Teaching doctors to kill?

One of the implications of euthanasia is that it involves teaching doctors to take life. Margaret Somerville argues that:

We also need to consider how the legalisation of euthanasia could affect the profession of medicine and its practitioners. Euthanasia takes both beyond their fundamental roles of caring, healing and curing whenever possible. It involves them, no matter how compassionate their motives, in the infliction of death on those for whom they provide care and treatment. ...
Can we imagine teaching medical students how to administer euthanasia - how to kill their patients? A fundamental attitude we reinforce in medical students, interns and residents is a repugnance toward the idea of killing patients. If physicians were authorised to administer euthanasia, it would no longer be possible to instil that repugnance. Maintaining this repugnance and, arguably, the intuitive recognition of a need for it, are demonstrated in the outraged reactions against physicians carrying out capital punishment when laws provide for them to do so. We do not consider their involvement acceptable - not even for those physicians who personally are in favour of capital punishment. What would we lose by legalising euthanasia?

Is this a problem though? The following discussion of the study of the experience of killing in war by Stanley Hauerwas is to say the least thought provoking.

I think it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill. It may seem odd to call the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill "a sacrifice," but this sacrifice often renders the lives of those who make it unintelligible. The sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill is but the dark side of the willingness in war to be killed. I am not suggesting that every person who has killed in war suffers from having killed. But I do believe that those who have killed without the killing troubling their lives should not have been in the business of killing in the first place.

In On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt Col Dave Grossman reports on General S.L.A. Marshall's study of men in battle in World War II. Marshall discovered that of every hundred men along a line of fire during a battle, only 15 to 20 would take part by firing their weapons. This led Marshall to conclude that the average or healthy individual, that is, the person who could endure combat, "still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance toward killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility." Lt Col Grossman observes that to study killing in combat is very much like the study of sex: "Killing is a private, intimate occurrence of tremendous intensity, in which the destructive act becomes psychologically very much like the procreative act." Telling the truth about the sacrifice of war

Essentially what euthanasia requires is that doctors will be asked to undertake the sacrifice of overcoming societal norms and undertake the task of taking human life. If we wish to take the step of legalising the taking of life we need to be clear about the human implications of what we are doing and who will bear the burden of this. 

Killing and the demands of warfare

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman exploring the psychology of the act of killing and the military establishment's attempt to understand and deal with the consequences of killing. According to Grossman and contrary to popular perception, the majority of soldiers in war do not ever fire their weapons and that this is due to an innate resistance to killing. Consequently the military has instituted training measures to break down this resistance and has successfully raised soldier's firing rates.

If accurate this is likely to have long term consequences when men who are so trained return to civilian life. When combined with the reality of traumatic stress syndrome now known to be common in men returning from war zone s such as Iraq the likelihood of violent responses to stressful situations by returned servicemen would seem to be almost inevitable. The need for substantial pyschological, spiritual and community support for Australian servicemen returning from active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be over-emphasised. people are trained to override their basic human instinct - which is - not to kill. The minimum moral duty we owe them is to assist them to become reoriented to the basic human instinct and requirement - you shall not kill.

Giles Fraser in commenting on Grossmans' book and connecting it with the recently released James Bond movie:

What Lt Col Grossman suggests is that a huge percentage of soldiers become conscientious objectors at the point of firing their weapon. Many simply aim over the heads of their enemies. Most soldiers cannot kill. Human beings have an inbuilt psychological resistance to the taking of human life.

Next week, the new Bond film (the fantastically-named 'Quantum of Solace') comes out. Once again, 007 kills with ease. But this is make-believe. Sure, a handful of people — perhaps two per cent, psychologists say — have a diminished resistance to killing, and these are the psychopaths. But the vast majority, when faced with the reality, find it an incredibly difficult thing to do.

This is why training in the army involves repetition, doing the same thing again and again, so that you come not to think about it. The soldier fires just as Pavlov’s dogs drool. This form of conditioning can significantly increase firing rates — as can the enhancement of denial defence mechanisms: soldiers do not shoot people, they shoot targets.

Lt Col Grossman thus asserts that, ... “A new era of psychological warfare has dawned, not upon the enemy, but upon our own troops.”

All this might be vital for the creation of effective soldiers. But what does it do to these people when they are demobilised?