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This episode is brought to you by Claude by Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at Goodenough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter and finds connections you might have missed for problems worth solving. Get started at Claude AI Spotify welcome to the Quilet Podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan K. And by Iona Italia. Quilet is where freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and peerless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the full episode and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, Visit us@quillet.com and click the subscribe button. This week I have a guest whom many of you will know from the culture war over transgender rights former University of Sussex philosophy professor Kathleen Stock. But Kathleen's latest book, titled Do Not Go Gentle, isn't about gender. Rather, it's about assisted dying or euthanasia. Whatever name you pick for it, Kathleen argues that a formal government run system that actively assists people people seeking to kill themselves is immoral. Now, before proceeding further, I should let listeners know that I'm on the opposite side of the debate from Kathleen on this issue. While I opposed a lot of the expansive, socially progressive agenda implemented by Justin Trudeau during his time as Canadian Prime Minister, this is an issue that I think he got right. That is to say, I support the right of citizens to access medical assistance in dying. And so I came to Kathleen's book as a skeptic. Do Not Go Gentle didn't change my mind on the subject, but I did find it fair minded and thought provoking. It's also more nuanced than some readers might expect. Specifically, Kathleen is careful to say that she doesn't oppose the more informal practice by which doctors take measures that allow terminally ill patients suffering great pain to accelerate their passing. But she believes that this should be done in a way that is negotiated privately between patient and caregiver, as opposed to a full scale program run by the state once euthanasia is institutionalized. In that way, Kathleen argues, it is only a matter of time before patients are encouraged to solve a growing list of medical woes by abandoning life altogether. Please enjoy my interview with Kathleen Stock, author of Do Not Go Gentlemen the Case Against Assisted Death. Kathleen Stock welcome to the Quillette Podcast
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B
Hi, Nice to be here.
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A
So, very serious subject. And you derive the title of your book from Dylan Thomas, a 1951 poem. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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B
Yeah, I mean, it's a great poem. It's. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And it. Thomas wrote it for his dying father. My dad told me about it early on and kind of. It's one of the first poems that I remember knowing about. So I just. For that reason, I've always liked it. But it's important to be clear that my book isn't really about telling people to fight the aging process or fight the dying process even. It's a polemic about fighting the system of assisted death. Also, I thought it was interesting as I was researching the book. Dylan Thomas died in very ambiguous circumstances, widely thought at the time to have died of alcoholism. But actually, there's a theory that his doctor in New York, in the Chelsea Hotel, gave him a massive dose of. I don't know what it was, some barbiturate or something, and not necessarily intentionally to kill him. I finish by discussing that in the last chapter because it's a good example of the messiness of the medical process, the messiness of human lives, because he was an alcoholic. It's the messy side of things that I go into in this book, not the clean fantasy version of euthanasia that you often hear about.
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A
And sometimes you see it on social media. The subject has become sanitized to such extent that people will put on Facebook their last hours with a grandmother or a parent, sometimes even a spouse. And Facebook in particular is always supposed to be kind of. Not always, but usually sort of upbeat and curated. So actually, maybe. Is that one of the things that made you want to write this book is that if you look at Facebook, you would see people will. I mean, it's not an everyday thing that people post about, but when they do post about it, it tends to be in the idiom of it was ennobling, it was uplifting. Is that one of the factors that went into writing a book?
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B
Oh, yes. I mean, one of the radicalizing moments actually was seeing a advert from Canada. It wasn't like a. I don't know, a lobbying group that was pushing for greater powers or anything like that.
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A
You mentioned dignity in dying as a group that you.
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B
Oh, well, that's. That's the British version. I'm sorry, I didn't know what the Canadian.
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No, but you mention it a lot as a kind of paradigmatic lobby group.
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B
So. So lobby groups tend to do this thing of, like, presenting it as beautiful calm, which sometimes it is. Well, yeah, of course. But, but, but we want the full picture, don't we? But no, this advert that I saw was this woman on a beach. There was a camp, campfire. It was beautifully shot, very aesthetically pleasing. It was her last moments, and she really was about to be euthanized. The voiceover came over about how she wanted her last moments to be beautiful. And then I think it turned out afterwards that there was some complicating factor about her situation. I can't quite remember what it was,
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A
but she was not in law. You would say she's not, you know, a model plaintiff, by the way, even in ultra liberal Canada, that. That ad was controversial.
