Assisting suicide

Sir – When I taught criminal law at Cambridge, my students would have raised a quizzical eyebrow at David Milne KC’S opinion (Letters, January 5) that for the state to repeal the law’s historic prohibition on helping people to kill themselves (and, we may add, to pay its doctors to facilitate it) would not signal approval. But one does not need a law degree to appreciate that, just as the criminal prohibition on assisting suicide signals disapproval, decriminalisation would signal approval. The moral case advanced for legalising physician-assisted suicide is that it is right for some people to be helped to a hastened death to end their suffering.

The House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, in its rejection of assisting suicide and euthanasia, described the prohibition on intentionally killing patients as the “cornerstone of law and of social relationships” that “protects each one of us impartially, embodying the belief that all are equal”. We should not let the smokescreen of “choice” blind us to the fact that removing that cornerstone would signal a moral paradigm shift. That shift would have particularly grave implications for those, such as people with disabilities, leading lives it might also be thought reasonable to help them to end.

Mr Milne supports physicianassisted suicide for the “terminally ill”. But why deny choice to the chronically ill (who also fly to Switzerland) and to the vast majority of patients who would prefer a lethal injection? The deafening silence of UK campaigners in response to that question illustrates that once one sacrifices the principle of objective human equality on the altar of subjective “choice”, there is no principled stopping point.

Mr Milne rightly notes that a key aim of the law is the protection of citizens. Helping terminally ill citizens to kill themselves (which would prove but a first step) is a peculiar way of protecting them.

Professor John Keown

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington DC, United States