On Assisted Dying
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
I have always been for women’s participation in the military. I think the military should accept gay people too. I think it should be trans-inclusive as well. Because the right of equality of human beings is important to fight for. If these groups don’t have representation in certain social arenas such as the military, then it becomes that much easier to strip them of their freedoms and powers on a broader basis.
Of course, one could argue (and quite legitimately too) that opening up the military to a wider social demographic will increase the pool of ordinary people who can be sucked into the kind of predatory and imperialist conflicts like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars which promote the interests of a small, wealthy elite by facilitating mass murder abroad.
But while this is true, I would still say that one should not sacrifice the principle of equality as a consequence. One should continue to stress that those minorities who are discriminated against should be allowed to enter the military, but at the same time, we should try and protest military imperialism wherever such conflicts and occupations arise.
Something is similar in the case of assisted dying. The right to die with dignity and with minimal pain, the right to have some kind of control and determination over one’s own death is – or at least should be – a fundamental human right. It is an expression of human freedom at the starkest and most elemental level.
And yet, the assisted dying bill which was passed last week in the UK provoked a lot of opposition from leading radical-left wing figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbot, both of whom voted against it in parliament.
The concerns they had were shared by many on the left more broadly. And I think such concerns are warranted. In a neoliberal-capitalist society, the assisted dying bill could provide a means by which those who are poverty stricken – those who are marginalized due to disability or debilitating illness and can’t afford the kind of decent palliative care they should have access to – will end their lives as a result of economic deprivation, in order to avoid the misery of inadequate or non-existent care packages.
In fact, a recent analysis by the charity Marie Curie showed that around 100,000 people in England requiring palliative care went without it at the end of their lives. And around half of the families interviewed expressed unhappiness about the quality of care their loved ones had received – reports of people left in pain and with little support as they approached their deaths were rife. It is difficult to imagine that people in this kind of situation might not use assisted dying as a way to end their suffering, and who could blame them? This, in turn, would relieve the government of its obligation of care to some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our number.
But the solution to the dilemma is not to negate or eliminate a fundamental human right. The empowerment of the human individual by way of possessing and determining both the context of their life and their death is not something we should seek to work against. Rather, the real victory will be won by fighting for the political and economic measures which see the standard of healthcare and hospices uplifted and made available to all, while at the same time averring those fundamental freedoms which bestow the type of dignity and self-determination which befit human beings.
On a more niche note, the debate about assisted dying as a political right has some resonance in the history of Marxist theory more broadly. Marx’s own critique of ‘bourgeois right’ came down to an acute philosophical understanding of the relationship between form and content. Bourgeois right promised ‘legal equality’ but this was always a formal equality; it provided only a carapace of universality that was indifferent to the content of the real economic distinctions which opened up between one individual and another in class society, and determined the horizons of a given life: ‘This equal right is an unequal right for … [i[t recognizes no class differences … It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content.’
So, for example, every person can stand for political office, but if you are working in a supermarket for ten hours a day struggling to support a family it is unlikely you will have either the time or financial resources to hit the campaign trail. Likewise, I have as much legal right to buy a major national newspaper as Rupert Murdoch, but the £3065 currently sitting in my bank account means this is unlikely to work out for me.
And yet, for all its criticism of Enlightenment thought, Marxism was as well the inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition, it presents a deepening of rationalism through a more concrete historical unfolding. The philosophy of Marxism was about providing Enlightenment thought with the type of social and economic content to be wrought by a practical and radical transformation of society, one that would allow all people to realise the universality promised by bourgeois right because such universality would, for the first time, be inscribed into a social context where the economic conditions of class exploitation had ceased to pertain.
On a more modest scale, a similar logic should be applied to the issue at hand. The truly radical demand is not to abolish assisted dying as a legal right. The truly radical demand is to fight to bring the content in terms of economic conditions – in terms of quality of care of hospices, hospitals, carers and so on – into alignment with the form – i.e. the possibility of assisted dying as a political and legal right. In this way, we can all work to make sure that it is not just the wealthy or well-off who are guaranteed respite and medical compassion in their final days.
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