News

By Hilary White

MONTREAL, June 27, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent ethicist at McGill University has warned that the upcoming debate on legalized euthanasia will leave opponents unprepared and that a coherent secular argument has yet to be fully developed. Margaret Somerville, the Samuel Gale Professor of Law, and the Founding Director of the Faculty of Law’s Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University expressed this belief in the Ottawa Citizen.

Bloc Québécois MP Francine Lalonde has tabled a private member’s bill (C-562) which would amend the Criminal Code to allow a physician to “aid a person to die with dignity”. Lalonde has made something of a Parliamentary career out of introducing and reintroducing her private members’ bill to legalize euthanasia and this is her third, and most radical attempt. It proposes to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide for people who experience “physical and mental pain” and allows any “medical practitioner” to carry it out, based on the conclusion that the patient “appears to be lucid”.

Somerville describes as “worrying” the lack of interest in the subject shown by her upper year and graduate law students at McGill University, whose only concern about the rising clamour for legalized euthanasia was to prevent its “abuse”. The concept itself raised little concern and Somerville said that she feared “their response was likely to be true also for the wider society”.

She points to the need for a secular argument against euthanasia, one that does not rely upon shared cultural and religious norms which no longer exist in Canadian, or indeed in any Western post-Christian society. For good or ill, she says, the West has moved past the point where a simple appeal to the religious prohibition against killing will suffice for most in the medical and legal professions.

In place of the previous concept of the universal sacredness of life, a “simple” ethic now prevails: “Individuals have the right to choose the manner, time and place of their death.” This comports with the prevailing system of ethics that is now the norm in medical circles and with secularist bioethicists, which places an individual’s “autonomy” at the forefront of all human values.

Somerville’s students, echoing the new, utilitarian-based ethics that has overshadowed the Natural Law philosophies of classical medical ethics, said that more emphasis has to be placed on the patients’ “rights to autonomy and self-determination, and to euthanasia as a way to relieve people’s suffering”. One student said that Somerville, in her class, “was giving far too much weight to concerns about how legalizing euthanasia would harm the community and our shared values, especially that of respect for life.”

The student also said that “legalizing euthanasia was consistent with other changes in society, such as respect for women and access to abortion”.

These are the new crop of legal minds coming from one of Canada’s premier law programs, students who are incapable of grasping the validity of an argument against killing. “To respond to such arguments,” Somerville says, “we need to be able to embed euthanasia in a moral context without resorting to religion – that is, formulate a response that adequately communicates the case against euthanasia from a secular perspective.”

The first task in this project, she said, is to learn effectively to counter the notion that individual rights must always prevail. Secondly, she said, valid arguments against euthanasia must present, for example, its threat to the “shared societal value of respect for life,” and its ability to “change the basic norm that we must not kill one another”.

She admits that it is difficult in a secular society to develop “convincing responses to the relief-of-suffering argument” because the religious outlook on life lent meaning to suffering.

 “But, now, suffering is often seen as the greatest evil and of no value, which leads to euthanasia being seen as an appropriate response.”

Read Somerville’s complete article:

https://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=de02045d-51b1-4f4b-aa1a-157f3f79651b&p=1