Rethinking Euthanasia
Abstract
Raimond Gaita

In the 1990’s I wrote critically of the campaign (as it was then) to make voluntary euthanasia lawful (in Quadrant April, 1995, May 1995 and Eureka Street, December, 1995, for example). I didn’t oppose euthanasia in all circumstances, but I was unsympathetic, sometimes hostile, to some of the assumptions that informed, often passionate, support for it. I thought it arrogant as well as ignorant to claim, for example, that clear-sighted compassion or respect for the autonomy and the dignity of persons required support for the campaign. What compassion or human dignity is, when it is most deeply understood, is what should be at issue in the debate, I argued. In the same spirit, I argued that arguments about slippery slopes had always to be considered in particular historical and cultural contexts and that the context in which arguments were conducted in Australia at the time justified fears that the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia would put us on slides that ended in places that few people desired to be.
A few years later I published Romulus, My Father. It struck me as ironical that the values I celebrate in that book, which was so warmly received across a diversity of the population – from academics to people who had read only a handful of books in their lives – were the values that seemed so controversial when I expressed them in my writings on euthanasia. Much has changed culturally since then. I would now write differently, certainly in a different tone, which then was a little embattled – ironically, given that I also wrote critically of the embattled spirit of the culture wars, which poison everything they touch. Nonetheless polemical though those essay were, I wrote to explore and hopefully to deepen understanding of what was is at issue rather than to support or oppose euthanasia. The sources of our deepest commitments are often obscure to us. Often we do not fully understand what we believe and why we believe it, partly because we are impatient to decide what to do rather than reflect on the meaning of what we do. I welcome the opportunity that the Medico-Legal Society of Australia has given me to rethink these matters.

 

Raimond Gaita was born in Germany in 1946. With his parents he migrated to Australia in 1950. Gaita is Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Law School and The Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College London. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

In 2009 the University of Antwerp awarded Gaita the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa “for his exceptional contribution to contemporary moral philosophy and for his singular contribution the role of the intellectual in today’s academic world. In 2011, Routledge published Christopher Cordner (ed.) Philosophy, Ethics, and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honour of Raimond Gaita and in 2014 Monash University Publishing put out, Craig Taylor (ed.) A Sense for Humanity: The Ethical Thought of Raimond Gaita

Gaita’s books, which have widely translated, include: Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception , the award winning Romulus, My Father, which was nominated by the New Statesman as one of the best books of 1999, by the Australian Financial Review as one of the best book of the decade and was made into a feature film starring Eric Bana, Frank Potente and Kodi Smit-McPhee; A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love & Truth & Justice, which was nominated by The Economist’s as one of best books of 2000;The Philosopher’s Dog, short-listed for the New South Wales Premier’s Award and The Age Book of the Year, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics and, as editor and contributor, Gaza: Morality Law and Politics; Muslims and Multiculturalism; and with Alex Miller and Alex Skovron, Singing for All he’s Worth: Essays in honour of J.G. Rosenberg.

His most recent book is After Romulus, a collection of essays in which (as his publisher puts it) “he reflects on the writing of the Romulus, My Father, the making of the film, his relationship to the desolate beauty of the central Victorian landscape, the philosophies that underpinned his father’s relationship to the world and, most movingly, the presence and absence of his mother and his unassuaged longing for her”.

Who’s Afraid of International Law (edited with Gerry Simpson) will be published in 2015.

Gaita is currently working on a collection of his essays, in the style of A Common Humanity united by the themes of love and dignity in ethics, law and politics.
Because he believes that it is generally a good thing for philosophers to address an educated and hard-thinking lay audience as well as their colleagues, Gaita has contributed extensively to public discussion about reconciliation, collective responsibility, the role of moral considerations in politics, the Holocaust, genocide, crimes against humanity, education (the nature of teaching as a vocation, the role of love in learning) and the plight of the universities.