This is just a quickie – I promise.

A tweet this morning from Kevin Yuill raises what he sees as a scary prospect:

The Falconer bill will treble suicides amongst the terminally ill, according to Dignity in Dying. Is that what we want? Reject this bill.

He bases his claim on two things, both from Dignity in Dying: first, this document, which estimates that 332 of the 4513 suicides in the England in 2012 (p 1); second, this document, which estimates that there would be 1000 assisted deaths in England and Wales under an Oregon-like law (p 10).

Dignity in Dying has disputed his interpretation of the figures, and I’ve spotted a couple of problems with them.  Some of those who committed suicide while terminally ill may not have committed suicide because they were terminally ill; that might skew the figures.  So might the leap from “England” to “England and Wales”.  And, most importantly, we don’t know how many people would have killed themselves but for the current legal setup.  (Neither does DiD.)  Hence the trebling rate is at best an educated guess, but probably not even that.

But I’m going to allow that Yuill’s interpretation is reasonable for the sake of the argument.  I’ll also allow – in keeping with the Falconer Bill – that all legal assisted deaths in the UK would be assisted suicides, rather than allocides.  It occurs to me, though, that his claim still doesn’t do quite what he thinks it does, or wants it to do.  Importantly, he assumes that an increase in suicides would be a bad thing – and that DiD has therefore blundered in admitting that the rate would rise.

I’m not so sure.  Suicide may be a bad thing, but it isn’t necessarily bad in the way Yuill thinks.

Here’s one consideration.  Assume that some people who are terminally ill would take assistance to kill themselves were it available, but don’t kill themselves under the current regime.  Maybe they’re housebound and can’t procure the means, for example.  Something like the Falconer Bill would make suicide easier for them; and so we’d expect the rate to increase.  But we oughtn’t to forget the alternative, which is not not dying, but dying from a different cause.  This being the case, it isn’t necessarily going to matter too much to a defender of assisted dying that the suicide rate would increase, since his whole position would be that being able to end your own life in the way you choose is preferable to dying without any control.

In other words, the defender of assisted dying could, I think, accept that the suicide rate’d increase, and point out that, in a way, that is the whole point.  An increase in the suicide rate may be, in a certain light, a welcome development, not something to be feared.  I don’t know whether DiD would endorse that view, but it seems coherent, and not obviously vicious; hence Yuill seems to have committed an ignoratio elenchi.

And this leads to another consideration, which is that you don’t – as far as I can see – have to deny the badness of suicide to defend assisted dying.  All you have to think is that there are circumstances in which it’s less bad than the alternative.  Being the better option doesn’t mean it’s a good option, in just the same way that amputation of a limb may be preferable to dying from gangrene without that meaning that amputation is a particularly good thing in its own right.

Even if Yuill’s use of the figures is statistically sound, his claim doesn’t have any of the normative punch he thinks it does.