More or Less "Read This Book"

In view of the kerfuffle raised by the recent BBC Panorama poll showing that 73% of folks in the UK believe that family members/close friends should be able to assist with the suicide of someone with a painful illness or condition from which they will die, I thought I'd see what Gilbert Meilaender had to say.  Thoughtful but not as penetrating as I expected.

Meilaender begins with a critique of the "immortalist" ideas abroad today (those for whom death is an unqualified evil).  In response to a widespread hope that biotechnology will someday permit us to live forever as we are, Meilaender asserts that death is a qualified good because, on the Christian account, "if the deepest desire of our hearts is for God then more of this life could not possibly satisfy that desire." (p. 72)  But this, this argument seems to prove too much--that death is an unqualified good.  (Perhaps I'm overstating his claim a bit because Meilaender could respond that death would be qualified by the character of one's relationship to God.)  Indeed, St. Paul seems to make this very point in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Philippians where he writes that "for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."

In any event, Meilaender does not believe that death is an unqualified good because"we should never think of death as a good to be embraced since the person who dies is equally but uniquely one of us" and thus "death puts an end to a unique and irreplaceable person."  Therefore, he writes, we should reject the idea "that it could be right deliberately to aim at our own death or that of another person." (74)

This conclusion hardly seems to follow his premises.  But more next time on a better argument.