Someone my age just went to Dignitas, the assisted dying place in Switzerland. It concentrates the mind, of course. She had stage 4 bowel cancer and things were about to get seriously unpleasant. There’s an interview with her in the Guardian, conducted the night before she did the deed. Asked about the dangers of people being coerced into it she said this
Another concern is that any initial law would be widened to include non-terminal illness, mental health problems and even children. Opponents of assisted dying warn that “guardrail” regulations would become viewed as restrictions on rights and widening the application could see more cases involving vulnerable people.
“I can’t see that happening here,” Marra said. “All of my terminal friends want the choice and if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. It just seems kind of black and white to me.”
Fine, but the article has established that she has been able to lead an independent life, and clearly had the £10k to drop on the one-way trip. And her terminal friends were probably mostly in the same boat (though that’s a stretch/unsafe assumption). Understandably, with other things on her mind, she fails to really try to inhabit the world of someone who has been on the receiving end of all sorts of social, economic pressures and not had her level of independence. It’s not so much “what would I do in their situation” but “who would I be if I had spent years, nay decades, especially formative years and decades, under the same pressures and constraints as them?” That’s a harder question to think, a harder question to answer, and an unsettling one in almost every sense. Most of us lack the courage to ask it and the intellectual and emotional tools to answer it. I know I lack both.
We need to be (but won’t be) much more alive to how we are shaped by forces we can only see with effort , imagination and vocabulary that is rarely available to us. We need to think about how extending the right to end your own life (which I do support, by the way) is regarded with deep and well-founded fear by those who the state and society have always regarded as lesser and disposable – the chronically ill, those with physical constraints. We need to be alive to how state and cultural power works on the body, on the mind, and not simply say “well, I haven’t felt that way”. (1)
Also though, the way the climate stuff is unfolding, the idea of peaceful deaths with dignity and Dignitas may well be looked on with awe and envy, and fairly soon.
Notes and further reading
(1) It reminds me of a white middle-class liberal friend in America at the time of the Rodney King riots saying he couldn’t understand the anger “Well, I’ve never had any problem with the police.”
See also: Bourdieu and his habitus
marchudson.net 
Marc, the circumstances surrounding and impacting on our lives is different in every case, so I doubt any two people think and act the same way. But the right to choose when to end ones life surely should be a given?
No matter how hard one tries, we can never see life through another’s eyes, such decisions are theirs and theirs alone.
For too long medical science, the state and religion has played the role of GOD and humanity has suffered as a result.
Hi John,
I too support the right to end one’s life, and get practical support for it. I should have made it clearer than just saying “fine” immediately after the quote.
The point was that we all could take the opposing view a bit more seriously, especially if we think about how social power works, as per my sentence – We need to be alive to how state and cultural power works on the body, on the mind, and not simply say “well, I haven’t felt that way”.
There’s all sorts of stuff that is dangerous to the individual, and society, that has been smuggled in under the banner of “individual choice.”
Marc, I totally agree with your last paragraph, far too much of what we are told is supportive of ” individual choice” is in fact a mask for more government control.