LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

10 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW IX
4. WHAT EFFECT WILL MERCY KILLING HAVE UPON OBSERVERS
WHO ENDORSE THE PRACTICE
We may not assume that the members of our society who approve the
practice of VAE and observe it at a respectable distance will escape the
effects of desensitisation. Their moral sensitivities can also become dulled if
they endorse by legislation the habit of killing terminally ill patients. A way
of life can easily become a way of thought, and vice versa. What assurance
would we have that, in a few decades after the endorsement of VAE, the
less-than-terminally ill patients would not become candidates for a
“merciful” death It might become perilously easy for us to urge ailing
granny to take the nearest exit if we find that she has been generous in her
will—not only because we have been thinking that way but also because we
have been vicariously behaving that way all along. 12 Here is an insidious
problem: once our sensitivities have changed, so will the mercy-killing
debate, perhaps irrevocably. Three decades after VAE has been legalised,
and probably less, those proponents who originally said that the excesses
would never occur may no longer be operating with the same definition of
excesses. What they once thought was horrible and excessive they may no
longer consider to be so. They could simply say that their thirty year-old
sensitivities were mistaken.
We cannot predict with certainty how humans in a society will behave,
but the distinct possibility that mercy killers and their compliant observers
will become desensitised should give us pause. Better to err on the side of
caution when the stakes are so dreadfully high.
5. DO WE VALUE PAIN TOO LITTLE AND PLEASURE TOO MUCH
After quoting a passage in which Bishop Sullivan essentially argues
that, according to his church, suffering is meritorious, James Rachaels says,
“This argument may strike some people as simply grotesque.” 13 Anyone
who suggests that there is something to be gained by enduring pain, that
virtues of a religious or non-religious kind can be developed, is liable to
meet with ridicule and disgust. Unfortunately, ridicule and disgust do not
12 Although the circumstances in Nazi Germany admittedly are not the same as those in
North America today, it has been argued with chilling cogency that “four sets of beliefs
which were held in common between exponents of earlier and later eugenics, are widely held
today”. The “common factor” is that “some lives are deemed not to be worth living”. David
Lamb, Down the Slippery Slope: Arguing in Applied Ethics (London: Croom Helm, 1988) 26,
30.
13 Regan 58.