The UK has altered its guidelines regarding the matter of assisted suicide, and this in a way which places more emphasis upon the motivation of the agent.   It does not legalise mercy killing and, as the Director of Public Prosecutions says, does not on paper make prosecution more or less likely; but it certainly enhances the discretionary powers of the Crown Prosecution Service as to whether to prosecute, by moving the grounds for such into what would appear to be far more subjective areas.   One sees the spectre of the only ethic that seems to matter anymore -- emotional sincerity -- looming up over the horizon.

In the 1930s, Germany started a program of mercy killings of children with brain damage, disabilities etc.  The Nazi authorities at the time produced a documentary, entitled Sein ohne Leben, `Being without Life.'  It is one of the most moving and compelling documentaries I have ever seen, playing shamelessly to the emotions, and it undoubtedly helped to legitimate the program.   While the mercy killing program did not cause the Holocaust, it undoubtedly softened public attitudes toward euthanasia and helped to produce the social and cultural conditions which made the subsequent Holocaust from 1942 onwards a possibility.

Those of us who have witnessed the agonising deaths of loved ones from terminal illnesses will know that, emotionally, the problems surrounding end of life care are awful and not to be treated in any flippant or casual manner on either side of the debate about mercy killing; but the reduction of ethics to an emotional response and  to contentless notions of sincerity is simply not an adequate response to the issue; and, while I do not believe that mercy killing today necessarily leads to gas chambers tomorrow, it certainly does refashion how society looks at life and its intrinsic value, and how it is prepared to make ethical and legal judgments.

The story can be found here.