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B
Okay, good.
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There's a lot of hyperbolic social liberalism that went on in Canada, especially during the Trudeau years. I try and discourage the idea that in Canada it's all just seen as normal and everyone signs on to it.
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B
In my book, I actually cite quite a few Canadians who are extremely disturbed about what's happening. And I can see, of course, I think if you're working palliative care in Canada, you're going to see stuff that is going to disturb you. But yes, the Facebook style version, the advert style version, and the lobbying group style version is this sentimental treatment. And there's always been a kind of fascination with death, you know, from the 17th century, 18th century, 19th century onward. I mean, I talk about a death mask that was very popular in the 19th century of an unknown drowned woman in the Seine, and lots and lots of students had it on their walls, you know, so when you bring together a kind of fascination with the mystery and romance of death, with social media and opportunities to dramatize and tragedize your life, you're going to get these mawkish last moments shared with the world for activist purposes or honesty, authenticity purposes. And I find that incredibly sinister.
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A
You are a philosophically minded individual in a past life. You're an academic. And so I expected to find some pretty deep philosophical analysis of the subject. And I did not come away from your book disappointed.
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B
Oh, good. I thought you were about to say, but actually it was terribly shallow.
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A
You're such a fraud. No, it was just the opposite. I told people it's one of the best books I've ever disagreed with.
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B
Oh, great. Thank you.
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A
I was surprised to see that there is no explicit biblical injunction in the older New Testament against suicide. Is that right? But it was sort of A lot of it comes from St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
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B
I mean there's sort of ambiguous bits, like there's a bit where St. Paul seems to be considering it, but pulls back. And then there's a lot of stuff about your in the New Testament about your body not being your own and it being gods. And that I think from that tradition does developed an injunction against self killing.
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A
Life is a divine gift type thing.
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B
Yeah, exactly. It's not yours to give away. God owns it, as it were. You are the property of God. I mean there's various metaphors, but your body's a temple or you're the God's property or the purpose is not yours to know. So it would be seen as taking some kind of control or trying to take control where it's not up to you. Even within the Augustinian tradition there can be noble self sacrifices. So there's gray areas. You know, it depends how you define what a suicide is. If you think of a suicide as just an act of self extinction, then obviously people can do that knowingly for altruistic purposes in battle, for instance, for religious purposes. But generally speaking, this injunction emerged, yes, through figures like Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. And then in the Enlightenment, as God started to retreat, I think we got this question like, well, if it isn't God's, if the body isn't God's property, well whose property is it? And this I think somewhat strange idea is oh, it's the self's property, like the body is like property of the self. Very dualistic. And then once it's your property, whoever you are, you're not your body exactly, but your body is something that you own. Then we get moving into the much very modern sounding my body, my choice, I can do what I want with it. It's up to me when it ends, when my life ends.
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A
Your arguments are secular, but you also are forthright, saying that you have a Catholic background and that you're not exactly a super devout, but to some extent you observe some of the rites of Catholicism, you've come back to the church a little bit.
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B
It's funny because I do go to church. I go to a Catholic church. I don't take communion. I mean, my lifestyle is not one that the Catholic Church would particularly approve of.
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A
You don't take communion in many metaphorical ways?
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B
Well, I mean, it's interesting talking to people that go to my church because they're interested in my book, but they're not really, you know, they didn't start from the Place of, let's argue this out. They start from the place of, no, you just don't end your own life and you don't help someone end their own life. And it's not up to us. And that's not what I say in the book. I say, I can imagine a circumstance in which it would be the right thing to do to help someone die. I mean, it will be quite extreme and I think. I'm not sure I would do it myself, but I wouldn't have written a book about the individual act. I'm specifically interested in the effects of the system and what harms that does to society.
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A
The term you use early in the book, you say, I'm against the institutionalization of death. When I say that I support the right to end your own life, I'll bring up case studies. I'll say, well, you know, and this is a real case study, which I'll anonymize. I have a friend whose sister suffering from a horrible illness. It's the sort of thing where you age 5 years every month and you become very decrepit in your 30s or 40s. Like, I wouldn't wish out on my worst enemy. She wants to take advantage of maid. It's the sort of thing I have in my mind, this particular disease. When I advocate for medical assistance in dying, often what these arguments or discussions will come down to is people will say, look, I'm not against a doctor discreetly giving a dose of morphine that they know will be lethal. Or I'm not against subtle methods of palliating symptoms of disease in such an aggressive way that it brings about death in a medically predictable way. But I'm against, to use your words, the institutionalization of this practice, which I'll be. I find hypocritical. You're saying, well, let's do it, but let's not talk about it, or let's do it. And also, on a pragmatic level, if it's not technically legal, the doctor could lose his or her medical license.
