“You wouldn’t treat your pet dog like this. If Fido was terminally ill, and in pain, you’d take him to the vets and have him humanely put down.” Breaking it down, this takes the form of a syllogism :
(1) It is compassionate to kill a suffering dog; (2) A terminally ill human being may also suffer; (3) Therefore it is compassionate to kill the human being.
It should help to interrogate this line of thinking, but the thoughtful person will already have spotted the following problem with this line of argument: the conclusion follows only if we insert an enormous unstated premise:
There is no morally relevant difference between our obligations towards a human patient and our obligations towards a domestic animal.
That is not a minor assumption: it is the entire argument. Now, let’s unpick it a bit.
(A) The analogy contradicts the autonomy argument
One of the commonest mantras on the lips of supporters of the Leadbeater Bill has been some variant of the “My life/my death, my choice” invocation of a kind of overarching autonomy, when it comes to the messy business of dying. It is a level of autonomy that is almost impossible to specify in most other areas of life, but it is made to do a great deal of heavy lifting here. But, of course, Fido does not choose. His owner and vet decide that his continuing life is no longer in his interests. Veterinary euthanasia is therefore a paternalistic, third-party quality-of-life judgement—not an exercise in autonomous self-determination. It is astonishing to see that this analogy is advanced so loudly and confidently when, in fact, it lays an axe at the root of the very argument in favour of human autonomy – and, in a rather sinister way – hints at the kinds of loss of autonomy facing human beings in other jurisdictions, who are offered a eugenic solution when, actually, all they really want to do is be allowed to live for what little remains of their life.
(B) In a civilised culture we do not, in fact, treat human beings as we treat dogs
We do not accord dogs legal personhood, political equality, independent agency or an inviolable claim upon the community. The entire architecture of human rights exists because human beings are not property and are not disposable according to someone else’s assessment of their utility, comfort or manageability. That is not a criticism of conscientious vets or heartbroken pet owners. It merely reveals why veterinary practice cannot be a viable template for human medicine. If someone says, “We should treat Grandma as compassionately as Fido,” one reasonable answer is: Which particular feature of Fido’s treatment do you wish to reproduce—the owner making the decision, the financial calculation, the quality-of-life assessment, or the absence of consent?
(C) The equivocation over the use of the word ‘treat’
“We wouldn’t treat a dog like this” contains a powerful verbal sleight of hand. It suggests that continued human care is a form of mistreatment, while describing the deliberate ending of life as “treatment.” But refusing deliberately to kill someone does not entail insisting upon every possible life-prolonging intervention. There is a well-established moral difference between:
- administering treatment whose purpose is to cause death;
- withdrawing a futile or disproportionately burdensome treatment;
- allowing the underlying disease to take its course;
- relieving pain, even where that might foreseeably shorten life;
- and providing palliative sedation in otherwise intractable cases.
The alternatives are not “kill the patient” or “torture the patient indefinitely.” Hospice and palliative medicine sit within the substantive moral territory which the slogan seeks to eliminate: responsible clinicians neither desperately prolong dying nor intentionally cause death, but accompany and care for the dying person. That distinction is essential. Death should be accepted as the limit of medicine without being converted into a medical treatment.
(D) It’s yet another example of secular reductionism
The dog analogy treats suffering as though it were the only morally significant fact in a person’s life. Once suffering passes some threshold, so the implication runs, death becomes self-evidently preferable. But human life contains goods that cannot be captured by a pain score:
- relationship and reconciliation;
- presence within a family;
- giving and receiving love;
- moral agency;
- unfinished obligations;
- the possibility of changed wishes;
- the meaning attached to being cared for rather than eliminated.
Human beings have always recognised the value of these factors without romanticising agony or suggesting that suffering itself is intrinsically ennobling. It means only that a person is more than the sum of his presently pleasurable and painful experiences. At this point, it is apparent that the argument reveals a particular anthropology. If the value of life depends principally upon subjective wellbeing, independence and control, then dependency, frailty and suffering necessarily appear as diminutions of personhood. Death begins to look not merely permissible but rational, efficient and—even more ominously—socially responsible.
That is where the analogy touches the eugenic imagination. Not because everyone who repeats it consciously endorses eugenics, but because it relocates human worth away from what a person is to some kind of assessment of the quality and cost of the life being lived.
(E) Turning the argument on its head
We put down animals because they cannot understand their prognosis, articulate informed wishes, participate in decisions, claim independent rights or ask society to bear the cost of continuing care. Precisely because human beings can possess those things—and because their intrinsic worth does not depend upon health, usefulness or independence—we must not make veterinary disposal the model for human medicine. The slogan initially sounds like an appeal to enlarged compassion. On inspection, it is an extraordinary contraction of the moral imagination. It cannot envisage anything compassionate between curing suffering and eliminating the sufferer.
And there may be the most revealing answer of all: a genuinely humane society should aspire to give dying human beings forms of pain relief, personal care, relational presence and protection that we simply cannot give Fido—rather than infer that, because veterinary medicine ends in a lethal injection, human medicine should do the same.
Read thebloggie here