Biography: Dr. Peck received his degree magna cum laude from Harvard. From 1983 onward, he was in private practice of psychiatry in Connecticut. Peck was nondenominationally baptized by a Methodist minister in an Episcopalian convent, where he had frequently gone on retreat. Dr. Peck was a nationally recognized authority on the relationship between religion and science, and the science of psychology in particular. His first book, The Road Less Traveled, has sold over six million copies to date in North America alone, and has been translated into over 20 languages. He is also known for People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil and Golf and the Spirit. In 1992, Dr. Peck was selected by the American Psychiatric Association as a distinguished psychiatrist lecturer “for his outstanding achievement in the field of psychiatry as an educator, researcher, and clinician.” M. Scott Peck died Sept. 25, 2005. He was 69 and had Parkinson’s disease as well as pancreatic and liver duct cancer.
~Evaluate the following essay on the ethical issue of euthanasia:
“Living Is the Mystery” by Dr. M. Scott Peck
(Many hooks before Intro.) I believe we should enlarge the debate on euthanasia and not rush to resolve it; the current debate over euthanasia is often simplistic. The subject is complex. We don’t even have a generally agreed-upon definition of the word. Is euthanasia solely an act committed by someone–a physician or family member–on someone else who is ill or dying? Or can the term also be used for someone who is ill or dying who kills himself without the assistance of another? Does euthanasia require the patient’s consent. The family’s consent. Is it separable from other forms of suicide or homicide? How does it differ from simply “pulling the plug”? If one type of euthanasia consists of refraining from the use of “heroic measures” to prolong life, how does one distinguish between those measures that are heroic and those that are standard treatment? What is the relationship between euthanasia and pain? Is there a distinction to be made between physical pain and emotional pain? How does one assess degrees of suffering? Above all, why are ethical issues involved, and what might they be? I believe that all patients deserve fully adequate medical relief from physical pain. Emotional pain may be another matter. It is very difficult to say no to emotional demands of those suffering severe physical disease, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. I have always resonated to two quotations: “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived” and “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” I find I need to remind myself of these quotations on a daily basis. Among other things, they point out to me that the loss of control, the irrationality, the mystery and the insecurity inherent in dying are also inherent to living. The emotional suffering involved in dealing with these realities strikes me as a very important segment of what I call existential suffering. It seems to me that “true euthanasia” patients suffer not so much from a problem of death as from a problem of life. I think they have a lot to learn from being assisted to face this problem rather than being assisted to kill themselves in order to avoid it. More than anything else, our differing beliefs about the existence or nonexistence of the human soul make euthanasia a subject for passionate ethical and moral debate. I am of a position that dictates against a laissez-faire attitude toward euthanasia, or what could be termed “euthanasia on demand.” While I am passionate about this position forged out of complexity, I am also profoundly aware that I do not know personally what it is like to be totally and permanently incapacitated or to live under a death sentence as a result of a very specific disease with a rapidly deteriorating course. In other words, I have not been there. All that I write here, therefore, should be taken with at least that much of a grain of salt.
(Stance) If I were a jurist, my judgment would be to keep physician-assisted suicide illegal; this would be my decision for three reasons:
(Reason One) The other extreme-making assisted suicide so fully legal that it is considered a right- has, I believe, profound negative implications for society as a whole. My concern is not simply, as another author has put it, that “euthanasia breeds euthanasia” or that the floodgates would be opened. My primary concern is the message that would be given to society. It would be yet another secular message that we need not wrestle with God, another message denying the soul and telling us that this is solely our life to do with as we please. It would be a most discouraging message. It would not encourage us to face the natural existential suffering of life, to learn how to overcome it, to learn how to face emotional hardship–the kind of hardship that calls forth our courage. Instead, it would be a message that we are entitled to take the easy way out. It would be a message pushing our society further along the worst of the directions it has already been taking.
(Reason Two) A decision for the middle ground legalizing assisted suicide under certain circumstances and not others would lead us into a legal quagmire. Despite their enormous expense and frustration, such quagmires might be all to the good if we were prepared to wallow in them. I do not believe that we are currently so prepared.
(Reason Three) As a society, we are not yet ready to grapple with the euthanasia issue in a meaningful way. There are just too many even more important issues that need to be decided first: the right to physical pain relief, the right to hospice comfort care, the right to public education that is not wholly secular, the right to free discourse about the soul and human meaning, the right to education about the nature of existential suffering, the right to medical care in general, and the right to quasi-euthanasia for the chronically but not fatally ill. Only when we are clear about these matters, among others, will we be in a position to tackle the issue of legalizing physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
(Refutation) I submit that the answer to the problem of assisted suicide lies not in more euthanasia but in more hospice care. The first order of business should be to establish that dying patients have a constitutional right to competent hospice care. Only after this right has been established does it make sense for the courts to turn their attention to the question of whether terminally ill patients should have an additional constitutional right to physician-assisted euthanasia.
(Conclusion) I am not for rushing to resolve the euthanasia debate but for enlarging and heating it up. If we can do this, it is conceivable to me that historians of the future will mark the debate as a turning point in U.S. history, on a par with the Declaration of Independence. They will see it as a watershed time when a possibly moribund society almost magically became revitalized. It is both my experience and that of others that whenever we are willing to engage ourselves fully in the mystery of death, the experience is usually enlivening. I believe that the euthanasia debate, besides requiring that we confront certain societal problems, offers the greatest hope in forcing us to encounter our own souls-often for the first time.
Analysis Questions:
Why does Peck include so many questions (hooks) at the beginning? What does this do, as far as the audience’s understanding of euthanasia? What does he want us to question?
Dr. Peck does not have a complete thesis, but we do see his stance; is he for or against assisted suicide? What are his reasons (rationales for body paragraphs) why?
Does he have any convincing medical support, as far as being a doctor? What kind of support would you add?
Does Peck saying that he “hasn’t been there” weaken his argument, or make him more trustworthy? Why?
Is Peck’s refutation of offering hospice as a solution a convincing counter-argument? What would you change? What is hospice care? Is it always a good thing?
Look at Peck’s bio. Does he have a bias?
What is “existential suffering,” and why is it necessary according to Peck? Do you agree?