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B
Okay, so I'll answer that second bit in a minute. But I don't think, I think, hypocritical. What does that.
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To me, that means you want something without saying no.
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I understand, I understand.
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A
You know what?
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B
Hypocrisy. But there's lots of areas in ethics, especially when you're talking about deciding not just for me and you, but setting precedents for huge numbers of people. I think it's sort of implicit in my argument that, like, sometimes systems will just produce such an attempt to make everything black and white, to regularize everything, to give exactly the right conditions under which this may happen. You will end up with much, much worse things than if you have a bit of a gray area. And you basically what you're doing is deferring to the doctor's judgment a lot. And what you're saying is in a kind of Aristotelian way, which, because Aristotle famously thought that, you know, you couldn't really have moral principles that were always applied everywhere, it was always a matter of judgment, like the right thing to do in the right circumstances for the right reasons, and you couldn't give rules for what that was. You'd have to look at context, you'd have to develop wisdom. We used to think of doctors, I'm not saying it's right, but we did used to think a lot more of doctors ability to make judgments on their own. And that was the context like a hundred years ago where doctors would be, I mean, the King of England got euthanized by his doctor who was in the House of Lords, you know, and they've known you for long enough, they've seen the progression of your disease. You're near the end as well. I mean, it wouldn't be any idea that you would euthanize someone because they were disabled. It would be because they are like in agony. We don't have drugs that palliate this pain sufficiently. I'm talking 100 years ago or so. And it's perfectly appropriate to give lots of morphine at this point. Is it pain rel or is it deliberate killing? Well, the doctrine of double effect comes in here. If you, you can foresee something's not the same as intending it. If your intention is to palliate pain and you foresee that death is likely to happen, all of that used to be sort of built into the fabric of medical practice in a way that didn't have to be spelt out policy wise, it didn't have to be regulated. But because we got to a much more kind of cautious, paranoid society in some ways that we don't like leaving things up to people's judgment anymore. And we think that laying it all out with rules and disciplinary boards is going to somehow sort out those problems or any problems that arise there. And of course, sometimes it does. But there are other problems that arrive with the regularization. In Britain we had this case of Harold Shipman, who was this horrendous mass murdering GP doctor who basically just told lots of women over the age of 50 that they looked A bit peaky and they needed a blood test and
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A
then killed them decades ago, I think, right?
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B
Yeah, decades ago. But that event was so horrific. It caused this enormous scrutiny of doctors practices and their death certificates. They would sign off and like all of that gray area for quite a lot of doctors, was no longer acceptable. And it made doctors much, much more cautious about end of life interventions of any kind in case they looked like they were doing a shipment. I'm not saying any system is perfect. And I know people who are very much against even palliative sedation at the end of life because they think it could be a way of murdering people, you know, But I don't, I wouldn't have written a book about that. I'm interested in what happens when you say, right, okay, under these circumstances. Because of course, what, you get huge eligibility. The doctor has role judgment, plays no role anymore, basically. Do you satisfy this condition? This condition? This condition? Yeah, okay, you can have it.
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In Canada, a lot of the claimed scandalous elements have involved people who have mental health issues. They don't have a condition like ALS or a horrible form of cancer which has no cure. There are people who are very depressed or psychiatric conditions that from their point of view, make life unlivable. This is held up as an example of, well, look, clearly medical assistance and dying is going too far because, look, now it's being permitted for people who have merely mental afflictions. I find that a false distinction. There are all sorts of psychiatric afflictions that, if I had them, I can see life being completely unlivable, including,
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I
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don't want to say garden variety, but including uncomplicated, clinical persistent depression. Do you make a distinction between something like ALS or cancer and something like profound persistent depression? Do you think there's a moral difference in terms of euthanasia?
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I'm against the systemization of assisted death for all of those things.
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But you do touch on the issue as an extrapolation, of course.
