Review of “Don’t Be Nice” by Kathleen Stock – The Case Against Euthanasia | Philosophical books

IIn this admirably clear and persuasive book, philosopher Kathleen Stock lays out the case against state-sanctioned assisted dying. Her immediate objection is to the end-of-life bill currently before the House of Lords, but her opposition extends to the principle in general. This is controversial, but it’s polite. Stock says she hopes we ultimately share her objection to the “institutionalization of death.”

It’s not a common place to start. Polls over the past few years consistently show that around three-quarters of Britons support assisted dying for terminally ill people. But Stock was never afraid to swim against the tide. In 2021, she resigned from the University of Sussex following protests by some staff and students over her views, expressed in Material Girls, that gender is binary and fixed and that this, not gender identity, should be the basis of laws protecting women.

In “Don’t Be Kind” — the phrase taken from Dylan Thomas’s 1951 poem in which he urges his ailing father not to accept death without a fight — Stock insists that she is not an unfeeling ascetic who believes that physical suffering is somehow good for you. Rather, her objection lies in the fact that once rules and protocols for the management of medically assisted death are in place, special appeals and pressures for extension will arise almost immediately.

And she has a lot of evidence to back this up. Canada has had medical assistance in dying (MAID) since June 2016. Initial eligibility was limited to individuals with a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. It has since been expanded to include those with serious and incurable diagnoses but whose conditions are not necessarily terminal. Legislation has also been passed — though implementation has been delayed until 2027 — to allow maids for individuals whose only underlying condition is mental illness. In the Benelux countries, it is already legal for a doctor to assist in the death of a person who is terminally mentally ill but has no underlying physical infirmity. Even more frightening is that laws that began by insisting that only adults could make the decision to die have ended up allowing the euthanasia of seriously ill infants and children.

Stock, in her measured and sensible way, does not seek to shock by continuing these extreme cautionary tales. Instead, it focuses on the most typical case imaginable of someone with a chronic somatic diagnosis seeking assisted suicide. On the face of it, this may seem like an obvious good. But Stock says that if a patient has automatic access to specialized palliative care and pain relief, they may not feel the need to seek artificial death. Treatment for the elderly in Britain is incomplete, expensive and relies on an insecure mix of charitable donations and NHS funding. How can we ensure that assisted dying does not come up for discussion as a means of relieving additional financial burden on the state?

You can extend this analysis almost infinitely. Evidence from Canada shows that people with disabilities who do not suffer from terminal illnesses now seek death because the services necessary to maintain a dignified life at home are not available to them. Then there is the scenario of family members pressuring their elderly relatives to move out early to avoid care home fees or to speed up an inheritance. It sounds like a scary story until Stock reminds us of the numerous cases of mortgage, pension and benefits fraud that come before the courts every year.

People are not always good or kind, and she urges us not to support a system based on distorted thinking that places vulnerable people – a category that will eventually include most of us – at the mercy of coercion.