It is Christmas, a time at which many people celebrate the birth of Jesus, a man who was ritually tortured to death for uttering forbidden speech.
It is unclear how much of the Jesus story is true, but undoubtedly, ritual torturing to death was a horrible and widespread reality at the time. It was one of the mechanisms by which the Roman empire affirmed and entrenched the values by which it lived, namely order, deference, and obedience to authority. Such a practice is alien and incomprehensible to us. In addition to having better values, our society has utterly different, infinitely more wholesome, ways of affirming its values, does it not?
Committing suicide is a fundamental human right: if we do not own our own bodies, what do we own? Like all other rights, it is legitimate to exercise it only when this does not violate the rights of others. So the pilot of an aircraft in flight does not have the right to shoot himself if by doing so he murders his passengers. Correspondingly, they have the right forcibly to keep him alive – even if he is undergoing great suffering and is desperate to end it. Indeed, they have the right to force him, by torture if necessary, to perform his contractual obligation to land the aircraft. But the instant they have landed safely (or if they find an alternative pilot on board, or any other non-violent way of saving themselves), their right to keep him alive, or to torture him in any other way, abruptly ends.
Logically, aiding and abetting such torture – or the exercise of any other right – is also a right, since forbidding such help is tantamount to forbidding the helpless to exercise the right itself.
Whether the existing state of the law respects the right to torture in self-defence, or to aid and abet such torture, is unclear. But in most jurisdictions today it certainly does not respect the right to commit suicide, nor the right to assist in one. The justification for this position, though it has widespread popular support (just as crucifixion did in Roman times), is morally empty. It is a sort of formal obeisance to the rule that murder is wrong, in a way that contradicts the substantive purpose of that rule (which is to prevent a person's body from being used as a means to someone else's ends and contrary to his own). Nevertheless, it is supported as a symbol of our society's ‘respect for life’. It is a mechanism by which our society seeks to affirm and entrench the values by which it lives.
As part of this symbolic posturing, many people who at this moment are terminally ill and undergoing such suffering that they are desperate to die, are being forcibly prevented from doing so. That is to say, they are being ritually tortured to death.
One small further consequence of that injustice is that Dr Jack Kevorkian is still in jail in Michigan for trying to prevent a patient from being tortured – i.e. for assisting that patient to commit suicide. It is grimly appropriate that the Governor of Michigan has just refused to grant Kevorkian a compassionate parole. Despite the fact that he has harmed no one and is a danger to no one, and despite the fact that he himself is now gravely ill but wants to live, she considers it more important to leave him in the conditions that may end his life prematurely, just to set an example to other doctors whose humanity and integrity may tempt them to help their patients. She is, one might say with very little hyperbole, ritually torturing him to death.
Furthermore, note that in reality, assisted suicide is a very widespread practice. But other doctors do it discreetly and deniably. So what really landed Kevorkian in his current predicament was not so much the crime of which he was convicted, but his forbidden speech. He recklessly uttered the justifications that the others ritually deny.
May he survive his ordeal, and may he live to see the repeal of the obscene laws that he has defied.
Merry Christmas.
