When it’s kind to kill another human being

In practically all human situations, it is tragic for a person to kill another person. On occasion, however, even the closest relatives, deeming that an ailing person has suffered enough, may decide to end his or her suffering by killing him or her. By describing it as a “mercy killing”, England has long expressed the humaneness of such an action.

By acting thus, you are expressing much more humaneness than by allowing the patient to continue suffering intensely under the assumption that, even if you do nothing, he or she will finally emerge all right. Here, the English expression “mercy killing” should remind everybody that it is not always evil to kill a human being.

If it were, there would be no war on earth and our prisons would be practically empty. Yet, on rare occasions, a life sentence may be the only humane thing to hand over to a fellow human being.

That is why the universally useful language of England, apparently recognising the humaneness of such a teaching, often even describes it as a “mercy killing”.

It is merciful, I suppose, because such a killing, being immediate, does not entail too much bodily or mental pain.

SUFFERING

No matter how much we love the patient, the truth may be that, given the prevailing conditions, it might be much more humane to help end his or her life than to allow him or her to go on suffering so intensely for too long.

That would seem to be the reason that a certain European school of thought calls it “realism”, which is what, alone, may urge the sufferer’s relatives to end his or her suffering by deliberately ending his or her life, in other words, by murdering him or her. One might retort that death is an extremely harsh thing for a normal human being even to contemplate facing.

However, on close examination, killing is, on certain occasions, perhaps the most merciful thing to do for an intensely suffering fellow human being.

By dying, he/she is immediately relieved of all the painful anxieties that face all humanity. That is why I assert that, in certain conditions, killing is the most humane thing to do to certain patients, especially murderers.

SOCIAL REVENGE

However, what to do to a mental sufferer caught in a criminal act? Even there, we must try to relieve him of all momentary suffering before we plunge him into a situation — such as a court of law — which is sure to intensify his or her suffering. To be quite sure, do take your social revenge. But, before you do so, please remember that society is most likely to have contributed to the particular crime.

The universal agreement seems to be that, if a human being was cruel enough to deliberately inflict bodily or mental harm on a fellow human being, then the culprit should be treated with equal harshness either in order to deter him or her from repeating such brutality or to remove him or her entirely from the comity of human beings.

BODILY PAIN

The first and most humane thing to do for the sufferer, then, is to rush him or her for relief from the immediate mental and/or bodily pain that he or she has been suffering.

There is then the question of what to do to or with or about the individual who inflicted that pain. But that is a question which I must leave to the officials of our courts of law.

Although some such officials do not make decisions that are universally satisfactory, the important fact is that most of them do. In any case, we have no other recourse for dealing with the individuals who behave in such an unsocial manner against fellow human beings. They all know what they have to face whenever they are caught acting so inhumanely against other human beings.

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