March 10, 2020 - 8:30am
The Bundesverfassungsgericht — the German federal constitutional court — has overturned the ban on ‘assisted suicide services’, asserting instead the right of every German to ‘a self-determined death’ and associated right ‘to pursue and carry out the decision to end their life on their own terms’.
The English-language version of the ruling states:
This is founded in ‘the central notion that human beings are capable of self-determination and personal responsibility.’ Founded in ‘the belief that personal autonomy and development of one’s personality are integral to human freedom,’ the logic of this position requires German law to protect ‘human dignity’ by defending ‘individuality, identity and integrity’. If an individual human wishes in their integrity to end their own life, it then follows that German law must protect their human dignity by protecting their right to kill themselves.
In a moral framework that holds ‘autonomous self-determination’ to be the only meaningful value worth protecting, this makes sense. Missing from it, though, is the recognition that human dignity might exist in how we belong not just to ourselves, but to others as well.
By framing dignity in this light, we see societies — not just individuals — showing stress. Among working-class men, for example, the decline of marriage, social dignity and ‘traditional’ jobs have gone hand in hand. Stable and well-paying jobs have been offshored, so many feel unable to marry and start families. Then, without families to provide for, men lose the motivation to work, express their loss of social standing via substance abuse or antisocial behaviour, struggle to find work or a partner as a consequence, and so the vicious circle goes on.
Chris Arnade’s 2019 book Dignity explicitly links the decline in meaningful working-class work with the decline of dignity as expressed in community bonds.
The German ruling suggests that human dignity is an attribute solely of each individual. But the growing phenomenon in the US and elsewhere of ‘deaths of despair’, driven by a declining social fabric, suggests that for many, suicide is less an expression of dignity than of desolation at its loss.
If we understand dignity in individual terms only, there is no need to care about deaths of despair. After all, as the German judgement puts it, these suicides decided on the basis of ‘how they personally define quality of life and a meaningful existence’ to exercise their own right to die.
I am jumping between developed nations in this discussion. But the whole West is presently wrestling with the same tension, between the absolutist demands of liberal individualism and the needs of the social fabric. If we are not to argue ourselves into an indifference to deaths of despair that we do not truly feel, we should resist the drive to privatise dignity and look instead for language that lets us acknowledge what we owe one another.
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SubscribeThe Germans were very good at ‘assisted dying’ for some years in the mid-20th century. They appear to have lost the art.
“In a moral framework that holds ‘autonomous self-determination’ to be
the only meaningful value worth protecting, this makes sense. Missing
from it, though, is the recognition that human dignity might exist in
how we belong not just to ourselves, but to others as well.”
I think this takes the argument to an extreme, which few would agree with – yet polls show a lot of support for regulated voluntary assisted dying. Dignity doesn’t just belong to ourselves because it is something we can give to each other. People can, like with the abortion issue, consider all the complex angles and come up with different justifiable positions. People near the end of their lives who want to be able to choose a dignified exit (in their terms) are perhaps a lesson in dignity.
You make an important point, that deaths of despair should not be tolerated or ignored, because of the principle that we each have the right to decide when enough is enough. But this decision defends, rightly in my view, that principle, however society may wish to hedge that around with protections for the vulnerable. It should not in the end be easier to throw oneself under a tube train with all the horrors that involves for others, than to take a legally sanctioned and controlled route to end one’s life.
What a struggle you make here to maintain a moral constraint on this one legal human need that you dissapprove of.