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Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Dignity is something different than putting an end to your own life


Atheist Jeff Lowder weighs in on the Maynard case:
According to Jezebel.com, an official with the Vatican told an Italian news agency that Maynard had committed a “reprehensible” act. 

Before proceeding any further, let's quote a fuller version of what the Vatican official said:

“We don’t judge people, but the gesture in itself is to be condemned,” said Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which is responsible for ethical issues in the Catholic Church.
“Assisted suicide is an absurdity,” Carrasco de Paula told the Italian news agency ANSA. “Dignity is something different than putting an end to your own life.”
“Killing yourself is not a good thing; it’s a bad thing because it says no to life and to all that means in relation to our duty in the world and to those close to us,” the ethicist said.
Carrasco de Paula said assisted suicide was also dangerous because it offered a potential “solution” for a society that sought to abandon the sick and quit paying the costs of their illnesses.
http://www.religionnews.com/2014/11/04/vatican-ethicist-dignity-brittany-maynards-physician-assisted-death/
Speaking for myself, I think what Maynard did was wrong, but given the attenuating circumstances, I wouldn't say it was "reprehensible." Of course, this is an English translation. The Italian may have a different nuance. Also, to claim that someone with terminal brain cancer said "no to life" misses the point. However, I agree with everything else he said. 
Continuing with the report:
The Vatican’s stance isn’t surprising, given that Catholics consider suicide a mortal and unforgivable sin. 

That is the logic of the traditional Catholic position, although Rome has backpedaled on the eternal fate of suicides. 

Earlier this year, a high-ranking assistant to Pope Francis, Archbishop Antonio Mennini, advocated against legalizing assisted suicide in the United Kingdom, saying it would “open a Pandora’s Box.” 

Well, Mennini is just stating the obvious.

Nor are they the first group to suggest that Maynard didn’t have the right to die at the time of her choosing: various American pro-life groups started with that line even before she died.

Imagine that! You had prolife groups who discouraged her from killing herself before she killed herself–as opposed to, say, discouraging her from killing herself after she killed herself. But it rather seems to me that if you wait until after the fact, that's a tad too late. 

The underlying implication here is that these groups believe Maynard is in Hell.

i) What evidence does Anna Merlan (or Jeff Lowder) have that that's what these groups believe? To begin with, how did Anna Merlan go from the traditional Catholic moral theology to prolife groups generally? Is she unaware of the fact that many prolifers are evangelicals rather than Roman Catholics? Likewise, what evidence does she have that prominent opponents of euthanasia like Wesley J. Smith believe Maynard is in Hell?

ii) I'd like to take the opportunity to clarify a theological confusion which Merlan (and Lowder?) seems to suffer from. People don't go to hell for committing hellbound sins; rather, hellbound people commit sins. 

It's not a particular sin that damns you. It's not as if people are heavenbound unless and until they commit a damnable sin. Rather, people are hellbound unless and until they are regenerated and justified. 

But Life News’ Steven Ertelt is using her passing to accuse Compassion & Choices, the assisted suicide advocacy group that helped Maynard make her videos, of “exploiting” her, writing that they and other death with dignity groups “were essentially pushing her to kill herself.” (boldface mine)

i) To begin with, Life News is no more or less using her passing than Anna Merlan or Jeff Lowder. 

ii) In addition, had she backed out at the last minute, that would undermine the assisted suicide advocacy groups. She's worth more to them dead than alive. So the allegation seems entirely plausible to me.

Because Brittany made her plight (and her choice) public in order to advocate for the right to death with dignity, I can think of no better way to honor her than to dedicate this post to her and her cause. 

Nothing quite like the self-importance of atheism. Proudly planting its little flag in the shifting sand dune of existential nihilism. 

And since this is a philosophy of religion blog, I think it’s especially useful to highlight the religious opposition to Euthanasia. In fact, off the top of my head, it seems as if all or virtually all of the opposition to Euthanasia comes from religious groups. 

That's because, unlike atheists, we don't consider human beings to be adventitious collections of particles. 

(If anyone knows of any counterexamples, please let me know in the combox.) Brittany’s life and death are an especially tragic combination of many aspects of the problem of evil: 

You can't have evil without good, and you can't have good without God. So the argument from evil is self-refuting. 

(1) the tragic nature of her story (see: the atheistic argument from triumph and tragedy);

i) "Tragedy" is a presupposition of Biblical theism–not an evidence to the contrary. It's not as if Biblical theism is utopian in the here and now. Moreover, tragedy is offset by eschatology. 

ii) Conversely, how can a collection of particles experience tragedy? 

(2) the gratuitous (and apparently morally random) biological pain caused by her condition if allowed to progress until death (see: the atheistic argument from the biological role of pain and pleasure); 

In what sense is biological pain gratuitous? Pain serves a biological function. A warning signal. 

and (3) the so-called “soteriological problem of evil” (i.e, the problem of reconciling God’s perfectly moral, loving nature with the eternity of Hell, including the impossibility of escape). 

As if Christian theologians and apologists don't have answers to boilerplate objections to hell. 

If Brittany did not feel God’s comforting presence during the end of her life — and I have no idea if she did or not — her story would also be an example of another atheistic argument at the intersection of arguments from evil and arguments from hiddenness: the argument from divine silence during tragedies

i) To begin with, was she even a Christian? There's no promise that unbelievers will feel God's comforting presence at the end of life. 

ii) In addition, Jeff has a bad habit of burning straw man without a fire permit. He attacks an abstract generic theism. But it's not as if Biblical theism predicts for a life devoid of tragedy. Just the opposite. Likewise, it's not as if Biblical theism promises every believer (much less unbeliever) a comforting death. So that doesn't count as evidence against Biblical theism, for it's not inconsistent with Biblical theism.  

Finally, if there are religious groups which do support Euthanasia, then the argument from ethical confusion applies. In fact, if there is sincere ethical disagreement among theists regarding Euthanasia and IF Euthanasia is not objectively morally wrong, then ethical disagreement becomes an additional, independent instance of the problem of evil for theists. We would then have a situation where, if theism were true, a perfectly loving God allowed theists who, in this hypothetical situation, wrongly believed Euthanasia was morally wrong and that belief contributed to Brittany’s suffering. And that state of affairs is more probable on naturalism than on theism. This last point is not hypothetical. Before her death, Brittany spoke about the emotional toll the criticism of her choice took on her.

According to physicalism, human beings aren't even capable of consciousness. For instance:

1 comment:

  1. I guess I would like to think that anti-theists who acknowledge and struggle with good and evil at least conceptually haven't yet had their consciences seared unlike those given over completely to nihilism.

    And I personally prefer the irrational, inconsistent garden variety anti-theists who live as if there were such things as good and evil over the rational, consistent type.

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