A NATURAL RIGHT TO DIE: TWENTY-THREE CENTURIES OF DEBATE

Vol. 16 No.1 (January 2006), pp.17-19

A NATURAL RIGHT TO DIE: TWENTY-THREE CENTURIES OF DEBATE, by Raymond Whiting. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. 234pp. Cloth $97.95/£55.99. ISBN: 0-313-31474-8.

Reviewed by Adelaide H. Villmoare, Department of Political Science, Vassar College. E-mail: Villmoare [at] Vassar.edu.

Raymond Whiting advocates a right to die grounded in natural law. Contending that various forms of euthanasia are not uncommon today in the United States and Western world, he argues that the US should confront the practice and its justifications head-on in order to protect those who wish to end their lives and those who do not. When the state fails to establish a clear policy supporting and regulating the right to die, it endangers its citizens. He writes that “we are left with only two options: We can both legalize and regulate euthanasia in order to guarantee the safety of all, or we can continue to allow a secret and dangerous blackmarket in death to exist in our country” (p.2). His position is that government best protects the right to die and the right to live through what he calls “the active permissive mode” of euthanasia. This mode recognizes the right to die as a fundamental, pre-political right that includes a right to the means to die, or a right to assisted suicide and requires the state to regulate the practice of the right.

Whiting has a two-pronged argument. This first is that contemporary society by and large accepts a right to die even where it remains controversial. The second is that there is historical and philosophical justification for this right in natural law. The early chapters describe notable events and actors moving the US toward recognition of a right to die. The intellectual heart (and bulk) of this book, however, is devoted to an analysis of natural law theory, which he believes provides a deeper, moral justification for a right to die than positive law can ever do.

The first chapters on the evolution of end of life concerns, including the right to die, euthanasia, right to life, and slippery slope issues, are well trodden terrain. With a particular focus on contemporary debates in the US, Whiting presents reasonable summaries of positions, although primarily as an entrée into the next sections on natural law philosophy. A discussion of natural law and rights derived from natural law occupies the analytic core of the book. For example, in the chapter “Anatomy of a Right” he argues that the rights of individuals are embedded in natural law, “a concept with which our founding fathers were intimately familiar and eventually incorporated into our constitution” (p.54).

Once he has planted the seed of his argument that individual rights arise from natural law, he spends most of the remainder of the text familiarizing his reader with the history of natural law and with driving home the argument that natural law provides the most profound and effective justification for the right to die. He discusses the long role of natural law through history. For the [*18] reader most interested in the right to die and euthanasia in all its forms, these chapters may be heavy going and not really necessary for understanding the last chapters where Whiting brings together the different strands of his position on natural law and individual rights. Although he recognizes that natural law theory is neither philosophically popular today nor at the forefront of political discussion about euthanasia, he believes it should be. As he says, “natural law has played an important part in the development of a theory of rights, upon which an argument for the ‘right to die’ can be based. . . [and] its principles are of such a nature that they provide a vehicle for blending legal and moral considerations into one theory, thereby proving to be a particularly useful tool for addressing difficult ethical questions such as those involved with the ‘right to die’” (p.70).

Although Whiting is interested in natural law as political theory, he is much more dedicated to it as a basis for practical justification of “active permissive” euthanasia, where the state explicitly supports the right to die (p.115). He believes that natural law informs Americans’ views of the state, individuals, law, and power in ways of which we may not be fully aware. It is a living part of our political culture. In constitutional law, it is “transformed into an appeal to fundamental law” (p.123). Attributing a dramatic role to it he writes: “in America, natural law has commonly been used as a principle upon which to base revolutionary shifts in political thought pertaining to the appropriate use of state authority” (p.142). Whiting himself is certain that natural law animates values in law and politics today, although he understands that many will be skeptical about his certainty. He speaks directly to those who reject the relevance of natural law. Natural law, he argues, is the foundation for a “consistent legal philosophy upon which to base an acceptable American theory of rights that is consistent with both our past and our idealized visions of the future” (p.143). It is also the moral benchmark for us to appraise our democracy and the relationship between individual and state and the rights of individuals.

According to Whiting, natural law sees certain rights as “pre-political” (p.146) or, in constitutional language, fundamental. They must, therefore, be respected above all else. Linked to the right to privacy, the right to die is a fundamental right, which cannot justly be removed from the individual. The individual is the possessor of the right, and limited government must recognize that possession (pp.148-149). In the case of the right to die, government should nonetheless protect it through regulation; “while autonomous individuals may have a right to terminate their own lives passively, actively, by individual act, or with the assistance of a third party, the government has an obligation to regulate such events for the purposes of guaranteeing that all acts of euthanasia meet minimal standards” (p.162).

This book is primarily an exegesis of natural law and its relevance to the controversies surrounding assisted suicide and euthanasia. Whiting’s claim of a pre-political, fundamental right to die does not directly contend much with US constitutional history that has denied a “right to die” even as it has come to accept a right to refuse medical and [*19] sustenance treatment. Beyond the first chapters, there are only passing references to US law. Whiting is making a moral argument that he hopes will have legal and political purchase. But to have such an impact, Whiting would have to engage more fully than he does the law and politics of these debates.

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