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B
But I just wanted that as a caveat because I think listeners might be, might not know that. Yes, I think there's a difference in the sense, at the individual level. Like, you know, if you come to me and you've been burned horribly in a fire and you're about, you're three days from death and you're in agony, I can see there's a moral case to help you ease your suffering. There's no other help available. There's no other, you know, medical interventions. You're definitely going to die. In the case of someone who's suffering from psychosis or chronic depression. There's no certainty that this life could not get better.
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A
Sorry, but so what?
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B
Well, now, so this. Is this exactly the pincer move that I talk about in the book, where people go from, first of all, we're talking, is suffering irredeemable? And suddenly I say, okay, well, we don't know that suffering is irredeemable or not. And you go, okay, but so what? Because it's autonomy.
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A
Yeah, yeah, I'm an autonomous. I'm not arguing from the irredeemable.
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B
So, well, then why are you talking about mental health at all? Why don't you just talk about someone who does it on a whim in your book?
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You do touch on this distinction. It suggests to me that it's meaningful to you.
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B
The suffering in depression, although enormous, it's a presupposition of my position that it's not a good idea to introduce death into a health system to deal with suffering. That's for reasons I go into at length. But let's say the suffering is enormous, but people can change. People can come back from that. Now, if you moved immediately to, oh, but why should they? It's their life, it's their body, it's their choice. Well, firstly, that's no longer a question that pertains only to the mental health case or the physical health. It pertains to anyone. People want to kill themselves. People could be suicidal for all sorts of reasons, shame, disgust. And if you're saying, okay, well, in that case, if they know what they're doing, they should be given a helping hand. I think we should expand that a little bit because I've got things to say about that. But the second thing with mental health is there's the. If you're going to go down the autonomy route with people who've got very poor mental health, then you've got to establish that they have autonomy. And classically, treatments of autonomy say that you have to be in your right mind and you have to have capacity. So you'd have to be very sure that this person simultaneously was mentally ill enough to warrant the treatment, but not mentally ill enough to not know what they were doing. I don't know what it's like in Canada. I suspect the capacity test is quite thin because it really is. In Britain you can have capacity for most decisions. Like, you know, if a psychiatrist comes along and tries to judge whether you've got capacity to sign away your house or something. Being chronically depressed probably won't affect the decisions you make. You have to be quite disturbed of
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A
mind or to change your sex. Yeah, you're probably not familiar with it, but the capacity test to change your sex, in some cases, they don't look at your underlying mental health conditions. I've heard.
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B
Yeah, of course, I've heard of that too. And the doctor has to prove that you haven't got capacity. And also it can come in and out. You can have capacity one day and in capacity the next day. Psychiatrists don't know what test you would possibly give for capacity when it's somebody who wants to end their life. Doctors spend in Britain anyway. I mean, Canada's system has now been affected by the fact you've had maid for a while. But doctors in Britain spend nearly all of their time trying to stop people dying and stop them from ending their lives. Like you put people on suicide watch. If you think someone's about to take their life, you now still have to start. That might be a sign that they've lost capacity in a healthy person. And as soon as they get into a. Oh, terminally ill has six months to live or less. Now you're supposed to help them. Now you're. Or at least you're supposed to judge. Oh, okay, it might be a good idea for this person to end their life. They've got no idea what to say in that case. So they kind of. What happens, as you know, in Canada is they just kind of retreat the scene and go, well, if the person wants it, they probably, you know, they probably know best. And I don't think they do always know best.
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A
You have this fantastic quote. The one that kind of captured my view is Montaigne, Living is slavery. If the liberty of dying is wanting, which totally captures the way I see it because I project myself into the state where I. I'm always thinking about what if I get this disease or that disease or whatnot. It really would feel like a form of slavery or imprisonment if I didn't have access to something like maid.
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B
There's another quote in the book about that from Nietzsche. You know, I mean, suicide generally, never mind the context, has often been a comforting thought to people. You know, I could get out of here.
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A
I can check out all the philosophers and theologians in the world. Can't convince me out of this sort of visceral fear that says, if I get Condition X, I want the liberty to end things. And if you take away that liberty, then I will feel like I'm in prison.
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B
John, I really appreciate you saying that, actually, because so few people that officially argue for this as in the kind of lobbying side of things will ever admit or will ever connect what they want to their own fear to their visceral fear. And I make no judgment about the fear, but I can clearly see it's there, and yet you're not supposed to mention it, you know, And I think it's helpful to say, yeah, this is coming from visceral fear.
