"Compassionate" murder?

It is hard to believe, if not impossible, that a society that finds it difficult to practise the most elementary virtues - temperance, prudence, justice, honesty - is able to excel at compassion, which is certainly one of the most difficult and demanding of all the virtues. Imagine someone who has a short attention span, is barely literate, and woefully inept in arithmetic but who somehow excels in nuclear physics! Unlikely? Extraordinary? No doubt, and to be realistic, impossible.

Suffering losing its meaning

According to the traditional understanding, a compassionate person willingly shares the suffering of another. Compassion, therefore, recognizes, feels, and affirms suffering. It accepts the burden of another and thereby lessens it. If suffering seems unbearable to the sufferer, it is less so when it is shared by a compassionate friend. Compassion mitigates suffering by sharing it. This is the perfect opposite of what compassion usually means in today's anaesthetic society.

We live in a culture in which we frantically seek an instant remedy - usually through pills - for everything that ails us. Painlessness has become an ideal. Suffering is now commonly regarded as devoid of meaning, and consequently something that should not be tolerated. The right not to suffer seems the ultimate right in the catalogue of human rights. In this context, compassion has become inverted. It no longer means sharing another's suffering, but being intolerant of suffering, so much so in fact, that killing the sufferer is justified as a way of eliminating the suffering. If we kill to end suffering, where do we stop? And who would not be vulnerable?

C.S. Lewis has written in The Problem of Pain, "Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty." Human beings, given their historical propensity for cruelty, will not avoid being cruel to each other on the strength of a single misunderstood virtue. The new "compassion," therefore, is a vice, and as such, it must lead to cruelty.

The recent Latimer case (see C.I., Dec. '97, p. 25) well illustrates how the new "compassion," though pretending to be a panacea, is truly pernicious. Robert Latimer killed his 12-year-old daughter, Tracy, because he could no longer tolerate her suffering. His act was said to be one of compassion. Tracy, indeed, suffered from severe cerebral palsy (though she was scheduled for an operation a month after she was killed). Not surprising, Latimer's act elicited a virtual tidal wave of "compassion" from people throughout the country. Some argued that sentencing Robert Latimer even to one year in prison seemed "cruel and unusual." Nonetheless, if serving one year for second-degree homicide is "cruel and unusual," what adjectives could describe the treatment of Toronto's Linda Gibbons who has spent the better part of the last three years in prison, essentially for praying outside of an abortion clinic?

Already, one can observe in the Latimer discussion the accusation that those who think that Latimer should be imprisoned are lacking compassion and are therefore cruel. But this accusation itself is cruel. And it is cruel precisely because it is so unjust and uncharitable.

We cannot begin to imagine the suffering that Robert Latimer is currently experiencing from humiliation, solitude, disappointment, self-doubts, anger, shame, and confusion. It may be said that his own suffering, because it includes moral, spiritual, and social dimensions, is actually greater than was that of his daughter. Psychotherapists have pointed out that spiritual suffering can be far more intense than physical suffering. It is easy for Christians to understand how Christ's suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane was greater than what he suffered physically on the Cross.

The Saskatchewan ruling

On December 1, 1997, Saskatchewan Judge Ted Noble reduced Latimer's sentence to one year in prison, to be followed by a one-year confinement to his farm. Latimer will not serve as much as a year in jail, since sentences served in provincial jails are automatically reduced by onethird for good behaviour. In this legally unprecedented move, Noble made the exemption by declaring that the minimum sentence for second-degree murder (10 years) would be "cruel and unusual."

(Editor: On December 17, the Crown announced that it will appeal Judge Noble's decision because of the "significant legal issues involved in the case.")

Ivan Karamazov, in Dostoevsky's great novel, could not believe in God as long as one child was in torment. One of Albert Camus' heroes could not accept the divinity of Christ because of the slaughter of the innocents. In this kind of popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility, but without realizing how much we have lost in vision. If compassion causes us to lose sight of justice, love and the dignity of the person, then it is not a virtue. It is a dangerous form of sentimentality. It is that insidious form of kindness that can kill.

The fact that this new form of compassion can kill is only one side of the problem; the other is that it can drive out true compassion, which springs from love and values the person more than it disvalues the pain.

Donald DeMarco teaches philosophy at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON. He is the author of eight books.