses. Yes, as in any enterprise, there is a risk of death, but the soldier resumes his fight only because he relies on the fairly high probability that such a risk will not be realized and that his own prowess and rationality will enable him to evade it. A suicidist, on the other hand, is not acting selfishly, for luxury or prosperity or security or profit, but committing the ultimate sacrifice, the surrender of his life (which possesses infinite potential value) to the ultimate non-value, death.

MR. DALEFORD: What then, of a man like Patrick Henry, who uttered “Give me Liberty or give me Death”, as a sign of the refusal to live in a state of negative value, wherein British extortionists drained the colonies’ wealth and gave nothing in return? I think that signifies the existence of states lower on the value scale than the zero that is death, and I think such immense pain as terminally ill individuals undergo may in certain instances qualify for a negative-value existence.

MR. STOLYAROV: I disagree. Mr. Henry, first of all, had undertaken the same risk as a soldier, selfishly preserving the liberties of his homeland against an aggressor and an oppressor, and seeking only one result (which he did achieve in the end), victory and freedom. He had realized that man cannot survive absent freedom and that he would be destroyed by his foes should his efforts toward liberty be insufficient or thwarted. Nevertheless, he did not deliberately seek death as a goal. He sought liberty as a necessary condition for the life proper to man, i.e. a life where man can truly survive. A euthanasia victim does not seek to undertake a calculated risk in order to extinguish the plague of illness or disability within him (as he would have done had he chosen to remain living), but rather to commit outright, surefire self-destruction. He seeks to “escape” from his enemy (which he cannot do). The end result, of course, is that he submits to such a foe and permits his sole basis for value and perception, his life, to be annihilated. Anytime that is called a moral right (as is the title of Mr. Bowden’s article, if I may recall), we experience an absolute perversion of morality.

MR. DALEFORD: Nevertheless, forcing people to “do good” unto themselves, as a government abolition of euthanasia would accomplish under your premises, is antithetical to the conception of rights, and in a society where voluntary assisted suicide is not recognized as an option, the form of government is a dictatorship. You would be a benevolent dictator, albeit a dictator nevertheless.

MR. STOLYAROV: It is not an act of dictatorship to prosecute the initiation of force (by a euthanasia physician, by the victim upon his family) which is an inherent violation of rights. As I have shown, legalized self-destruction is incompatible with a free society, just as a “right to die” is a bogus fabrication antithetical to the right to live. The right to live still implies the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment as well as the fact that society possesses no positive obligation to succor men on the basis of need. Nevertheless, it is the rightful province of law to prevent the wanton destruction by one entity of another on the basis of whim. Had euthanasia been compatible with limited government and laissez-faire capitalism, it would have functioned properly under any political or economic system, as all aspects of capitalism are unconditionally functional and virtuous. Since this is empirically disproved, we may conclude that euthanasia is an anti-capitalistic, statist, and immoral practice which needs to be stifled by the enforcers of the negative obligation theory of rights.

Sources Cited:

Bowden, Thomas A. Ayn Rand Institute. “Assisted Suicide: A Moral Right.” Available October 13, 2002: http://religion.aynrand.org/suicide.html.

Bowden, Thomas A. Ayn Rand Institute. April 1, 2002.  “Assisted Suicide: A Moral Right. Ashcroft’s Decree Threatens Doctors’ and Patients’ Rights.” Available October 13, 2002: http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/asuicideright.shtml.

Henthoff, Nat. Pro-Life Infonet “Assisted Suicide: License to Kill.” Available October 13, 2002: http://www.prolifeinfo.org/euth007.html.

Monmaney, Terrence. Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1997.

Smith, Wesley J. Pro-Life Infonet. “The Culture of Death Angels.” Available October 13, 2002: http://www.prolifeinfo.org/euth008.html.

Smith, Wesley J. New Oxford Review, Dec. 1999. “When death is our physician.” Available October 13, 2002: http://www.prolifeinfo.org/art020.html.
 

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Edmund Daleford is a freelance writer whose works have been published on Enter Stage Right and Objective Medicine. He is also the Vice Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator. He can be contacted at rationalargumentator@yahoo.com.
		G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent philosophical essayist, poet, contributor to Enter Stage Right, writer for Objective Medicine, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator. He can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.

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