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Margaret Pabst Battin, Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die.

Article Excerpt
Margaret Pabst Battin, Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), viii + 344 pp.

Margaret Battin is an imaginative philosopher. She comes at issues at different angles and in different ways from most philosophers. She has a keen eye for points where philosophical argument and the public conversation have become polarized and unproductively stalled. She is deeply concerned about the social consequences of these stalled arguments. As a result, she is on the lookout for ways to get the argument unstuck. All of this makes Battin a good philosopher to read on issues that have reached an impasse, with entrenched sides churning out ever-more-sophisticated versions of well-mapped terrain.

One such issue is physician-assisted suicide (hereafter, "PAS"), the organizing theme of Ending Life. (1) Battin has been working on philosophical questions concerning suicide and assisted death for over 30 years. Ending Life is a collection of papers spanning this entire period. All but two have been previously published, and some readers will be familiar with many of these pieces. Some of the papers--most notably "Euthanasia: The Way We Do It, The Way They Do It"--have been revised and updated to keep them abreast of changing social realities. Others have been left unaltered because Battin judges that the earlier perspective still has the power to illuminate.

In her introduction, Battin notes:

This collection is thoroughly diverse: it offers systematic essays, practical notes, historical explorations, policy analyses, cross-cultural comparisons, pieces with political implications, fiction, creative nonfiction, and essays on matters as varied as clinical suicide prevention, suicide bombing, serpent-handling, and the development of high-tech methods for non-drug-aided death. While this collection takes the argument over physician-assisted suicide as a central framework, many of these pieces are used here in a way that triangulates into the issue, so to speak, from comparatively unconventional vantage-points. Nearly everything in this collection has real relevance to the issues in physician-assisted suicide (though that may be sometimes be difficult to see), but it also addresses the larger ... issue of the role a person may play in his or her own dying. (7)

The diversity of this collection is both its chief strength and its greatest weakness. The strength: Pieces that "triangulate into the issue" from unconventional vantage points hold great promise for offering ways to get the argument unstuck and new possibilities for the social consensus that Battin believes we so badly need.

What happens to the debate if we, for example, start from consideration of suicide bombers? Or examine our reactions to a story about an elderly couple with a suicide pact but no terminal illnesses and no physician involvement? Or acknowledge that were PAS legal, physicians could easily find themselves in situations where they would be morally obliged to engage in it? Or consider "high-risk religion"--contemporary Christian practices that involve considerable risk to human life (with and without informed consent) and even allowing...

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