Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide(2)

treatment if human beings were thought capable of losing them. They are, so to speak, ineliminable features of our humanity.

Euthanasiast killing, even when it is voluntary, involves denial of the ongoing worth of the lives of those reckoned to be candidates for euthanasia. It is a type of killing, therefore, which cannot be accommodated in a legal system for which belief in the worth and dignity of every human being is foundational.

It is of critical importance to every state to maintain a body of laws consistent with respect for the dignity and worth of every human being. In particular, it is important not to legalize killing of the innocent. For it is the fundamental task of civil authority to protect the innocent. But if the claim that a person lacks a worthwhile life is held to make killing lawful, then the state has ceased to recognise the innocent as having binding claims to protection. If the state treats these claims as null, then what claim has it to that authority which derives precisely from the need of citizens for protection from unjust attack?

2. To legalize assistance in suicide is also inconsistent with the same fundamental tenet of a just legal system The decriminalization of suicide (and attempted suicide, therefore) makes sense if we contemplate the plight of people having to face criminal proceedings after failed suicide attempts. Decriminalization motivated by the desire to ease the plight of such people does not, however, imply that the law takes a neutral view of the choice to carry out suicide. Those who attempt suicide are clearly moved by the (at least transient) belief that their lives are no longer worthwhile. Since just legal arrangements rest on a belief in the ineliminable worth of every human life, the law must reject the reasonableness of a choice which is so motivated.

Hence the law must also refuse to accommodate the behaviour of those who effectively endorse the choice of the suicide: for they too are acting on the view that the person they are helping no longer has a worthwhile life. Their behaviour would not be sufficiently explained if one were to say that they were acting 'out of friendship' or 'out of compassion'. For how could the motives of the person assisting in suicide be described as 'friendship' or 'compassion' if they were not informed by the thought that the person intending to kill himself would be better off dead? If one thought this person could continue to have a worthwhile life it would hardly be an act of friendship, for example, to help him kill himself.

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