Assisted dying ethics

SIR – Lord Sumption’s balanced article (“I’ve made up my mind on complex moral issue of medical suicide”, Commentary, March 29) concludes by supporting physician-assisted suicide for the “terminally ill”.

Very kindly he wrote a thoughtful foreword to my Policy Exchange paper published last year, in which I urged an improvement in the quality of the debate.

In that foreword, he asked: “What is the justification for allowing medically assisted suicide but limiting it to those believed to be close to death or in intolerable pain, actual or prospective? There are so many other reasons why one might want to end one’s life. Once the moral barrier has been crossed, what is the logical stopping point?”

Quite.

Professor John Keown

Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington DC, United States

SIR – Lord Sumption lays out his argument for assisted dying for the terminally ill with clarity.

However, having nursed my wife at home through her years of increasingly severe Alzheimer’s (wonderfully supported by our local medical team), I still do not agree with his conclusion that the law should be changed. This highly complex issue cannot actually be solved by law.

In the case of euthanasia (a good, gentle or easy death), the law can only deal justifiably with the consequences of an action to end someone’s life, not with justification of the cause. The cause of someone’s voluntary death may be deemed to be morally wrong, while the consequent action could be legally right.

So the dilemma remains. Indeed, we would be on dangerous ground if the law were to be the sole arbiter of what is morally right or wrong.

Changing the law in the matter of euthanasia would not deal with the moral nature of the cause of death, but only with the legal consequences. The overriding factor should be respect for life, in whatever circumstances, even in the presence of acute suffering.

My conclusion is that improved palliative care is the most acceptable answer, not legally prescribed termination.

Rev Harry Beverley Tasker Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire