Outrage! I would argue that outrage ought to mark our response to Jack Kevorkian’s latest. There is a real role for moral outrage, after all. That is how we tell one another that something is just beyond tolerable -- not part of normal public consideration and discourse.
Once, for many people, slavery was a political topic on which one could have any of various stands, only one of which was abolition. In this country in the last century, normal politics was abrogated and slavery was declared "off the agenda" of the civil society. In contrast, for far too long, selective killing by the Nazis was tolerated in Germany and elsewhere. Early on, only a few were outraged and many found it to be of only a distant and rather intellectual interest.
I raise these examples to contend that a social uprising in moral outrage is a way of declaring that certain practices are off the agenda, that they are not merely an unusual endpoint on a scale that includes lots of quite acceptable practices. Instead, it is a way of saying that a practice is NOT like others. It is alien and rejected, so abhorrent that it has no near neighbors.
Surely, that is how we should evaluate Kevorkian’s coldly efficient killing of a patient, videotaped and aired on national TV. Here is a man who has never been a physician to suffering people and has not even had a medical license for more than a dozen years. He cannot provide anything to his "clients" except death. He cannot assess or treat depression, he cannot provide a prognosis, he cannot relieve pain. He only is equipped to kill. And his killing is so banal as to be terrifying. No tears, no reminiscences, no last thoughts or tender moments with loved ones. Just a man sitting there thinking, interacting, and talking in monosyllables, who goes to sleep and stops breathing -- sandwiched between an ad for a pop singer and one for a car rental company. It all was neatly packaged into eighteen minutes, with not even a pause for reflection or a moment of awe. At least it left ethicist and commentator Mark Siegler "nearly speechless!"
Years of caring for the seriously ill and severely disabled color my view. Most viewers saw a man in a wheelchair who had lost so much. I saw a man who still had so much! He could still write, he could still talk and breathe. Later on, I knew he would lose these capabilities, and I can understand his fear and dread. But he could have lived with substantial ability to interact and to control his environment for some months - even if then he wanted to end it quickly.
More important, though, is the fact that the news media seemed eager to cast this story quite differently. When interviewed by ABC News, the interviewer was clearly aiming to have me say that this case was rather like the Meier et al findings that a small number of doctors had at least once been involved in lethal injection or in physician-assisted suicide. The interviewer really did not have time to deal with my contention that what Kevorkian had done was not at all like the cases that the Meier article outlined (because it was not PAS and the lethal injections that doctors described in that article were for people who had hours to live). No, that reporter, and the newsmagazines, and the major papers all reported that something very similar was happening all the time.
Wait a minute! Where is it happening, even a little of the time?! And why is it not sufficient to say that there are lots of real issues and difficult questions around how to care for seriously ill and dying people - but that Kevorkian’s latest is just not part of the debate.
And where were the organizations that could have raised a voice in outrage? In all the press I saw, only ABCD and the AMA were quoted. Most groups just sat it out. The aging groups, it seems, should have been loud, the disability groups, those who represent cancer or AIDS, and on and on.
Many missed an opportunity to speak out. We could have set some fences on the slippery slope - this, at least, is just not part of the spectrum of reasonable debate and discord. This is indefensible. Perhaps it still can be rescued. Perhaps readers can work on their organizations to speak out û there will be more opportunities as the trial unfolds. Perhaps we can work on some language that still keeps open the questions that we want society to confront. And we should simply foreclose on allowing a self-anointed righteous killer to trick us into talking about his antics as if they were merely one more interesting example of what we might choose to allow.
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