I think I understand well enough the inducement to relieve the person of suffering. I already said that the primary problem, from society's point of view, would be abuse, for example, in order to preserve an inheritance. And yes, I am concerned more generally with the devaluation of life, for example, regarding the chronically infirm as candidates for disposal.
My concern, though, was to give you a keener sense of the "complicity with death" objection. I did not merely keep with examples of murder, but moved things forward to imagine a person asking you to shoot her, and adducing her own mental anguish as a reason to do so. This gets pretty close to the situation contemplated in assisted suicide, where the initial murderer is the disease, although it is not precisely the same. My main goal was to illustrate the inner core of the objection, which is that you do not abet death, since it represents the negation of the person...... |
