Euthanasia and human dignity

The argument

Dignity, in the sense at issue here, is not a feeling that can be supplied by good nursing. It is bound up with having authority over one's own body and the conditions of one's own life, which is why the terminal phase of many illnesses is experienced as the loss of something more than health. Many patients suffering from terminal illnesses become incapable of taking care of themselves and have to be reliant on other people or on medical apparatus. For many of them such a situation is irreconcilable with their sense of dignity and deeply humiliating — not because those caring for them treat them badly, but because the dependence itself removes the standing they had as an adult in charge of their own affairs. The particulars are not incidental: incontinence, constant pain, and the sense of being a burden for the people around them are the specific ways the loss is felt from one day to the next. What distinguishes this from other hardship is that there is no hope of recovery to set against it. Suffering endured on the way to getting better can be given a meaning by the recovery. Suffering that will only deepen until death cannot, and there is nothing dignified in it. Forcing a person to live the remainder of their life stuck in a hospital bed, with a lack of power over themselves and in humiliating conditions, is on this account inhumane — the law requiring endurance of something the person has judged intolerable. Legal euthanasia answers that by returning the decision to the patient. It is seen by such patients as a tool to regain their sense of autonomy: the point at which their life ends becomes something they choose rather than something that is done to them. Voluntary legal euthanasia is therefore the preferable alternative.

Context

The first philosopher to argue that each human being possesses inherent dignity because of being a rational agent in contrast with animals was Cicero in the 1st century BCE. Since then, the idea of unique dignity ascribed to human beings shows up in various philosophies (most notably in a moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant) and has become a foundation of human rights.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument presumes that suffering is in itself undignified and humiliating, which is not necessarily the case; the concept of human dignity can be divorced from the capacity of self-autonomy and self-reliance on the principle of the sanctity of human life. Furthermore, this argument confuses the value of life itself with its quality, which taken to its logical conclusion could be used to justify non-voluntary euthanasia.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Human dignity doesn't need to be dependent on self-reliance or the quality of life and cannot be made relative to the state of one's health.