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A
That's news to me, that people who are trying to convince other people do not play on what I just assumed to be a widely held fear.
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B
As I try to convey in the book, there's these two kind of motivating ideals that get swapped all the time, almost dizzyingly so. One is autonomy. One is compassion or mercy. So often you will hear, yes, there's this person in this terrible position. Can't we do something for them? But that doesn't sound like fear. That's empathy. That's compassion. That's dressed up as, like, oh, it's not really about what, my future Florence
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Nightingale type thing where you're helping other people. Okay.
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B
Yeah, exactly. But they never say, oh, and I'm actually shit scared of this.
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A
It'll never happen to you. No, no, it'll never happen to you. You're gonna live to 200 and you're gonna die in your sleep. Yeah, but it'll happen to other people.
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B
The autonomy people obviously want to say, well, why shouldn't I do any? You know, it's more like sort of robust, masculine freedom. I need to seize my own destiny and all the rest of it. And again, you don't hear a lot of, like, I'm actually really, really frightened of this thing. But can I just say to. To go back to the motive that's coming through for you wanting this yourself, where I make no judgment on the fear. I mean, I'm sure I would be frightened myself under many different diagnoses, terrified. But this is a difficult and delicate thing to say. I do try and say it in the book, and I have to put it carefully because it can so easily be turned against me. But you already have the freedom. Most people who are terminally ill, of course, you can find counterexamples. Your friend sounds like maybe they'd be one. But most people who have a terminal diagnosis already have the freedom that you're claiming. This whole system should be set up to give you. As in, people can end their lives. So it can't just be that you want the freedom. It's that you want the freedom in a nice environment with a doctor who's taking care of it. Who's going to make it easy for you?
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A
Of course I could jump off a bridge. God, this has gotten so morbid. I guess I should have expected it would get morbid. It's the book but unfortunately it's gotten very specifically morbid. Most people who are not in like the final days of life there probably is some avenue that they could direct their own death. Statistics show people are actually incredibly bad at it.
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B
It's difficult to self harm, so there's that. But generally speaking, I mean what I want at least in discussing assisted dying is a more honest conversation and I think it has to be said so early on in the book. I say, look, I don't think there is a right to endure life, never mind assisted death. I don't think it's a universal. Hands off, leave me alone. I should be able to do what I want because I think we are connected to each other. The effect on families is massive. Once somebody in your family suicides, you are much. Your next generation is much more likely to suicide, you know, so, so I, I'm not saying go and do it yourself. I'm absolutely saying don't do it yourself. Think very, very seriously about the effects on everyone around you. And one of the problems with the maid discourse is that nobody seems to be able to say it could be absolutely devastating to a family to have their father suddenly euthanized. That's a discourse that's just shoved under the carpet in favour of all this beautiful autonomy and all the rest of it. But the point is the rhetoric around freedom does not make sense in this context. You are asking the state to help you do something that's not asking for a free to help you do something that you could already have done yourself. And you want it done in a specific way and you want it done practically on demand. And that's really we're talking about freedom has now become very vague and it's more like freedom from life or freedom from pain.
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A
I don't claim it as a right. I think there's a lot of things that I want and need that I wouldn't use. The language of human rights which gets overused. I mean we've all seen the language of human rights extrapolated in completely inappropriate ways. What I like about your book, and you do talk about this, is you talk about the public facing nature of the act that when we legitimize the act of government helping to kill somebody, that sends a message to the rest of society. Yes. There's this one person who gets what they want. But there's millions of other people who are now living in a society where life is coarser and cheaper. My problem with that is you're kind of telling a person who's suffering, you got to take one for the team here. We get that you want to end your suffering, but if you die, we all live in a slightly degraded world. And you're asking someone to take one for the team in a way that I don't feel comfortable doing.
