The Pursuit of Happiness and the Oregon Death with Dignity Act

The recent Supreme Court ruling on the Oregon Death with Dignity Act allows for some interesting reflections on the pursuit of happiness that lie outside the narrow legal boundaries and discussion of the case. A Reuters news story summarizes the case.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Bush administration cannot stop doctors from helping terminally ill patients end their lives under the nation’s only physician-assisted suicide law, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

In a stinging defeat for the administration, the high court ruled on a 6-3 vote that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2001 impermissibly interpreted federal law to bar distribution of controlled drugs to assist suicides, regardless of the Oregon law authorizing it.

The justices upheld a U.S. appeals court ruling that Ashcroft’s directive was unlawful and unenforceable, and that he had overstepped his authority.

The Oregon law, called the Death with Dignity Act, was twice approved by the state’s voters. The only state law in the nation allowing physician-assisted suicide, it has been used by more than 200 people since it took effect in 1997.

Under Oregon law, terminally ill patients must get a certification from two doctors stating they are of sound mind and have less than six months to live. A prescription for lethal drugs is then written by the doctor, and the patients administer the drugs themselves.

Ashcroft’s directive declared that assisting suicide was not a legitimate medical purpose under the Controlled Substances Act and that prescribing federally controlled drugs for that purpose was against the federal law.

The directive threatened to revoke prescription-writing licenses for physicians and pharmacists who filled orders for life-ending drugs.

Writing the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy said the federal drug law does not allow the attorney general to prohibit doctors from prescribing regulated drugs for use in physician-assisted suicide under state law permitting the procedure.

COURT’S CONSERVATIVES DISSENTED

The court’s most conservative members — Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and new Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by President George W. Bush– dissented.

Ashcroft reversed the policy adopted by his predecessor, Attorney General during the Clinton administration. Conservative lawmakers and groups had opposed Reno’s decision.

The closely watched case pitted the federal government’s power to interpret and enforce the nation’s drug laws versus the traditional authority of a state to regulate doctors and the practice of medicine.

Bush administration attorneys argued that federal drug law trumped the Oregon law on the issue of whether doctors may prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients.

But Kennedy, joined by another moderate conservative, retiring Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and the court’s four most liberal members, rejected the government’s arguments.

He said the administration maintained that the law delegated to a single officer in the executive branch “the power to effect a radical shift of authority from the states to the federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality.”

Kennedy concluded in the 28-page opinion that the text of the federal law shows that “Congress did not have this far-reaching intent to alter the federal-state balance.”

Oregon had argued that Congress did not authorize Ashcroft to overrule a state’s decision about specific medical uses of controlled substances.

As a parenthetical aside, if Judge Alito had been on the Court instead of Justice O’Connor, the vote would have been 5-4.

Now let’s move onto broader pursuit of happiness issues discussed in the Declaration of Independence and necessary to understanding the Preamble to the Constitution.

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness …

The Declaration of Independence

Happiness can be understand in a psychological sense and an ethical sense. The psychological sense of happiness means the satisfaction of a desire whether it be a right desire that is good for an individual or not. Ethical happiness can be understood in an Aristotelian sense.

Ethical happiness is the sum total of a life well lived and filled with all the goods of life. Happiness is the fulfillment of all those desires that are truly good for us. As such it is a final end that cannot be measured until the life of the individual is complete and a reckoning can be made of it. Ethical happiness is an ultimate end and not a means to other ends. Ethical happiness is also an activity which everyone has a right to pursue those things that constitute a good and well lived life.

Part of the strength of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is that they are living documents whose ideas and ideals have expanded as American citizens have become more enlightened about those ideas and ideals. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act is another step toward the ideals expressed in these documents.

When an individual has lived his life to its end and faces the prospect of six months of physical and psychological pain, he has the right to end that life should he choose. Ethical happiness gives a person the right to calculate whether an additional few months lived under abhorrent conditions will add to or subtract from her ethical happiness as understood in the classical sense, and to make her own decision to die if she calculates that a few additional months of life subtracts from that happiness.

Let us not be confused by the narrowness of the Supreme Court’s decision or the Bush Administration’s attempt to deny the right to pursue happiness. Whether the Bush Administration is intentionally denying this right or merely misunderstands the Constitution’s guarantee of the right to pursue happiness does not matter. Ignorance must be opposed as vigorously as malice. The right of an individual to pursue their happiness is absolutely basic to the Constitution. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act merely reinforces and facilitates a citizen’s right to pursue their happiness in an enlightened ethical sense even to the end of his days.