Killing kindness.

• Author: Szasz, Thomas
• Position: Physician-assisted suicide

Jack Kevorkian believes we can solve moral problems by medicalizing them.

THE ACT OF KILLING MAY BE DEEMED good or bad, depending on who kills whom and why. When a man shoots an intruder about to attack him, we condone the killing as self-defense. When a bandit shoots a bank teller, we condemn the killing as murder. However, when a person kills himself, we are confused about whether to regard his act as good or bad and instead classify it as mad.

Although priests no longer consider suicide a mortal sin, and lawmakers do not punish it as an offense against the state and hence a crime, psychiatrists now diagnose it as a symptom of a mental illness and hence incarcerate the unsuccessful or would-be suicide as a "dangerous" mental patient. Regardless of our moral judgment of the act, suicide is by definition a type of homicide. Like any homicide, we may judge suicide to be justified or unjustified, virtuous or wicked, sane or insane, depending on the circumstances and on our own values.

It is against this background that we must view Dr. Jack Kevorkian's crusade for physician-assisted suicide as a state-approved "right" and "treatment." Since Kevorkian's recent announcement that he has abandoned his campaign of law defiance, and instead has undertaken a campaign of "law reform," he is more dangerous than ever. His aim is ominous because it taps into one of our most powerful popular delusions, namely the belief that we can solve moral problems by medicalizing them. Maintaining that the so-called right (of a terminally ill patient) to physician-assisted suicide is more fundamental than our established constitutional rights, Kevorkian wants it encoded in the constitution of the state of Michigan. And because this right is, in fact, a service, he wants it guaranteed--that is, provided--by expanding the medical profession's legally recognized repertoire of treatments to include doctors helping patients to commit suicide.

To grasp the threat of Kevorkian's purported compassion and the seemingly widespread popular support for it, it is necessary to remember the long history of medicine's war on freedom and self-determination. In Plato's Republic, he explained "that our rulers will have to make considerable use of falsehood and deception for the benefit of their subjects. We said, I believe, that the use of that sort of thing was in the category of medicine."

Before approving physician-assisted suicide as a treatment, we need to confront the ethical...