Misusing Mill's ideas to advocate for assisted suicide

Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse

Secondly, and more importantly, no one else knows what’s best for you. You are the single greatest arbiter, the one who should decide your future, lack of it, and means for getting there. I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to live your life, so why should I tell you how to end it? It’s your decision.

I find this sort of simplistic liberalism and use of Mill’s principle (it is always Mill behind this reasoning) distasteful and naive. Death is under-theorized in politics generally and liberalism ought to have a better standard line of argument than this. We are talking about annihilation.

…the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

I wonder how Mill would have thought about the particulars. His defence of capital punishment was much more nuanced than this, and involved many unpalatable ideas, including this:

What comparison can there really be, in point of severity, between consigning a man to the short pang of a rapid death, and immuring him in a living tomb…debarred from all pleasant sights and sounds, and cut off from all earthly hope

This is the now familiar “quality of life” argument. Living in a retirement home and watching television simply isn’t comparable to living in a Victorian prison. Mill argued that criminals would suffer and die early anyway, due to the lack of resources for proper prisons. We are vastly richer than they were; we have the great resources of modern medicine and social care. The people watching television all day have a much better life than those Victorian criminals, and it can be made so much better with a few phone calls and visits. Post them some photos of your children. The idea that old people are living at a margin of misery whereby death is the obvious answer is just wrong. It is fixable at relatively low cost. I don’t think this is the way we ought to decide these things, but some people do and they have much better ways of approaching the problem. Those old people still have Christmas, birthdays. I would stay alive in a dreary retirement home to see my children once a year, as would most people not being persuaded that it would be better to die. Yes, many middle-aged people casually say they want to die when the time comes. But that is no basis for encouraging the “solving emptiness” for someone else.¹

I wish more people knew those parts of Mill’s work that talked about how his principles should be applied. Mill said many times that we all owe each other the obligation to improve and enrich our lives. This was a crowning principle for him, just as important as individual sovereignty and the harm principle. On Liberty includes this qualification.

It would be a great misunderstanding of this doctrine, to suppose that it is one of selfish indifference, which pretends that human beings have no business with each other's conduct in life, and that they should not concern themselves about the well-doing or well-being of one another, unless their own interest is involved.

Millian liberalism is too often distorted to assume that good liberals are not supposed to have eyes into men’s souls. Quite the opposite. Mill wished us to have a firm and vibrant liberty that encouraged mutuality and instruction.

Human beings owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worse, and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter. They should be for ever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties, and increased direction of their feelings and aims towards wise instead of foolish, elevating instead of degrading, objects and contemplations.

Stop invoking individual sovereignty as a pat argument for assisted suicide. Every time you do so, you make the world a little worse, you prevent other people from distinguishing the better from the worse. Choose instead to stimulate each other’s higher faculties.

1. Other principles apply to the case, too. In Utilitarianism, Mill said: “Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals…”. Would they then consent to be changed into nothing? In On Liberty he says that it is not possible to for someone to “ allow himself to be sold” because that would be to abdicate liberty. “The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom.” One can hardly think of anything more alienating to freedom than to die. We cannot consent to be sold but we can consent to be destroyed? Mill said it was quite acceptable to forcibly stop a man from walking over an unsafe bridge without infringing his liberty, “for liberty consists in doing what one desires, and he does not desire to fall into the river.”