Cultural conflict in America has focused in recent years over issues surrounding the beginning of life - abortion and contraception, for example. Recently, though, end-of-life issues have been growing in importance and it is likely that they will continue to become more important in the coming years.

Tom Flynn writes in the August/September 2005 issue of Free Inquiry:

What’s really going on under the surface in our end-of-life debates? I think we’re seeing an under-articulated Culture War showdown over who owns human life. Enlightenment ideals say each person’s life is his or her own property; more ancient codes say that one’s life belongs to God, the monarch, or the state. In part, I suspect, our end-of-life debates are so thorny because participants don’t always realize that they’re really examining the question, “Who owns me?”

Actually, I think that it might make more sense to go a step further and question whether “ownership” of a person is even possible in the first place. If you can “own” yourself, then it would require some fancy rhetoric to explain why this ownership cannot be transferred like every other sort of ownership. If you can “own” yourself like you own your house, why can’t your be sold like your house?

If we reject the language of ownership altogether, though, then the fact that you don’t “own” yourself is accompanied by the fact that neither gods nor any other humans can “own” you either. You, as a human being, are not something to which the concept of “ownership” can apply. You are an autonomous individual who makes your own choices about life, an end in and of yourself rather than a means to some other end.

Advocates who rail about “the culture of death” overlook the fact that all too often, ours is a culture of life coerced. It’s not morally neutral to maintain a Terri Schiavo’s basal metabolism indefinitely just for its own sake. It’s not morally neutral to deny suffering patients the surcease of euthanasia because it might be abused or because some religious people feel it’s wrong to “play God.” It’s not morally neutral to decree that everyone who chooses suicide is mentally ill, then suspend the human rights and autonomy of those unlucky enough to bungle at it.

This is, I think, a very interesting point that deserves more attention and more emphasis. As a general principle, it makes sense to say that life is better than death — especially if you don’t believe that there is anything but this life. That does not mean, however, that life comes without consequences and this is especially true when continued life is coerced against one’s will.

Life isn’t necessarily an unmitigated good and the only person who can be allowed to make a judgment on the value of a life is the person living it or the person designated for that purpose. Life isn’t morally neutral, and coerced life definitely isn’t. We need to take this sort of thing into account when we hear complaints about a “culture of death” where people have the temerity to make decisions about whether their lives should continue.

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