“There is only one really serious philosophical problem: it is suicide”. Who could forget the incipit of the Myth of Sisyphus at a time when we are about to legalize euthanasia? Admittedly, limits will be set by the legislator, but it is enough to observe the trend in the texts since the end of the 1970s to be convinced that they will be crossed and that no ethics committee will come, in the long term, to thwart this movement. inexorable in favor of “active medical assistance in dying”. In our secularized societies, the rule that God alone gives life, and he alone can take it away, has been replaced by the right to die with dignity.
The ancient Greeks claimed the right to choose their death. Indeed, from a philosophical point of view, suicide remains the free act par excellence of an individual who, paradoxically, intends by this gesture to retain or regain control of his life. But times have changed. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century, Durkheim had already masterfully analyzed the social determinants of suicide. We live and we die, sometimes alone, but we always die in society. This is why the question of legislation on “active assistance in dying” is a political, and therefore social, question as much as an ethical and medical question. While we would all like to die at home, surrounded by loved ones, and if possible in good health, we should probably keep in mind that death, in France, mainly takes place in a hospital or nursing home, and sometimes in appalling conditions.
Extension of new rights
This simple observation should prevent us from reasoning solely from a philosophical abstraction like that of the little Sartrean man asserting himself all along the paths of freedom, being able to decide his fate sovereignly until the final stage. The current supporters of an authorization of euthanasia assert a principle of equality according to which disabled people are not deprived of a right reserved only for the able-bodied. This claim is part of the logic of the continuous extension of new beneficiaries of rights (slaves, women, children, ethnic or sexual minorities, animals, etc.) inseparable from the history of liberalism.
But it also participates in a logic often ignored but nevertheless active, that of technical societies wanting that in the name of the search for efficiency, each problem, including death, receives a technical solution. Under Dennis Gabor’s law, everything technically feasible will be done. Everything that can be done must be done. An ethics committee can simply slow down the deadline. Moreover, CCNE Opinion 139 notes in passing that due to “economic, structural and organizational contingencies” aggravated by the pandemic, the ethics of cure “whose main aim is to treat in order to cure through technical power” has replaced the ethics of care (or concern).
A new social norm
Who would dare to oppose the right not to suffer and the right to die with dignity? Certainly not the author of these lines who only wonders if, by further medicalizing the end of life, our societies are not opening a door that they will never be able to close again. Isn’t that one more step towards Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932) with its famous soma, a technical parody of the holy Christian species, which would not be content with allowing one to live in a paradisiacal psychological state but which, in a modified form, would allow one to die in full euphoria?
Will this way of dying not become, if not a legal obligation, at least a social norm? Is it reasonable to want to suffer and cause damage to society by needlessly mobilizing hospital staff and expensive drugs, not to mention the perception of a pension? This life is no longer livable, grandpa, isn’t it time to give it up.
Dystopia yesterday, reality tomorrow
The first image that came to mind when reading CCNE’s opinion 139 is that taken from a science fiction film seen when it was released in 1973: Green Sun. I can still see the incredulous face of Thorn (Charlton Heston) when he arrives at the “Home”, the place where voluntary euthanasia is practiced. Arriving too late to prevent Sol (Edward Robinson) from dying, he witnesses the last minutes of his friend, an old scholar with whom he shares food and secrets. On a huge screen and to the sounds of Beethoven’s Pastoral, the two men watch images of what the Earth was like before excessive industrialization: magnificent landscapes, the beauty of nature in its wild state. The action is supposed to take place in… 2022 in a polluted New York City, subject to the heat wave caused by the greenhouse effect and unable to feed its inhabitants other than by synthetic food tablets including the famous Soylent Green which turns out to be human flesh and not ocean plankton as claimed by the multinational firm that markets them.
Let us be careful that the dystopia of yesterday does not become the reality of tomorrow. Far from encouraging us to be vigilant, this kind of film – or series, like Black Mirror – fulfills a soothing function by cheaply reassuring us about our present which, by contrast, seems to us to be heavenly.