Professor Desmond O'Neill:

It is usually with some discomfort. One will always have outliers like Mr. Jack Kevorkian who was a pathologist with a van. For some people, issues arise over prominence associated with other forms of gain. Very often it relates to social contracts. There are very tight social contracts in countries such as the Netherlands where the authorities are extraordinarily keen to pull everyone else in with them, which, to my sense, always suggested a kind of inner or internalised insecurity. The authorities tried to bring forward the measure around the time of the Madrid declaration on ageing. For all of us involved in dealing with the issue of ageing, this is just not how we envision the welcome increase in longevity.

One will see justification. The first PhD in nursing was on experiments on concentration camp victims. That people will bend, row in or collude is something of which we should be mindful as a society. People rowed in and colluded around the time of the financial bubble. People row in and justify injudicious and foolish courses of action. What we have to try to search for is the truth but also what is at the core of ethics, which is virtuous thought and action. It was put well by Atul Gawande in doing the right thing.