Arguing for assisted dying of the very ill, people often say, ‘I wouldn’t let my dog live like that.’ This sounds a powerful point, but is it? As someone complicit in the euthanasia of our much-loved dog a few years ago, I can confirm that it was traumatic; and although we still think it was the right decision, it evoked feelings of guilt which are hard to shake off.
In assisting the death of a person one loves, such feelings would be infinitely more disturbing, because a person is profoundly different from a dog. It may sound perverse, but it is precisely because we see human autonomy as being of a different order from the autonomy of an animal that we think it right to tolerate higher levels of human suffering. We are not mere animals, and we therefore have the joys and sorrows which come from this fact. If we start killing people, or helping people to kill themselves, out of kindness, we are coming to think of them more as animals, less as people.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s notes. The full article can be found here.
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