The Canadian Supreme Court recently upheld the murder conviction of Robert Latimer, a farmer in Saskatchewan who killed his severely handicapped daughter Tracy. Unless the Cabinet grants an exemption in this case, Mr. Latimer must now serve the minimum sentence prescribed by law: life in prison. His first chance at parole will be in the year 2011.
While I support the Court's decision in principle, what I'd like to do in this essay is point out a misconception in one of the arguments against leniency raised by advocates for the rights of the disabled. They are pleased with the Supreme Court ruling, because they feel that a legal exemption for "mercy killing" would amount to an open season on the disabled. No one has the right to take another person's life, they argue, and a disabled person's life is every bit as valuable as anyone else's.
I don't argue with that reasoning at all. How can I? Of course everyone's life is valuable, and of course no one should have the right to decide that someone else's life isn't important. The problem, though, is that this argument doesn't really apply to the issue of mercy killing, because mercy killing is not about the assertion of a right to kill, or the denial of a right to life. No one would argue that Mr. Latimer was entitled to kill his daughter, in the same sense that he might be entitled to sell his truck or play his guitar at his own discretion or pleasure. His daughter's life was not his property.
Rather, Mr. Latimer's defense was based on the argument that it was a concern for Tracy's own welfare that motivated (indeed, obliged) him to end her life. He perceived her to be suffering, in virtually constant pain, with no hope of improvement to her condition. As Tracy's parent and legal guardian, the responsibility for making decisions on her behalf fell to him, and so he reasoned that if she herself had been able to decide for herself, she would have chosen not to live that way. So, rightly or wrongly, he made that decision for her.
I'm not going to take a position on that decision itself, because frankly I don't know enough to do so. I wasn't in his shoes, and I don't know what he was thinking. He says he did it for her benefit, not for his, and that may be so. On the other hand, it could be that he just had enough of taking care of her after all those years. More likely, there was a combination of factors. As much as he might have been tired of taking care of her, he was certainly also tired of seeing her suffer. In any case, the specific details of this case are not what I want to talk about here. The philosophical point is whether or not it can ever be in someone's interests to die, and so it might be best at this point to move to another example.
Let's consider suicide. Is it conceivable for a rational, competent human being to prefer death over life? I think it is. Personally, I'm enjoying the business of being alive, and I realize that eventually I'll get around to being dead anyway, so I'm in no hurry to schedule it in. Even so, I can imagine a person's existence being so disagreeable that he might choose oblivion, and I have even known several people who have made such a choice. Admittedly, some or even most suicides are rash decisions made in a passionate moment, but there are almost certainly a few which are the result of years of careful deliberation. Who am I to declare, based on my quite different circumstances, that their conclusions are wrong? In other words, I hold the right to autonomy as prior to the right to life; indeed, I hold the right to life as valuable only as an instrumental good, in that its value comes from its usefulness in protecting autonomy.
If we concede, as I think we must, that it is possible for a rational being to choose to die, then presumably there will be circumstances where a person would choose death if only he or she were not incapable of making or communicating choices in the first place. I will not beg the question by claiming that life in the absence of autonomy is worthless, although I do think that the absence of autonomy does tend to make the whole issue of rights moot. It may still be in the interests of a person lacking autonomy to live, and in fact it usually is. I certainly would not want to claim that my son as a newborn would have been better off dead simply because he was at the time incapable of rational choice, nor that sleeping persons are better off never waking up. All I am trying to suggest at this point is that there may be instance, possible quite rare, in which a non-autonomous being might not be best served by continuing to exist.
Now, the person responsible for making decisions on this non-autonomous person's behalf will be in a very difficult position. Even at the best of times, it's difficult to know for sure whose interests the proxy is really considering. (When my son asks to go to McDonalds for supper, and I say no, is it my concern for his proper nutrition, or the fact that I just don't much like the food there?) Most of the time, these conflicts of interest aren't too big a deal, but at the same time, we can't simply assume that everything a proxy decides is really what the person would choose. In particular, we should be suspicious whenever a proxy makes improbably altruistic decisions on the person's behalf which just happen to benefit the proxy. After all, it's unlikely my child would altruistically choose to stop eating just to save me the trouble of changing his diapers. So in practice it's necessary for us to make certain presumption about what a person's interests really are, and primary among those presumptions is the idea that one would rather live than die.
But what do we do in those tragic circumstances where a person actually would rather die, or where it seems in the good-faith judgement of a proxy that the person would prefer to be dead? In such cases, the proxy who decides that the person would choose suicide, and acts accordingly, is not threatening the dignity and autonomy of the disabled. In fact, a strong argument could be made that such a proxy is a champion of those fundamental rights.
Even so, I must say that I am in support of the Supreme Court's decision, not because I condemn what Robert Latimer did, but because I recognize the vital importance of ensuring that so momentous a choice is taken very seriously. If we were to establish as a general principle that you can kill someone without consequences if you can convince yourself you're doing them a favour, I fear that people might not approach the decision to end someone's life with the appropriate gravity. If, on the other hand, one feels so strongly that one must end a life that one is willing to spend a decade or more in prison, then perhaps that is some assurance that the act is genuinely an altruistic one. In any case, there is little we can do to stop someone willing to make such a sacrifice, regardless of what we think of their motivations.
Ultimately, then, my position on the Latimer case is that he should have been found guilty, and sentenced accordingly, even if what he did was right. We cannot afford to have people take lightly the decision to end a life. Yet now that he has been convicted and sentenced, I see no reason why Cabinet should not grant a significant reduction of his sentence. In fact, I believe they ought to, if for no other reason than to preserve a sense of proportion in sentencing. After all, one of the problems with mandatory sentencing is that it removes that sense of proportion. Robert Latimer will spend exactly as long in prison before he is eligible for parole as any other murderer, including many whose crimes were clearly motivated by greed, anger, or brutal indifference.
I can only imagine what Robert Latimer felt and thought as he made his decision, and I hope I never face the same dilemma. It may seem as if ten years of imprisonment is an unreasonable price for him to pay for doing what many feel was ethically demanded of him. If he loved his daughter as he says he did, and I have no reason to doubt him, then I hope he can at least take some comfort in the knowledge that every day he spends in prison is well-spent, if it bought Tracy her peace.