The BLOG: Faith and Law

Assisted suicide and the corruption of lawyers

The NewBostonPost recently ran a fine editorial by John Peteet, a medical doctor who expressed concern about the proposal to legalize assisted suicide in the commonwealth. His concern is warranted. Substantial evidence has now accumulated to show that legalizing assisted suicide corrupts the medical profession (see, for example, this, this, and this). This is all quite predictable given what we know from moral philosophy about the nature of human choice and action. As I have explained elsewhere:

It is the choosing of death, acting with a purpose that death will result, that is morally problematic. Death is not something to be chosen, least of all by doctors. A physician who adopts the death of her patient as the purpose for her action has become a different kind of physician. Indeed, she has become a different kind of person. She has become a person who chooses death over life.

A person who purposely chooses to cause death, who makes death a reason for his actions, is not oriented toward the good. This is because choosing has a creative, self-making significance. To adopt by free choice a reason for one’s action is to make that reason part of one’s projects and commitments. By choosing life, one becomes a person oriented toward life. By choosing death, one becomes a person oriented toward death.

The Massachusetts Medical Society and the American Medical Association are wise to resist being enlisted in the death-rights cause. The moral dangers are manifest.

Less attention has been paid to the potential, corrupting influence of legalization of assisted suicide on the legal profession. This deserves attention because as legalization statutes involve complex legal norms, they will necessarily involve lawyers.

Assisted suicide legislation is sold with the promise that it contains safeguards against abuse. Those safeguards consist largely of indeterminate legal standards. Those standards require lawyers to interpret them and judges to adjudicate their meaning. Legal professionals should not be involved in adjudicating which human beings are worthy of death and which are not. And we should not be making those determinations not only for the protection of our fellow citizens but also for reasons of our own moral health and the integrity of our profession.

Consider just one of the standards that will require adjudication in the bill that has been proposed in Massachusetts. Section 2 of Bill H.1991 requires that a patient’s choice to commit suicide be voluntary. What lawyer should be willing to stake his integrity, conscience, and professional reputation to a demonstration that a suicidal person is not being coerced by her family, friends, or others who have an interest in her demise? A lawyer who succeeds in persuading a court that the patient is acting voluntarily but turns out to be wrong in fact would then have an enormous burden to carry on his or her conscience.

We are fortunate to practice law within a legal tradition that has always balanced autonomy and bodily integrity on one side with human life and moral integrity on the other on the foundation of the inviolability of human life. Lawyers, of all people, should not want to overturn that balance by abrogating the inviolability of human life.

Adam J. MacLeod

Adam J. MacLeod

Adam J. MacLeod is a member of the Maine and Massachusetts (inactive) bars and an Associate Professor at Faulkner University, Jones School of Law. He is the author of “Property and Practical Reason” (Cambridge University Press) and dozens of articles in journals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, many of which can be accessed at his website.