Public debate on Euthanasia and assisted suicide: Undue Influence

Tonight, the British TV channel Sky will air a documentary about assisted suicide. It is more a real life filming of an actual assisted suicide at a Suiss clinic than a documentary, including the capture by the camera of the dying man's wife saying her goodbye and the precise moment of death.

The event prompted two parallel debates in the British and international media about the legalisation of the right to die, a debate on the right to air the documentary, and the impact of the airing on the first debate itself, as well as an overall confusion of the two.

Proponents of the airing are already proponents of Euthanasia and assisted suicide. Opponents to the airing are naturally against Euthanasia and assisted suicide. The first group is defending the documentary on the ground that it will revive the debate about both issues that are conflated in the media into one. The second group's most compelling argument against the airing came from Dr. Peter Saunders: for him, the airing can be viewed as a form of pressure on uninformed and hesitant individuals confronted with a decision on the end of life.

First, I don't think that visual media are equipped to help in such a debate. Images appeal much more to our emotions than to our deliberative rationality, especially images without a rational discourse, as in the present case. And although emotions play an important role in our individual moral deliberations, they are not suited for a social dialogue on Ethics and the end of life.

Secondly, unlike Euthanasia at the age of extreme technologies for sustaining damaged life, involving patients whose awareness about their state is no longer existant, whose contours in a medical setting seem to rest, most of the time, in a passive act accomplished in the shadow of acceptance and resignation both in the medical profession and among the public, assisted suicide involves conscious decisions taken by more than one party and enacted in an active way in which at least one party becomes a mean to an end decided by the other. This is a very important point since a human being should never be anything else but an end in itself, and since the worthiness of life, although it can vary from one individual to another, should never be objectively cast in a negative way in our collective experience, outside the subjectivity of our minds.

An ethical dialogue on suffering and the end of life should be an ongoing dialogue in our societies. The purpose of it is to shape our values in a consensual manner in order to adapt them to social and technological changes while keeping the core values safe. Life is a core value, and although it is being questioned when our suffering is extreme it should never be discussed under duress. Filming a man dying through assisted suicide and his wife saying 'goodbye', however the motives of the couple to make this intimate moment public and who must have went through a lot and deserve our sympathy, is imposing and forcing a public debate on the end of life in which the issue is not left to members of society to decide and build a consensus around, but is decided beforehand for us by proponents of the legalisation of Euthanasia and assisted suicide and the audience hungry media.

This is undue influence in a debate on a very important matter related to what defines us as humans in which free individuals living in a democratic pluralist society with differing views on Euthanasia and the end of life, and their governments who are reluctant to enact laws on the matter, are summoned, through images, raw emotions, and faits accomplis, to take sides and end, not revive, the debate on these very sensitive issues.