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B
Well, no, I'm not. I'm not, because. Or at least not to the extent that it may seem from that brief description, because the other part of this is palliative care, right? So we haven't mentioned it. Effectively, when you introduce assisted death into a system, it becomes a rival to palliative care. But palliative care is aimed at. If you take the aim of assisted death as relieving suffering, which it is under the Canadian legislation, palliative care is aimed at exactly that end. And so somebody is saying, I really, really want you to end my suffering. And you say, okay, I'm going to kill you. But you didn't say, oh, I'm going to offer you these brilliantly, technologically advanced ways of pain control and I'm going to control your nausea and I'm going to give you three extra months to talk to your family. You know, then you haven't really got a choice. So I'm not just saying, oh, you know, I can hear it sounds, you know, like, look, take one for the team. I'm saying, no, no, no. We have to fund palliative care properly. We have to get hospices back on their feet. We have to make sure that the people being funneled into maid in Canada, for instance, didn't go there because of the want of better medical care elsewhere. We also have to make sure that they're not doing it because they're homeless or because they aren't getting social care packages or whatever. In a very imperfect system like the one you have in Canada, that, like the health service we have here, I imagine ours is probably worse than yours, but I don't know.
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A
Everyone says that every health system is. Is better than your own health system, is universal.
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B
Oh, I see.
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A
I thought everyone thinks that.
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B
Yeah, okay, well, ours is bad. It's collapsing. And we were just about to introduce assisted death into a collapsing system where people are dying on trolleys anyway. You know, now am I saying to these people dying on trolleys going, kill me now, kill me now. Take one for the team, maybe. But if we introduce Assisted death. I'm telling you, we won't be funding palliative care any more heavily in 10 years time. And there will be a whole, you know, possibly thousands, tens of thousands of elderly people who are now being funneled into assisted death. So effectively, either way, we're asking people to take one for the team. It's either that we prioritise the interests of suffering people who really want this, or we prioritize the people of suffering people who don't really want this and don't want the choice and don't want to be pushed into it by their families and want, in fact, a better medical system. Because you're not going to get a better medical system for elderly and dying people once you've got assisted death there. That is my contention.
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A
When you say trolley, do you mean an actual trolley or a bus or is it like.
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B
Oh, sorry, no, I mean, British people
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call like a pen a biro or something.
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B
I don't mean on a tram. People aren't dying on trams. It's not a trolley car. I mean, would you call it a gurney? The things that people get moved around on hospitals when they're going into operations, well, there's lots of those in the corridor with people on them for hours and hours waiting to get a hospital.
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A
When you say that you were referring to a gurney, it makes total sense. It just struck me as odd. It's like, why are people dying on trolleys?
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B
Fair enough.
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A
However, it gives me an awesome opportunity for a segue, which is the trolley problem, well known to philosophically minded individuals such as. So even many laypeople understand at least how it's formulated. The trolley problem in philosophy. The idea that, if I'm sketching it out correctly, that there's a trolley headed along a track and it's going to kill, I don't know, say five people because they're on the tracks and you have the power, by pulling a lever to divert the trolley to kill another guy. There's only one of him, but he's gonna die. And the question is, are you murdering that guy or is it legitimate or is it okay to do nothing? Because passive action is different from doing something active, where you say, I'm gonna do something active and it's gonna kill this person versus doing nothing. I'm probably butchering in some way. But I think I got the basics of it. You summon to mind the trolley problem because you talk about the distinction between active government involvement or public involvement in a person's hastening a person's death and Passive measures. Is this fundamental to your argument?
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B
It's fundamental to some people who want assisted death in countries like the UK because they say, look, people already have the choice to withdraw from treatment. Like they don't have to take.
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A
So life saving treatment as opposed to life saving treatment.
- [32:04]
B
Yeah, sorry, lifesaking treatment. They can withdraw from it. And as we've discussed, doctors can give drugs to palliate that may foreseeably hasten death. So there's sort of two gray areas there. There's. There's one, you can withdraw from a treatment program and know that you're going to die. The doctor can stop giving you the drugs. The doctor can withdraw treatment when they think it's no longer working and know that the patient is going to die. The lobbyist for assisted death, the kind of crude one anyway, but there are quite a lot of crude ones around, will say, well, look, what's the difference? If we're going to withdraw it and kill people by the result of our passive withdrawal of treatment, why can't we actively give them poison? And I'm just saying, look, there's clearly a conceptual difference between pushing someone off a cliff and letting them fall in the law. Generally, we really do rely very often on a distinction between doing something to get a certain result and not doing something that gets that result. One of them is heavily tied up with culpability in a way that the second one isn't. Sometimes not doing something can be just as bad as doing it. But the big problem with actively supplying poison from doctors is, as opposed to withdrawing treatment in certain cases, is the sort of second order of effects across the whole.
- [33:24]
A
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- [34:09]
B
Sam.